Faith Foundations for Lent: Confrontation

March 27, 1994

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Scripture: Mark 11:1-11

“Then He entered Jerusalem...” Mark 11;11a

In a sense AMBIGUITY is the appropriate word for today, I think....or maybe AMBIVALENCE, which is very close kin, or PARADOX. There’s a tug, a pull in more than one direction.

You hardly know what to do with Palm Sunday. You hardly know how to handle it. It’s a tough day, frankly, for a preacher. Is it a happy day, or a sad day? Is it a day of shouting, or a day of weeping? Do you reach for a flag or a handkerchief?  Is it a day of celebration, or a day of gathering tension? OR IS IT, SOMEHOW, A COMBINATION OF THESE? It’s the least clear cut of all the great Christian celebrations.

Easter is obvious---glorious and obvious---the mood of Easter is sharply drawn....the song of triumph, victory, unmitigated joy permeates everything from start to finish.

The mood of PENTECOST is equally clear....explosive power and dynamism. You can feel the power surging through. A Church born, standing on tiptoe, ready for all comers. The mood of LENT is somber....a shadow hangs over the events as they unfold, a shadow which grows darker and more ominous as Calvary nears.

BUT THEN, as an intrusion, almost out of nowhere, erupts Palm Sunday. It breaks into that dark, ominous mood. You aren’t looking for it, you aren’t expecting it....all at once it pierces the clouds like a ray of light.

AND COMING WHEN IT DOES, and where it does, just 5 days before the Crucifixion, it has a jarring, discordant effect. Coronation, honor, recognition just before disaster? Ambivalence. You don’t quite know what to do with it.

Even among the Gospel accounts, I think, there is tension. When Matthew tells the story, he tends to highlight the celebrative aspect. For him, the Entry is a city-wide, stirring event. He says, “When Jesus rode into town, all the city was moved.....”

He pictures teaming crowds, jammed into Jerusalem for Passover anyway, pushing and shoving, caught up in the drama, shouting and waving palm branches in adulation. What’s more, he plainly identifies Jesus’ arrival with a passage from Zechariah, a passage with unmistakable Messianic overtones: “Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek and sitting on a donkey.”

For Matthew, it’s a nationalistic, patriotic parade. Excitement pervades everything.

Luke, on the other hand, plays it in a more subdued fashion. There are no great crowds in Luke’s version, no multitudes, no throngs....What happens is very much a disciple event, not a crowd event. It’s the disciples who place Jesus on the donkey, the disciples who spread the garments on the road, the disciples who rejoice and praise God. Christ is hailed by followers only, not the

general public.

And there are no quotations from the Old Testament, no branches cut from trees. If we had only Luke’s account, we wouldn’t even call it Palm Sunday. There are no palm branches mentioned. It’s a far less festive and exuberant event in Luke than in Matthew.

But it’s Mark we’re reading today. He, writing earlier than the other two, comes down somewhere in between. Excitement there is, some tumult, exuberance....Zechariah is quoted, but not identified, and we’re told that many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread before Him as He rode along leafy branches which they had cut from the fields. That’s one side.

But all of that takes place outside the city, before He arrived at the gates of Jerusalem. In Mark’s version, it’s the triumphal PRE-ENTRY. Jesus doesn’t get to the city until the very last verse of the passage, and by that time whatever parade there was seems to have played itself out entirely. The heavy Lenten cloud returns....somberness envelopes the scene once again, as if Mark, too, recognized the fragile nature of the preceding jubilation and wanted to call us back to the seriousness of what’s really happening.

He writes (our text), “Then he entered Jerusalem (no mention of anyone else) and went into the Temple; and when he had looked around at everything (doesn’t it make a graphic image?), as it was already late (the very words make you shudder) he went out to Bethany with the 12.”

So there are the two sides of the story, both present in Mark’s account. How then do we celebrate it?

I heard somebody say one time that Palm Sunday was probably the single happiest day in Jesus’ life, but given the overall context, could that possibly be?

The Church calls it the Triumphal Entry, but it was triumphant only in the light of subsequent developments. It’s Easter that makes Palm Sunday look good, not vice-versa. Far from being triumphant at the time, His coming into Jerusalem only hastened the tightening of the net around Him.

It was already there, it was already closing, anyway. This only speeded up the process.

Riding in like that, made it next to impossible for His enemies not to retort....It was the slap in the face, which they had to answer. In poker terms, He not only called them, He raised the ante. Sure they had to do something. AND IT DIDN’T TAKE THEM LONG.

No, I don’t think it was a happy day for Him at all. The joy of Palm Sunday is retrospective. In itself; it’s a bittersweet day....ambiguous. The true joy of it comes out of what it prefigures.

Nobody on hand saw it at the time....Maybe nobody could have seen it. He was Messiah, He was King...But in a way so different from anybody’s expectation.

Only after Easter did it begin to fit together. Only then did they start to grasp the significance of it. Can you imagine what the disciples must have thought about the Triumphal Entry on the Friday night of the crucifixion? How much would you have been willing to plunk down on triumph that night....or throughout that interminable Saturday which followed?

So how do we celebrate it today? With a pre-Easter or a post-Easter posture? With somberness or rejoicing?

In a mood of dread for what is to be, or in a mood of Doxology for what has happened since? WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE AMBIVALENCE OF PALM SUNDAY?

Could it be that in a sense the ambiguity, the very ambiguity itself is where you need to start in dealing with this strange day? I’ve preached it both ways, and never very satisfactorily. I confess it with embarrassment. Neither approach seemed quite big enough, inclusive enough. It was either sentimental, superficial, and just a little sappy, or it was so dark and brooding as to eliminate any note of joy and celebration. I tried to make it one or the other and missed it.

Because it’s neither....or it’s both. It’s not clear cut. I think now I see that the very ambiguity of the day, the very tension, ambivalence, mixed emotion of it is part of its strange fascination, part of its enduring strength....at least, it’s a good place to get into it today.

I would suggest that maybe no day of the Christian year, no act of Jesus’ ministry, maybe no story of the Christian Faith is more in tune with the flavor of modern life than Palm Sunday. Talk about pertinence....Here it is.

Ambiguity is the name of the world we live in....isn’t it? We live in a world of shades of gray, blurred standards, pressures that pull us in more than one direction. It’s a Palm Sunday kind of world.

We live in a world of cross currents and contrasts, of ebb and flow, of give and take, of shifting moral values....Has there ever been a time, since maybe the First Century itself, when it was more difficult than now to distinguish between right and wrong, when it was tougher to choose between competing values....all the blandishments that come to us from all sides....

Can you remember when it was harder to give wise counsel to young people, when it was more difficult to be a good teacher, or coach, or adviser...for almost any age? How do you know the right answers? How can you be sure?

Remember old Captain Ahab in Moby Dick? Melville says he would tighten the carpenter’s vise in the hold of the ship as tightly as he could stand it on his hand. He would close it shut until he could close it no more. He said, “I like to feel something in this slippery world that won’t budge.” I suspect we all feel that way at times.

I had to make an interesting decision a couple of years ago that I’ve thought about a good deal since. It didn’t involve anybody in this Church, or even in this community, so I don’t mind telling you the gist of it. I was asked if I would perform a marriage ceremony for an older couple who wanted me to marry them without a marriage license. They wanted to get married, they said. To be married legally would impose unfair penalties on them.

It would mean in this case a reduction of total income for them, loss of benefits, loss of insurance coverage....but they didn’t just want to live together. Could they be married in the sight of God, but not the state? Would I perform the ceremony? It’s just a piece of paper, after all, they said. They love each other. Would I bless their union, and send them off with assuaged conscience?

I suspect I was not the first minister they approached. Should I have agreed? I felt sympathy for them. I liked them. I think I understood their predicament. And I like to be helpful to people. I know sometimes laws have the effect of curtailing the very fulfillment of life they purport to protect. Sometimes even a good law can hurt more than it helps. On top of all that, as Peter and John said, “We must obey God, not men.” I mean, that’s Biblical. What’s a poor preacher to do?

Well, this poor preacher....is not going to tell you what he did. I’ll tell you privately if you want to know. I share this incident simply to say it’s a Palm Sunday kind of world. The name of it is AMBIGUITY....maybe more than ever.

NOT....not, please understand, because the standards themselves, the values themselves have eroded. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe for one minute that the 10 Commandments, or the Beatitudes have budged an inch over the last couple of millennia, but I do believe life is more complex now than it used to be.

I heard Fred Wertz one time describe the life and working conditions of a modern college president, which he himself was until he fell from grace and became a Bishop in the United Methodist Church. He said it was very much like the man who went to work in a carnival. They put him in one of those booths with a hole in one end. He stuck his head through the hole and people threw baseballs at him.

That wasn’t so bad, he said, as long as he could keep his eyes open. He got along all right with his head pointed in one direction until they rented out the other end for a dart game.

It comes close to being a parable of modern life. If it’s not a complete jungle out there, at least there are a lot of tangles and brambles....more people, more choices, more complexity.

I’m told there is a street in Boston, Massachusetts....Cub Scout’s honor on this....There is a street in Boston where this directive is posted: “On even numbered days, please park on the odd numbered side of the street. On odd numbered days, park on the even numbered side. If you park after midnight, the rule is reversed. Where parking is allowed on only one side, park on the side opposite the NO PARKING ALLOWED ANYTIME sign.”

Is it any wonder the New England Patriots are having trouble in the NFL?

It’s a Palm Sunday kind of world...ambiguity, ambivalence, complication...in more and more areas. One standard, important in its own right, clashes with another, equally valid---property rights---environmental rights; the right to life---the right to choose; the right to bear arms---the right to security; the right to throw the rascals out---the right to just cause....

Maybe nowhere are the issues more complex than in some of the newly opened technical fields of medical ethics. Every new frontier raises new questions....Where does life begin?

At what point do we stop using heroic measures to prolong human existence? OR DO WE EVER? What about fetal tissue as replacement parts for the human body? Should we do everything we can do?

Dare we tamper with the genetic structure of the unborn? WHO DECIDES?

I’m not answering questions. I’m raising them. Maybe at no other time in human history have there been more sticky ones.

The ambiguity of Palm Sunday has a counterpart in the ambiguity of our own day. We, of all people, can relate to the tension of the entry story, because we live in the same kind of world ourselves.....

But ahhh! NOW WE COME TO IT---THE GOSPEL INTRUSION. More than just ancient history is going on here. This is as modern as today’s newspaper. How in the world do these old writers know us so well?

The text: “Then he entered Jerusalem...the Jerusalem of ambiguity, the Jerusalem of mixed emotions, the Jerusalem of contradictory plans and schemes, the Jerusalem of high ideals and base desires, the Jerusalem of shifting values and blurred standards, the Jerusalem of your world and mine....INTO JERUSALEM THE KING COMES RIDING IN JUST AS REAL A WAY AS HE DID 2000 YEARS AGO.

“Then he entered Jerusalem”. Isn’t this the profoundest meaning of the Palm Sunday entry....the existential meaning, if you will, the personal meaning. THE KING IS COMING...and He’s headed straight for you.

I tell you, this is high drama....this is survival stuff. No fat left on this cut of meat.

Ambiguities become superfluous here. IN FACT, HERE’S WHAT GIVES US TRUE COMPASS THROUGH THE AMBIGUITIES. We’re talking bottom line, now, We’re talking SHOWDOWN, high drama, high noon, with a protagonist bigger than Gary Cooper.[1]

“Then he entered Jerusalem”, Mark says, and you’ve never really seen Palm Sunday until you’ve seen yourself looking into that gun barrel.

You see, sooner or later, somehow, somewhere, you and I....all of us, along with all the gods we make, Ba’al for our productivity, Venus for our lust, Mars for our anger, Bacchus for our pleasure....sooner or later, we all have to confront the real God, the God who made us.

And until we do that, honestly, we’ll never know what we really are....We’ll just continue on, twisted and pulled from one side to another by ambiguity....hectored and harried by both grandeur and meanness, glory and misery....always torn between the stars of self-giving fulfillment, and the mud of self-gratifying exploitation, always halfway between Utopia and ulcers, between the ideal and the ordeal, between heaven and hell, between the gaping abyss of our own incorrigible sin, AND THE BOLDEST, HUNGRIEST HOPES THAT EVER MARCHED UP AND DOWN THROUGH THE HUMAN SOUL.

This is the story of all of us, this is where we all are, UNTIL WE’VE ADMITTED OUR TRUE IDENTITY, until we allow ourselves to be what we were always meant to be....AND THIS IS WHY HE CAME, AND THIS IS WHY HE DIED....not to remove the ambiguity that surrounds us---we still have to fight those battles---but to give order, purpose, and focus to the ambiguity within.

THE KING IS COMING, there’s the deepest meaning of Palm Sunday. “Then he entered Jerusalem”....THE KING IS COMING, the real King, riding into town...and coming, hunting for you.

In one of his books, Frederick Buechner tells, or retells, a fable that comes out of 19th Century India. It’s one of the stories of the great Hindu saint Ramakrishna.

There was a tiger cub who was left motherless and alone in the jungle when his mother was shot and killed by a hunter. The cub nearly died, but by a strange quirk of fate or nature, was found and adopted by a herd of goats. The goats raised the tiger cub as one of their own. He learned to speak their language, eat their food, play their games, emulate their ways, and in time even to believe that he was a goat himself.

Then one day, a huge tiger king came along. He roared at the goats, and they scattered in every direction, every goat for himself, terrified with fear. But the young tiger didn’t run. He stayed where he was...afraid, and yet somehow not afraid, appalled, yet somehow intrigued....the feeling was one of ambiguity.

The king tiger approached the little fellow, and looked him square in the eye. He walked around him and sniffed. Then he said, “Who do you think you are? What do you think you’re doing playing this unseemly masquerade?”

All the little one could do was shiver. He bleated nervously and tried to nibble some grass. So the tiger took him over to a pool of water nearby. He stood by him and said, “Look down”, making him gaze at the two reflections side by side.

“What do you see?” he asked. “Can we draw any conclusions from this?” But the cub only looked baffled and confused.

So the king tiger excused himself for a moment, and went off out of sight, shortly returning dragging in a fresh kill. He offered the cub his first taste ever of raw meat. The young tiger tasted, gingerly, and recoiled, unfamiliar with the new experience.

But the king tiger persisted. “Eat some more”, he commanded.

As the cub tiger tasted again, and then took another bite, and another, something began to happen to him, something inside. An ancient, primeval instinct began to take hold. He ate more, feeling it warm his blood, and the truth gradually became clear to him.

Lashing his tale from side to side, and digging his claws into the earth beneath him, the young beast finally raised his head high, and the jungle trembled at the sound of his exultant roar. He had discovered at last what he really was.

Oh, friends, may I say it with the utmost kindness? You’re probably way ahead of me, but I suspect you know it’s true. A lot of us, even within the Church, are living a masqueraded, thinly disguised goat life.

Something’s incomplete....something’s out of kilter....we feel the ambiguity of it. Made for meat, we stuff ourselves with grass, and wonder why we’re never filled. We’ve learned to bleat, maybe even gotten pretty good at it, but down inside there is the haunting suspicion that we were really made for roaring.

THE PALM SUNDAY STORY BRINGS US FACE TO FACE WITH IT. “Then he entered Jerusalem.” Do you see Him coming....on the prowl?

T.S. Eliot has written a luminous phrase. It’s in the poem “Gerontion”. Eliot writes: “In the juvenescence of the year comes Christ the tiger....”

Exactly! It’s a superb line, a Palm Sunday line, I would suggest, because it cuts right through a lot of religious garbage. This is not the saccharine sweet, syrupy, sentimental Christ of those atrocious pictures you can buy...don’t kid yourself...this is an explosion of a Man, an explosion of real life, smack into the middle of our masquerade, sham life.

We see Him and we see what a tiger looks like, what a real human being looks like, and we know it’s what we were meant for.

“Then he entered Jerusalem....” Into the city....into the ambiguity...He’s coming....coming... hunting for goats....to set them free.

Behold the Lamb of God....behold the Tiger, who taketh away the sin of the world....even Jesus Christ our Lord.

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[1] Gary Cooper was a popular American actor whose career spanned from 1925-1961.