The Ambiguity of Palm Sunday

March 19, 1989

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Scripture: “As he was now drawing near....” Luke 19:37a

The word for today is ambiguity---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? Is it a day of celebration, or a day of gathering tension?

Or is it somehow, maybe, a combination of these? It’s the most ambiguous and mysterious of all the great Christian festivals.

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

The mood of Pentecost is equally clear...dynamism, surging strength.... You can almost feel it and taste it. A Church infused by new, raw power...standing on tiptoe and ready for all comers.

The mood of Lent is somber---a shadow hangs over the events as they unfold...a shadow that grows darker and more ominous as Calvary nears.

But then, suddenly, out of nowhere, is Palm Sunday. It breaks into that dark, ominous mood. You aren’t looking for it, you aren’t expecting it.... It just all at once pierces the cloud 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, recognition, just before disaster? Ambiguous! You don’t know quite what to do with it.

Even among the Gospel writers, I think, there is tension. Even among themselves there is not agreement about interpretation.

When Matthew and Mark tell the story, they portray it as a city-wide, stirring event. Matthew says, “When Jesus rode into town, all the city was moved....” He pictures the teeming 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, Matthew clearly identifies Jesus coming in with a passage from Zechariah, which had unmistakable Messianic overtones.... “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord....”

For both Matthew and Mark, it’s a nationalistic, patriotic parade. At last, Jesus has declared himself.

But in Luke you sense the ambiguity. He tones it all down. It was Luke’s account I just read.... Did you notice? He says nothing about crowds at all...no throngs, no multitudes...There are no hosannas, no quotations, no branches cut from trees. If we had only Luke’s version, we wouldn’t even call it Palm Sunday. There are no palm branches mentioned.

Even more, the entry is very much a disciple event, not a crowd event. It’s the disciples in Luke who place Jesus on the donkey, it’s the disciples who spread garments on the road. It’s the disciples who rejoice and praise God. Christ is hailed by His followers, not by the general public.

It’s entirely an “in house” affair. And this is not the group, Luke says, which later called for the crucifixion. The disciples didn’t understand Him, to be sure, they misunderstood, like everybody else, the nature of His messiahship, but don’t shame them totally. They aren’t the ones who sing praise and then scream death all in the same week.

It’s a more subdued version...may I say, a kinder, gentler version of the story, as if he, too, were not quite sure exactly how to handle it.

And how do you think Jesus Himself must have felt? Don’t you suspect there was an element of ambiguity even there, or at least mixed feelings. Don’t you think He was pulled in more than one direction?

Of course He wanted recognition. Of course He wanted followers....it was to draw people to Himself that He came. In one sense this day was a fulfillment of His ministry. But it’s awfully tempting, and maybe too easy, to go from the elation of Palm Sunday to the elation of Easter, without ever seeing the gaping, gruesome valley in between, and you miss the whole meaning of Gospel redemption if you do that. Jesus refused to do it.

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

Do you think for a minute he was fooled by what was going on around Him? Do you think He was taken in by the false glitter of that raucous reception?

The Church calls it the Triumphal Entry, but it was really triumphal only in the light of subsequent developments. It’s Easter that makes Palm Sunday look good, not vice-versa. Palm Sunday makes no sense without Easter.

Far from being triumphant, at the time, His entry into Jerusalem really only hastened the tightening of the net around Him. It was already there, it was already closing anyway...this only speeded up the process.

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

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 not out of the event itself, so much misunderstood. The true joy comes out of what it pre-figures.

Nobody on hand saw it at the time. Maybe nobody could have seen it. BUT HE WAS RIGHT...incredibly courageous...and RIGHT. 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 money would you have been willing to put down on triumph that night...or during that long, 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 yet to be, or in a mood of Doxology, for what has happened since? What do we do with the ambiguity 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 to be big enough, inclusive enough. It was either sentimental, superficial, and just a little sappy, or else 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 so much in tune with the flavor of modern life. Talk about pertinence for today.... Here it is. Everybody can relate to this....

Ambiguity is the name of the world we live in. We live in a world of shades of gray, of blurred standards, of 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 1st Century itself, when it was more difficult than now to distinguish between right and wrong? When was it 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 teen-age young people? When was it more difficult to be a good teacher, or coach, or advisor...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, and say, “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 last week. 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 a sharp 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 consciences?

I suspect I was not the first minister they had approached. Should I have agreed? I felt sympathy for them. I liked them. I think I understood their predicament. I like to be helpful. And I know sometimes laws have the effect of curtailing the very fulfillment of life they purport to protect. Sometimes a law can hurt more than it helps. On top of all that, we must, after all, as Peter and John said, “obey God, not man.”

I’ll tell you privately my decision, if you want to know. I share the incident simply to say it’s a Palm Sunday kind of world...the name of it is AMBIGUITY...maybe more than ever.

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

There are more of us, and there is less space in between. There are more possible choices, and less room for error. We interface at more points of contact....

The very word “interface”, which word I frankly despise, points up the additional dimensions of life that simply weren’t there a few years back, in those halcyon days of a simpler yesteryear.

It’s more complicated---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 safety. 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 and technical fields of medical ethics. It’s the cover story in a current newsmagazine.

Where does life begin? At what point do we stop using heroic methods to prolong physical existence? Or do we ever? What about organ banks, replacement parts for the human body? Where, if anywhere, would they come from?

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

I’m not answering questions. I’m raising them. Maybe at no other time in human history have there been more unanswered, 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, for we live in the same kind of world. BUT NOW...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 do these old writers know us so well?

Into Jerusalem....the Jerusalem of ambiguity, the Jerusalem of mixed emotions, the Jerusalem of contradictory plans and schemes, the Jerusalem of high idealism and base desires, the Jerusalem of shifting values and blurred standards, the Jerusalem of our world, the Jerusalem of your life...into Jerusalem the King comes riding in just as real a way as He did 2000 years ago.

The text says it, “As He was now drawing near....” Can you put yourself in the path? Here, I think, is the profoundest meaning of the Palm Sunday entry, the important meaning, the existential meaning, if you will, the personal meaning.... THE KING IS COMING, and He’s coming straight toward YOU.

This is HIGH DRAMA...survival stuff.... There’s no fat left on this cut of meat. Ambiguities become superfluous here...they pale alongside. In fact, here is what gives us true compass bearing through the ambiguities.

We’re talking bottom line, showdown, high drama, high noon, with a protagonist bigger than Gary Cooper.[1]

 “As he was now drawing near...” Luke 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, with 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.

Until we do that, honestly and truthfully, we’ll never know what we really are---We’ll continue twisted and pulled 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, until we’ve admitted our true identity, and this is why He came, and why He did...not to remove the ambiguity that surrounds us---we’ll still have to fight those battles---but to give order, purpose, and focus to the ambiguity within.

The King is coming---That’s the deepest meaning of Palm Sunday.... “As he was now drawing near.... ” THE KING IS COMING...the REAL King, riding into Jerusalem...and coming...hunting for YOU.

In one of his books, Frederick Buechner tells 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; he was...afraid, and yet somehow not afraid, appalled, and 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 2 reflections side by side.

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

So the king tiger excused himself for a moment, and went off out of sight, shortly returning dragging 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 just say it with the uttermost 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. “As He was now drawing near....” 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 masqueraded, 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.

“As He was now drawing near.....”  Into the city...into the ambiguity...He’s coming, coming...hunting for goats--to set them free. BEHOLD THE TIGER, WHO TAKETH AWAY THE SIN OF THE WORLD...even Jesus Christ our Lord.

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[1] Gary Cooper was an American actor known for his strong, quiet screen persona.