Matthew 21:1-13
April 17, 2011
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Every year on Palm Sunday, I wonder if I would have missed the parade. Unlike some of you who went to the Giants parade last year when they won the World Series or the Chinese New Year Parade to usher in the Rabbit, I don’t go to many parades. One year, Joy’s brother invited our family to the New York City Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and even then we were in a hotel room high above the inflated balloons.
Most of us do not often line the street, wave branches, and cheer. We have too much to do to go to parades. Besides, parades can be silly with funny hats and noisy with firecrackers that it’s easier to stick with our normal routines.
Five hundred years earlier, the prophet Zachariah had said that one day there would be a parade like Palm Sunday. For a half a millennium, they kept an eye open watching for King David’s successor to gallop into town and assume the throne. For five hundred years these people have been hoping, wishing and waiting to line the road. The marching band has been rehearsing, “Happy days are here again” for five hundred years.
Politically Charged
Palm/Passion Sunday is one of the most politically charged Sundays of the church year. But not politics as we normally think about politics.
On this day Jesus at last makes his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. But his triumphant entry is comical and a parody of our messianic expectations. The one who comes into Jerusalem rides not on a war horse, head of a conquering army, but bounces in on the back of a donkey and a colt.
One of the interesting ironies in this passage is that while Jesus didn’t come on the back of a war horse, Jesus seems to be riding two differently sized animals at the same time. The Scriptures says, “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (6). Do you think Jesus had one leg over the tall donkey and another over the small colt? Do you think he stood on both like a Chinese acrobat in the Chinese New Year Parade? Or did he, like some artists have tried to render it, sat sidesaddle on the donkey with his feet on the colt? While we may never really know how Jesus rode on both animals, what we know for sure is that Jesus was “humble.”
While being humble, Jesus was still being political. He practically choreographed the scene by instructing the disciples to untie the donkey and colt for the event. He does not seem to want to enter Jerusalem unnoticed. This hardly sounds humble, but he does not enter victoriously as does the king in Zechariah’s oracle. He heads, willingly to defeat. The parade is on the way to the cross. Jesus’ politics are not with the Roman Empire but with the reign of God.
When Mahatma Gandhi came to England, in the height of the crisis between England and its colony of India, Gandhi went first to the textile workers in Liverpool, the very ones who had been hurt by the boycott of English textiles in India. He attempted to explain to them his aspirations and why he was leading India in this way. Gandhi therefore subverted political expectations. Powerful political leaders, upon arriving in a country, first pay their homage to other powerful political leaders. Gandhi did otherwise, a man arriving not with a conquering army, but wrapped up in a sheet, wearing a diaper.
In arriving in Jerusalem the way that Jesus did, he demonstrates that true security is not in raising an army and running out the Romans, but in entrusting in the Lord. In this sense, all religion is political, and all politics is religious.
God’s Sovereignty
In our present age, politics becomes our main means of salvation, our main means of protection from the cradle to the grave, our main source of security and wellbeing. We say, “We raise up armies to produce peace.” We impose and participated in the “No-fly zone” over Libya. We fight wars for our personal security.
Where does this new king go, once he triumphantly enters the city? He does not go up to the palace for an important conversation with the political rulers. Rather, Jesus goes to the temple, where he purifies the temple, makes things ready for the true worship of God.
Jesus’ political action is really a deeply religious event. He is teaching us how to worship. He is turning our gaze away from our false idols toward our true salvation, our only hope, our real peace.
And during this coming week, what could have been a state dinner in the palace becomes a last supper with his friends in a borrowed upper room. Jesus has intruded into the capitol city, marched into Jerusalem, to offer us food for the hungry, to present a new definition of sovereignty.
It will not take the government long to move into action. In just a few days, Pilate, the empire, the state—that political system in which we put so much of our hope and trust—shall give its verdict upon King Jesus and his reign: “Crucify him.”
Palm Sunday Christians
It’s tempting to praise Jesus without following Jesus. Like the Palm Sunday crowd, we want to see what we want to see. We would like a Messiah who makes our lives easier. I have in my mind the Messiah I think I would most enjoy following. I believe you do too. But in order to follow the real Jesus, we have to give up our ideas about the path Jesus should choose, and admit that his way leads to the cross.
Some of you have tried to live as Palm Sunday Christians, keeping a safe distance from the one you are following. We’re at the parade but not on the frontline. It is easy to attend services on Sunday and then give ourselves to making as much money as we can on Monday through Friday. It is easy to pray for God to be with us and then to act as if we are on our own. It is easy to say that we are trying to love needy people and then find a dozen ways to ignore the hurting every day. We tend to serve unless the people we want to impress will not be impressed, unless others may disapprove, unless it will cost us, unless it is hard. It is easy to have a gaping chasm between what we applaud and what we actually do.
Jesus was courageous; we are careful. Jesus trusted the unworthy; we trust those with good collateral. Jesus forgave the unforgiveable; we forgive those who do not really hurt us that much. Jesus was righteous and laughed at respectability; we are respectable and smile at genuine righteousness. Jesus had no place to lay his head and did not worry about it; we fret when we do not have the latest convenience. Jesus did what we believed to be right regardless of consequences; we determine what is right by how it will affect us. Jesus feared God but not the world; we fear public opinion more than we fear God’s judgment. Jesus risked everything for God; we try to make religion safe.
Now you know why some Christians are tempted to skip the struggles and be cautious, discrete and reasonable. They don’t want to be politically active that would cause disruption to their definition of religious success. The church is lured by comfort and security, tempted to line the road on Palm Sunday, but turn away and run away when Jesus cleanses the temple and continues to the cross.
Christians are on a journey that goes all the way to the cross. Disciples take their place with Jesus, give their lives away, go to hard places and do things that are different from what the world and the state do. The five people who are joining the church today in believers’ baptism and transferring their membership want to follow Jesus to give their lives away, go to hard places and do difficult things.
Do you want to follow? Are you at the parade not just spectators but followers?
The King’s Speech
One of the best movies this past year is The King’s Speech about the little noticed reign of George VI, the second in line for the throne of England after his more extroverted brother.
Bertie, as he was known to his family, trained as a naval officer and knew his place of quiet obscurity. His wife Elizabeth and his two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret lived out their royal calling supporting and loving each other out of the glare of too many expectations.
Albert from a young age was afflicted by a stammer that he could manage in the presence of family but was left speechless in public settings.
Sadly for him his public duties and the advent of radio coincided. His inability to speak was shouted throughout the land in the awkward silence of radio broadcasts on those rare occasions when he was asked to speak for his father, the king.
Many doctors had been consulted and their methods and their impatience had achieved little improvement. The man never intended to be King was likely to be a man without his own voice.
But, Albert’s wife Elizabeth perseveres and locates an Australian, named Lionel Logue, who works with speech defects.
His rules are as strict as the royal protocol. Albert must come to his bare and simple office and open both his mouth and his heart and deal with not only his stammer but also his pain. Through hard work and the healing power of friendship, Bertie finds his words and his place in the world.
After his brother abdicates the throne, Albert becomes George VI, King of England, a leader both humble and brave who rises to lead his people at the beginning of World War II.
Throughout Great Britain, the King who stammered becomes the King who comforts and encourages a nation in the darkest of times. His story may have most affected his daughter, Elizabeth II, who reigns even now.
We are best led by those who know pain but yet with confidence lead us through it. On Palm Sunday, it is Jesus who humbles himself sitting on a donkey and a colt and will suffer on the cross for the world who leads us today.
Followers Not Admirers
As we see ourselves standing on the side of the parade and Jesus is triumphantly riding on a donkey and a colt at the same time, will you be a follower or just an admirer? Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Jesus wants followers, not admirers.” What does it mean for people like us to be followers and not just admirers?
We have to help our families take care of those who have no family. We have to give money away that we would rather keep, talk about what faith means when we would rather be silent, and do good for people who will not do good to us in return.
We follow Jesus in a thousand different ways: spending time with people who seem to have nothing to offer us, standing with the people who are losing, caring for those who’ve made terrible mistakes, doing good that will receive no applause, treating discarded children as God’s children, listening to a victim of Alzheimer’s who will not remember that you have listened.
Following Christ means forgiving those who do not deserve forgiveness, treating success as an imposter, and praying not for an easier life but for strength.
If we follow Jesus, we will find that the journey offers only one guarantee: in the long run, we will gain far more than we lose. Jesus changes all the definitions. Power, success, and even happiness, as the world knows them, belong to those who take them for themselves; but peace, love, and joy are gifts from God given to those who give themselves.
Palm Sunday, even with the joy it represents, is not nearly enough. We need to lay down our tiny aspirations and take up the hope of following Jesus. Following Christ is hard, but by grace, we cannot only line the street for the parade, but also become the Christians God intends by sharing the cross, challenging the powers to be in the world in which we live, and, maybe, catching a glimpse of Easter.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, on this Sunday you entered Jerusalem to claim your throne, greeted by little children, hailed by the dispossessed and the poor. No government or religious leader welcomed you. Lord, your sovereignty is a threat, a challenge to our dominant ideas of who is in charge. You come among us, not only to speak to us, to bless us, but also to turn the world upside down. Help us to receive you as you are rather than as we would have you to be. Help us to bow down and worship the King who reigns from a cross. Amen.