April 9, 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Is today “Happy Parade Day” or “Public Execution Day?” Given the fact that I won’t see most of you this Thursday night for our Maundy Thursday Tenebrae Service or this Friday’s Good Friday Services, we jumped ahead in our Scriptures. This way, some of you who are “Good Friday avoiders” can get the crucifixion and the triumphant entry into Jerusalem blended nicely together at one time.
The whole world loves a parade. Tourists who come to Chinatown run to watch a parade even when it’s only a funeral. One of the most spectacular parades in the world is the night parade at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Fairy tales come true. After a day at the Magic Kingdom, the climax is the parade of lights and dreams. There are huge floats, sugar plum music, glitter and lights, fireworks, and that wonderful cast of characters known around the world: Mickey, Goofy, Tinkerbell, Cinderella, Snow White and so on. The world loves parades for it warms our hearts especially when it is a parade in a magic kingdom.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a magic kingdom, a world of dreams come true, a world that goes to sleep each night with a spectacular parade of your favorite characters from your childhood? But magic kingdoms don’t exist in the real world. Well, they do but only in those small patches of land around the world of make-believe.
We like Magic Kingdom parades because they are a diversion from the ragged pain and ambiguities of life. The Magic Kingdom is a world with no sin, no dirt, and no death. Nothing evil or bad happens there. “It’s a small world after all”—all the time. People don’t get cancer in the Magic Kingdom. There are no hurts in the Magic Kingdom. It is all just sweetness and sugar candy. Such a world has no need for Holy Week, for Maundy Thursday, for Good Friday, and even no need for Easter. If everything is just right in this world of magic, there’s no need for redemption. Against the darkness of the night, the parade of lights is nothing less than a climax to the whole fantasy of make believe.
Palm Sunday
Don’t we wish that Palm Sunday can be such a parade too? The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem where he was rightfully proclaimed as the one who comes in the name of God is nothing short of joy and celebration. We gave you all blades of palm to wave up high like they were noisemakers.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could make Palm Sunday a day of religious optimism at its best? We can celebrate Jesus as a religious genius, a great teacher, an innovative rabbi, a moral man! Why can’t we just have Palm Sunday be a great climax of the biblical story when we can remember that Jesus healed the sick and told about the ways of God?
He called people to faith and right living. What more could be needed for a day of parades? Just like the way we follow a happy feel-good, magic kingdom parade, we would have no hesitation to follow a Palm Sunday parade. We can gather to celebrate Jesus the teacher, and like the people of Jerusalem we too can cheer him on his way and proclaim him Lord. But the hard truth is that Palm Sunday is a false climax.
Certainly Palm Sunday remains a part of the story of redemption and we can celebrate it for what it is. But Jesus comes into Jerusalem and says that the Temple is no longer some stone building but is now himself. He teaches about paying taxes to Caesar but not to cheat God. He denounces the scribes for their fancy robes. His disciples disappointed him by falling asleep while he was praying. He gets arrested and betrayed. After Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, he quickly became no childhood cartoon character that people want to take pictures with. The story of Jesus does not stop on Palm Sunday.
The full nature of the Lordship of Jesus is yet to be revealed. He still has work to do which must take him well beyond the limits of a Palm Sunday lordship and a Palm Sunday faith. His full work for our salvation is still to be accomplished.
The truth is that we don’t live in a magic kingdom, and our lives are not all sweetness and light. We live in a world mired in sin, suffering, and death. Brokenness is all around us. If we only had Palm Sunday, our sin is not yet dealt with, and death still has the last word. The terrible gulf which separates us from God and from one another must yet be bridged. The great salvation drama, beginning with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with Moses leading the people to freedom, through the years of the prophets and up to the incarnation in Bethlehem is still not finished yet when we get to Palm Sunday. There is still more to this drama—the necessary climatic scenes of crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is still ahead.
Regardless of how tempting it is to wave our palm fronds, Palm Sunday is not the climax of the ministry of Jesus Christ.
Not What We Expected
I haven’t been to Disneyland in a long time. I hope to go with our grandkids to Disney World in June this year. But what I do remember is that people start to line up and down Main Street very early to get the best seats. And right on schedule, the parade of dreams begins with great fanfare—music, marching bands, beautiful people on floats, and many of our childhood Disney characters. The dark sky is lit up with fireworks to thrill us. That’s what we expect at a parade; remember—dreams come true!
But Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem was nothing like that. He rode a donkey like he himself was a servant and not on a horse like a military conqueror. Unlike what we expect a Messiah to be, people plotted against him, his disciples betrayed and denied him, he was arrested, tried, whipped and mocked. And he was sentenced to be crucified while a known terrorist was allowed to be freed. My guess is that if we were in Jerusalem when Jesus entered into the city, we might have been disappointed in what we saw. Where were the legions of soldiers who will drive out the Roman occupation?
Palm Sunday is something of a false climax to the Christian story of redemption because the full meaning of the Lordship of Jesus is still to be unfolded. The church is continually tempted to short-circuit Holy Week by turning Palm Sunday into Easter. We have become somewhat sophisticated about religion saying that maybe our sins are not so bad after all. Perhaps God is not such a fearsome judge as primitive people long ago used to think. Maybe we don’t need this blood-of-the-lamb theology after all. We have grown up and moved beyond this kind of talk. So why don’t we just celebrate Jesus as our leader, our guide and our friend whose spirit and influence we can welcome today, just like the people of Jerusalem welcomed him 2000 years ago? Do we really need Maundy Thursday and Good Friday?
The answer to this question is “Yes.”
Palm Sunday without Holy Week is the theology designed by Disney World for a people who think they have never sinned and that death is not a reality. The journey of Jesus from Palm Sunday to Easter Monday is a journey from illusion into reality. Unless we move beyond Palm Sunday, we avoid naming the lie which says that everything is really quite fine just as it is, that our sin is not really so bad, that death is no cause for fear, and at the end that we would also avoid knowing that God after all is really nice. Did you notice that before the week was up, those who welcomed him on Palm Sunday were crying out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” How many times have we “crucified” Jesus when we looked away from the homeless or became callous to the hungry or gave our loyalties to other gods instead of God Almighty?
Without the days after Palm Sunday, we would never know that in Jesus Christ, God was reconciling the world to him. A faith which stops with Palm Sunday is a faith that does not have to deal with the Lordship of a Jesus who dies for the sin of the whole world and in and through whom God brings all creation back to God. A faith that stops with Palm Sunday is a faith that leaves us dead in our sin. For such a faith there can never be an Easter morning. The best we would have is fantasy faith in a fantasy God.
Parade of Crosses
We see another parade in the long passage we read this morning. As the Roman soldiers led Jesus to his crucifixion, they compelled a man named Simon of Cyrene to carry his cross. While the other disciples fled from him the previous evening, this Simon serves as a substitute disciple—a “surrogate Simon Peter” to take up the cross of Jesus.
Simon had no choice. Imagine the Roman soldiers barking into his face to assist Jesus. But we are given a choice—an invitation to take willingly the cross of Christ, to bear the infirmities of the weak and to assist those who are suffering because of a desire to serve Christ.
If you were to look up in your Bible dictionary, “Simon of Cyrene,” you will discover that there’s hardly anything known about him or for that matter his two sons, Alexander and Rufus too. We can imagine that maybe he was a simple man from the countryside. Maybe he was going to meet up with his two sons when he became caught up by this unexpected parade to an execution. When he carried Jesus’ cross, Simon’s life changed forever. With no connection to Jesus or to the Romans but only as an innocent passer-byer, that day like no other day transformed his life from that day on. He was no longer a neutral bystander. He was now in the parade of crosses. That’s what happened to those who were baptized today—they are no longer innocent passerbyers; they now bear the cross.
You may have read about this story or have seen a picture of twelve bald-headed boys with the caption, “Anything for A Friend.” Ian Gorman of Oceanside, CA, an eleven-year-old who is going through something an eleven-year-old should never have to face. He is undergoing chemotherapy following the removal of a cancerous tumor. But of course, a child suffering with cancer is not a story of a cross willingly taken up. However, Ian’s story becomes such a story.
Ian lost his hair from his chemotherapy as many often do. His classmates at his elementary school might well have made a large get-well card for him, or they might have offered him their sympathies. Anyone who knows human nature and the potential for cruelty that lives even in children knows they might well have made his bald head the subject of taunts and intimidation. But that is not what happened.
In the photograph, bald-headed Ian is surrounded by friends, who shaved their heads so he wouldn’t feel out of place. One classmate said, “If everybody has their head shaved, sometimes people don’t know who’s who. They don’t know who has cancer and who just shaved their head.” The boy’s teacher was so inspired that he shaved his head too. He called the boys his “little bald eagles.”
This story touches us because the boys’ kindness was truly bearing the cross. Ian had his cross thrust upon him, but the others stepped forward to help make a cross into a joyous burden to share. They walked in a parade of crosses.
The days of Holy Week teach us that the “Happy Day Parades” that we so much like to be in are only make-believe. We don’t live in a fantasy world. We live in a world in which there is horrific and unfathomable violence from war, a world in which ordinary people get cancer, a world in which sin casts its terrible net over all human beings, a world in which it seems that the only things that come true are taxes and death!
The world loves a parade and Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem is a parade that we all want to join in. But this is only the beginning of the end; it is not the whole story. The only hope in life and in death is the Lord of Holy Week and his glorious resurrection on Easter morn. As we look forward to singing “hosannas,” let us walk with Jesus toward Calvary by first going through Maundy Thursday and then to Good Friday when we admit to the reality that we are still crucifying him in the way we live. We need to first go through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to realize that we are mired in sin. The only way we are going to get to the hope of the resurrection of the Lord is that we must leave Palm Sunday behind and walk in the darkness of betrayal and crucifixion first.
When we walk with Jesus, we too may be asked to carry his cross like Simon of Cyrene did that first time. When you leave worship today, you are invited to receive a cross sticker to wear. Are you ready to bear the cross of Jesus today and participate in the Parade of Crosses?
Let us pray.
O God, forgive us when we want a make-believe Savior who parades around with only happiness. Show us your gracious love for the world when Jesus Christ did not just stop on Palm Sunday but became obedient to your will that led him to the cross. Thank you, dear God, for your love and mercy that our sins are forgiven and the promise made in the life, death and resurrection of Christ of eternal life. We pray his name, Amen.