And on the other side of town

And on the Other Side of Town The Dover Church
March 28 – Palm Sunday Scripture: Luke 19:22-44

As most of you know, I grew up in a New England Congregational church just like this one. Even as a youngster I was interested in the experience of God, not just my own experience, but how people from other traditions experienced the divine. Although this is what I know and love best, I have discovered is that we New England Congregationalists miss out on a lot. We shy away from really meaty and moving celebrations, the enormous reservoirs of spiritually transformative experiences which energize other traditions: the Passion Plays and Stations of the Cross of the Roman Catholics, the vigils and Easter dawn processions of the Orthodox Christians, the Passover of the Jews, the Haj to Mecca of the Muslims, the bathing in the Ganges of the Hindus, the sweat lodges and vision dances of the Native Americans.
Where the Baptists go down to the riverside or immerse themselves in large tanks, we have a nice, portable baptismal font which we take out and put away, out of which we sprinkle a few drops on babies’ heads. We like to sit in our nice box pews and listen to sermons, standing up every now and then to sing in a very organized and orderly way. Even the Lord’s Supper we like served to us in the pews. Think about the resistance churches like ours have had to exchanging signs of peace, another reenactment, where we actually have to get up and go to other people and shake their hands. No, we have not wanted to go there.
When we do these sorts of things, we make our children do them for us, the Christmas Pageant and the Palm Procession. I think that at some point people began to feel uncomfortable with the emotional energy these sorts of things triggered in the participants, so they decided to become spectators of the children, which made the whole thing sweet and harmless. We removed the immediate experience of God to arms length, but the Palm Procession is not kid’s stuff.
We all know that the setting is Jerusalem right before the festival of Passover. As the holy city of Judaism, the home of the temple, the place where God had chosen to dwell on earth, the focus of Jewish devotion and the destination of pilgrimage, Jerusalem was and is more than just any old city. In this small, sacred place the political and religious hopes and dreams of the Jewish people were inextricably interwoven.
It was also a remarkably cosmopolitan place in Jesus’ day. Home to probably 80,000 people, it dwarfed the villages most people lived in. Herod the Great had built on a massive and extravagant scale during his long lifetime and rule, encircling the city with massive walls. On the east side of the city, the side through which Jesus would have come this morning, the wall stood 150 feet high. 150 feet. Much higher than the top of our steeple, a height even more impressive as it rose directly out of the Kidron Valley’s deep ravine, which separated the Mount of Olives from the city. This high wall was just the foundation however, forming one side of the truly enormous platform on which the equally massive temple stood.
So that’s Jerusalem in a nutshell. But then there is Jerusalem at Passover. Passover is more than a Jewish Thanksgiving. It is the remembrance and celebration of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. In Jesus’ day, as many as 150 to 200,000 pilgrims would have come to the city for this most important of Jewish festivals, camping out on the hills all around the city. As they made their way towards the city, the pilgrims would have seen enormous stones being pulled by teams of oxen, stones as much as 50 feet tall and weighing hundreds of tons, stones for the completion of the Temple. For people who lived in wattle and daub or adobe style homes, the scale of the project was almost beyond belief. Thousands of animals would have been bleating and bellowing in the streets as they were sold in stalls for the coming sacrifice. And, of course, at the center of all this excitement was Adonai Elohenu, the Lord our God, in the Temple.
Into this heady mix of religious and political aspirations add the presence of occupying Roman legions in their holy city and you begin to get a sense of just how much emotional electricity would have been in the air. Had the time come for God to act decisively again for the people of Israel and deliver them from slavery? I imagine that being in Jerusalem would have been a lot like the experience some folks get at the Vietnam War Memorial in DC, or at Ground Zero in NY, or standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or watching the sunrise over the Grand Canyon, or visiting the house you grew up in after many years, or returning to your ancestral home, or being DC for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, JFK’s or Barack Obama’s inauguration, or walking into church on your wedding day, or lighting candles on Christmas Eve or All Saints. But all rolled into one.
Into this bubbling pot of excitement and anticipation, aspiration and resentment, came Jesus. He had been walking down the Jordan River valley from Galilee for a few weeks, telling his disciples that he was going to Jerusalem where he would to be handed over by the religious authorities to the Romans and be killed. They did not want to hear it, tried to argue Jesus out of it, but he explained that this was inevitable. The authorities would not tolerate him. They could not tolerate him and he was going to force their hand and show what God could do.
Jesus stayed in the village of Bethphage, on the side of the Mount of Olives facing away from the city. Luke’s Gospel is quite clear that Jesus planned a demonstration for the Sunday before Passover. The events we remember as Palm Sunday were intentional and provocative. Jesus told the disciples where to go to get the donkey. He was very clearly trying to evoke the message of the prophet Zechariah who had proclaimed: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, you 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 ens of the earth” (Zech. 9:9-10). A message of peace for Jews dreaming of a warrior king to drive the Romans out, dreaming of a new Messiah like King David of old. I'm sure there were heads scratching in the crowd that day.
A planned demonstration, probably a pretty pathetic demonstration at that, at most a few hundred folks or so, maybe more, probably less, but hardly a major disturbance in the midst of the thousands of people swarming in and around Jerusalem. A country rabbi, riding on a donkey with a bunch of peasants singing Hosannas, waving branches, as Jesus passed through this massive 150 foot high wall, through the Beautiful gate and into the city, where he went into the Temple, warned the listeners about the path of violence and the coming destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem by the Romans, turned over tables by some accounts, and went back to the Mount of Olives.
“Hossana!” A word used in worship at the Temple meaning “please save” or “save now.” Where was the salvation in Jesus' message of salvation through peace from Zechariah? It's almost ludicrous, isn't it, this little bunch of pilgrims with their “King” on a donkey, riding into a city which probably didn't even notice. But then again, Jesus was just doing what Jewish prophets did. This kind of seemingly absurd street theater was standard operating procedure for Jewish prophets warning their people and their leaders. God's prophetic Word often seems ludicrous in the face of the political, social and economic realities of the world.
So there's Jesus making his point, and on the other side of town a very different demonstration was underway. On the other side of town, there was another procession, “an imperial one. On or about the same day, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, rode into the city from the opposite side, the west, at the head of …imperial cavalry and foot soldiers arriving to reinforce the garrison on the Temple Mount.” “ (The Roman governor and reinforcements) came each year at Passover …to Jerusalem from Caesarea Maritima, the city on the Mediterranean coast from which the Roman governor administered Judea and Samaria.” Their garrison, the Antonia (named after Marc Antony of Cleopatra fame), had 2 - 3,000 soldiers. It was placed directly next to the Temple with guard towers overlooking the Temple courtyards where the pilgrims would gather to pray. In the words of David Van Biema of Time magazine, “the Roman garrison...loomed over the Temple courtyards like a watchtower over a prison.” They came to keep a lid on the Passover aspirations of those Jewish pilgrims. They wanted to keep the whole liberation a spiritual one, to keep the flock from becoming a mobv.
Coming through the east gate, a bunch of peasants, their “King” on a donkey, waving palm branches and crying “Save us! Hosanna!” Coming through the west gate, weapons, helmets, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. The pounding of horse hooves, the clinking of bridles, the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the beating of drums, the swirling of dust.” And silence from the onlookers, some awed, some resentful. No Hossanas here!
Jesus staged the whole thing to embody the central conflict of his last week in the juxtaposition of these two contrasting processions: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of imperial domination. The choice was there for the people of Jerusalem to see. A choice of two kingdoms. A choice between two visions of life on earth. One side looking silly and weak. The other’s power speaking for itself. A choice between peace and shalom or domination and oppression. Choices involve decisions and anything but a “Yes” that translates into action for God’s kingdom amounts to a “No,” because those imperials processions and the kingdoms they maintain just keep right on rolling, unopposed. I think that’s why we want our kids to do the marching for us. But this is not kid’s stuff, is it?