Preacher's Post 8.0

Submitted by Executive Direc... on March 12, 2008 - 7:45pm.

The Word: Palm Sunday

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14- 27:66 or
Matthew 27-11-54
Psalm 31:9-16

Quotable Words:

"The first passion of Jesus was the kindgom of God, namely, to incarnate the justice of god by demanding for all a fair share...It was that first passion for God's distributive justice that led inevitably to the second passion by Pilate's punitive justice." ~ Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan in The Last Week

Preached Words:

from a sermon for Palm Sunday

Everyone has come into Jerusalem for the great annual festival of the Passover. The streets are filled. Here we are with our waving palm branches, our pulses quickened with the excitement of the festival, our shouts of Hosanna still resonant in our throats.

But listen for a minute. We can hear another sound. Not Hosannas, but the steady, measured, martial drumbeat of the Roman legions. Pontius Pilate is arriving for the great festival. Everybody comes to Jerusalem for Passover, and that includes the Roman governor. The might of Rome will be on display in the Jewish Festival, just to make sure that the locals remember who occupies their land, who holds power over all of life, from civic order to temple ritual. Rome is in Jerusalem.

Lutheran New Testament scholar Mark Hoffman reminds us that all that this story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is “not so much prophetic fulfillment as it is political statement.” In being greeted as a king while riding a donkey colt [that Jesus has obtained much as a Roman soldier would acquisition an animal from the locals] Jesus is making a parody of the regal Roman procession.

This is more a planned political demonstration by Jesus than it is a pious procession. Our hosannas, Hoffman says, are really political commentary. Any Roman watching would know that Caesar was being mocked. This Jesus was a threat, with all his preaching about kingdoms for the poor, all his actions giving healing and forgiveness outside the temple, and now this public affront to the Empire. What next?

What comes next from Jesus, as we walk with him through this week, is the real challenge to the power of Rome, and the real key to the person of Jesus, and so the real heart of our Christian identity. Jesus will kneel as a slave at the feet of his friends, he will not resist arrest, he will not fight back with a plan for winning, he will not refuse death, he will not triumph. He will die on a Roman cross. And only by walking with him will we be able to walk beyond the cross to the empty tomb, to the promise that more is yet to come...

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