"Will You Let Yourself Be Saved?"

Sermon for April 5, 2020

Matthew 21:1-11

Have you ever read a book or watched a movie again and again and hoped each time that it would end differently? One story that always gets under my skin is in James Cameron’s film Titanic, where we spend the first half of the movie watching two unlikely characters fall in love aboard the famously doomed ocean liner. The film centers around a romance between rich but depressed young woman and a poor but handsome young man who saves her from herself. The love story gives real stakes to a piece of dry historical fact. By the time you get to the beginning of the third act, you could be excused for forgetting that you are watching the story of the most famous shipwreck in history. But there is one moment that jars you out of your enjoyment and reminds you that this romance is a tragedy. The moment is when the ship strikes the iceberg. There is something ominous in none of the characters in the film realizing the stakes of what has just happened, but those in the audience know. Sometimes that is how I feel about Palm Sunday. As Christians, we live the life of Jesus in the first part of every Church year. From Advent to Easter, we sit with the stories and the ministry and the saving work of Jesus, aware of them and perhaps recreating them in dramas and rituals and routines of the faith. In my mind as a child, I remember the preparation for Christmas from so many Christmas pageants and the rehearsals that led up to them. I remember Spring Revival as the lead-up to Easter, and Good Friday services in South Boston as Jesus’ funeral. We have a peculiar way of living the story, doing it every year in just a few months. When I was a kid I thought that one of the miracles was that Jesus grew up in four short months, was crucified and buried as a grown man just 120 days after his birth. I remember where I was, in the third pew of the First Baptist Church of Republican Grove, when I realized that that wasn’t how it happened. I began to get swept up in the story, which we rightly repeat every year. Jesus’ announcement and Mary’s gestation, the birth in a stable in Bethlehem, the flight to Egypt, the baptism, his ministry and miracles, his teaching, and all of it leads us inevitably to Palm Sunday. More than any other moment in Jesus’s life, Palm Sunday strikes me as the moment where things could have been different. Jesus enters Palm Sunday like a king heading for his coronation. A couple things jump out to historians: first, Jesus’s borrowing of a donkey seems to be the way people actually did transportation in the first century. It was customary for someone of more status, like a respected teacher, to be allowed to just borrow a pack animal if he didn’t want to walk. Jesus would have been within his rights to just take the donkey and go, provided he arranged for its return when he was done. Second and more importantly, the way Jesus enters Jerusalem is reminiscent of Solomon’s coronation in 1 Kings 1:38-40. Jesus, like Solomon before him, enters Jerusalem as a son of David, heir to the throne, and a source of wisdom, if the people would just listen to him. In their book The Last Week historians and Bible scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan imagine a second procession entering Jerusalem around the same time as Jesus. Jesus enters the city from the East, from the Mount of Olives, and is greeted by a great multitude of people, again like a king coming to be recognized. Meanwhile from the West, Governor Pilate rides in on a war-horse with a “peace-keeping” force, preparing for the potential unrest that Passover always brought. Pilate and his force bring peace the way government always does, with the threat of violence. But Jesus enters the city as the king of peace, riding into the city on a humble donkey. To really drive the point home, Matthew begins his account with a quotation from the prophet Zechariah. The context is a Messianic prophecy about a king who would bring peace to Jerusalem by bringing peace to the world: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.”

(Zech. 9:9–10 NRSV) Zechariah’s vision doesn’t exactly sound like a winning presidential platform. We tend to believe that peace comes by having the bigger stick. The dominant understanding of peace since the middle of the last century has been a stalemate between world powers. The military peace of the Cold War was based on a doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction.” When peace is built on threats instead of getting rid of the weapons of war, what we are talking about is actually delaying the next war. And that isn’t the same thing.

Another interesting thing about Zechariah’s portrait of the Messiah is that he doesn’t disarm the enemies of God’s people. The Messiah removes the “chariot from Ephraim,” which is a name often used in Scripture for the old Northern Kingdom of Israel. And then he removes the “war horse from Jerusalem,” which is the capital of the historic Southern Kingdom of Judah. He then “commands peace to the nations.” This is an entirely different sort of king than any political leader I’ve ever seen. To our political wisdom, a king like this would seem naïve, impractical, and unreasonable. But viewed from the perspective of God’s people, a king of peace is the only type of king that could reasonably expect to reign forever. And so Palm Sunday asks us a question: are we ready to receive Jesus? Many have hastily answered this question, in the same way that the people of Jerusalem and the crowds of pilgrims coming into the holy city for the Passover hastily answered the question. Hear them now: Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord Hosanna in the highest heaven! The word “Hosanna” means “save us!” And we can understand the desire for a savior. But the people who shouted “Hosanna” on Sunday were many of the same people who shouted “Crucify!” on Friday. They wanted a savior, but I guess they didn’t want this savior. Do we want this savior today? I think a lot every year about where things went bad for Jesus during Holy Week. It was an era before opinion polls and 24-hour news, so it’s up to our best guesses when the mood starts to turn against him. When do these crowds turn on him? It seems like the enthusiasm first just sort of wanes. Jesus leads a crowd to the Temple, where he famously disrupts the buying and selling of sacrifices going on. Here the crowds are still with him, bringing him the blind and the sick for healing. But I think what they expect next is for him to march over to the other side of town and similarly disrupt the palace. It’s here we are reminded that Jesus doesn’t work for us. He doesn’t have to meet our expectations. He doesn’t have to go where we want him to go. And so they leave him. And then when it’s convenient, they turn on him.

I think we all want a savior until we realize what he’s saving us from. We want him to forgive us, sure. We want him to protect us, absolutely! But we also want him to crush our enemies. I suspect we still have enough of that ancient blood lust in us. We want them embarrassed for standing against our God, or our ideas about God. We want them to feel as bad as they made us feel. It never occurs to us that Jesus might come to save us from that. Jesus is a reconciler. He is in the business of bringing people together, mending relationships. He comes to take away the ability to make war with each other. Will you let him break off your chariot? Your war horse? Your atomic bomb? Your sidearm and rifle? Your sharpened tongue? That grudge you’ve been holding onto for the last 20 years? Will you let him save you from that? Or will you turn away, because his salvation is impractical and naïve? Will you trust the grace and power of God enough to let him take those from you? When Jesus comes again—and he is coming again—I expect that we will all be pretty excited. But what will our response be when he tells us the new rules? This is the question Palm Sunday asks us.