The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of Palm Sunday
25 March 2018
Readings:
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Mark 14:1-15:47
Psalm 31:9-16
From shouts of “Hosanna, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” to shouts of “Crucify Him!,” Palm Sunday is a fascinating, if not shocking study in the frailty of Human nature.
When we started out this morning, Jesus’ ecstatic followers were rallying behind him, lining the streets with cloaks and palms to shout out his praises – “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” They were ready to place Jesus on the throne in Jerusalem to begin the prophesied reign of Messiah. Then, like so many times before, Jesus did something unexpected. He allowed himself to be paraded up through the gates of the city, he looked around at the temple… and did nothing. He simply turned around, and went back out the city gates to stay in Bethany. No confrontations with Rome, no grand speeches or legions of angels, no lightening, not even a word was spoken. Christ simply arrived, gathered up the people’s expectations, and left them in a tidy bundle on his way back out the gate.
And here we switch to the alternate ending of Christ’s three-year campaign – the one that God knew full well when, as Christ, he was born into the world as a frail human child. The one that Jesus had tried at least four different times to explain to his disciples. The one where instead of reigning as king of this world on David’s throne in Jerusalem, he continues to teach about God’s reign and to demonstrate God’s indomitable love for all of creation. The one where the Messiah the people were expecting simply didn’t turn out to be the Messiah God was, in Christ.
Part of the messy part of being human is that when events and people don’t live up to our expectations, we get disappointed and upset. And suddenly shouts of “Hosanna” turn into betrayal by a beloved friend, denial by another, and to shouts of “Crucify Him!”
In this ending, the expectations of the disciples and Christ’s other faithful followers are exchanged for the agony of watching their teacher, healer, friend, and messiah be beaten, stripped, and nailed to a cross. In this version all their hopes die with Christ on Good Friday. Yet even in this messy, tragic, unexpected end, Jesus still surprises his onlookers (and us if we let him), and we find hope in the bleakest and blackest hour in the transformation of the centurion’s heart—“Truly this man was the son of God.”
We like to project Easter back on Good Friday—taking hope in Christ’s resurrection even while he is hanging there dying on the cross. It’s tidier. It makes humanity’s part in killing Jesus just a part of God’s plan.
As most of you know I disagree with this classic theory of atonement. I don’t believe that God came into this world simply so that he could be killed in order to counter Adam and Eve’s original sin so that God could finally forgive us. It seems to me that it is simply not in God’s nature to not forgive us. The whole of the law and the prophets and the whole history of Israel demonstrates, if nothing else, that God is in this for the long haul. As we’ve heard in the stories throughout this Lent, we can turn back in the desert, complain, fall away from our faith, worship impotent golden statues, set up rulers and kings in God’s place, but at every turn of heart that draws us back to the knowledge and love of God, God is right there waiting with open arms for us.
Christ taught us that every one of God’s commandments could be fulfilled through the simple act of loving God and one another. That through true love for all of humankind, we would find ourselves incapable of the acts that destroy the spirit, trust, and love within us and others. He explained, through parable and example, the teachings of the prophets, pointing to God’s unconditional love for us. He worked tirelessly in ministry to lift up the poor and downtrodden, to draw in the outsider, to heal the socially and physically wounded. He sat down with the outcasts to demonstrate to us who is most in need of God’s healing and forgiveness, and he taught us that true healing of body and spirit startsbthe loving touch of personal physical contact.
This isn’t the behavior of a God that needed to kill a perfect human as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Rather it is the behavior of a God who will stop at nothing to teach us who we are meant to be—who will stop at nothing to help us claim our identity as God’s children and our inheritance as workers of God’s love and reconciliation.
Each year as we come to the foot of the cross, I am reminded that it isn’t God who needed for Christ to die, but that part of me and of all of us that cannot make the leap—from fear of inadequacy or scarcity or self-preservation or whatever it is that stands between us and God—to claiming our identity and our community strength as God’s children and Christ’s body.
God’s understanding of human nature was complete without needing to become human. I do believe that God learned from becoming Human, but it wasn’t an experience that I think taught God anything God didn’t already know about our nature. That said, I don’t believe that it was God’s plan that Christ should come into the world and be crucified, rather it was simply God’s knowledge that our response to God’s truth amongst us would be to nail it to a tree out of our own deep fear.
And out of the worst of human nature, out of our best efforts to kill God’s truth, out of our own need to destroy that incarnate love of God that so frightened us with the truth that God loves and values us, individually, beyond any human comprehension, out of the pain of human betrayal at one friend’s hand, and abandonment and outright denial by most of the rest, God creates a thing of such beauty and love that we have been talking about it and trying to become it for over two thousand years.
Like Judas’ betrayal, the crucifixion of Jesus was foreseen by the God of a people that so needed to know first hand what the kingdom of God looked like that it was worth it to God to come amongst us, even knowing what we would do to him. That kind of sacrificial love – the love that would save his whole world of closest friends by demonstrating God’s forgiveness to us with such reckless and careless abandon – is why Christ died for us. It was not so that God could forgive us, but so that we could finally be brought into the understanding and acceptance of a love and forgiveness so profound and unconditional that without God’s ultimate sacrifice, we just couldn’t have grasped it.
Who needed Christ to die on the cross? I did. All of it – his birth into the world, his life, his teachings, his love, his miracles, his willingness to face death in order to love us unconditionally and completely – All of it is for us. Even without knowing what lies ahead on Easter morning, there is profound hope and good news in the cross as it demonstrates to us just how far God is willing to go to finally get our attention, to join with the centurion at the foot of the cross, and, witnessing the death of our fears, to finally embrace the messiah that Christ truly is.
And so as we enter into Holy Week, I look to the cross with renewed awe. At our crucified expectations and fears, at our pride and contempt for God’s ultimate act of love hung up for all the world to see and shudder at, at our own hardness of heart pierced by nail and spear, at the messiah God truly was, sacrificed for a world that just couldn’t understand any other way. And suddenly I am the centurion—watching every expression on a dying man’s face as his tormentors taunt him with “Aha’s” and scorn, as with his final breath, he dies in prayer. And my heart of stone is transformed as I finally understand the sacrifice of a God who came into this world to teach us to love, even in the full knowledge that we would kill him for it. Alone and forsaken, breathing his last breath, the centurion witnessed the true death that took place that afternoon, and he was changed forever by a love and forgiveness so profound that it could only and truly have been God’s own.
As we witness again the events of this Holy Week, let us, with the Centurion, find our hearts surprised with renewed hope in God’s profound and unquenchable love for us.
Amen.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.