Note: At the beginning of the service, it was announced that Georgina B, one of the worshippers, had just that week been named “Citizen of the Year” by the local municipal Chamber of Commerce, in recognition of a lifetime, really, of dedicated volunteer and public service for the community on many levels. The occasion is noted in, and has relevance for the sermon.
Scripture Reading: Mathew 21:1-17
The reading is Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ celebrated entry to Jerusalem.
Throughout Galilee, Jesus has become known for gathering people of all kinds into healing and loving community – rich and poor, young and old, men and women, pious people and notorious sinners. He brings them all together to sit freely and equally at one table. When he enters Jerusalem, and especially the Temple, he enters a different world and encounters a different kind of religion.
In the Temple, people are segregated and divided into insiders and outsiders according to gender, status, nationality, and moral respectability. Also, what people are allowed to offer as a sacrifice to God in the Temple is also tightly regulated. The Temple has its own in-house currency, which people must use when they are there, to buy an animal to offer as a sacrifice. People from a distance – like Galilee, have to exchange their money for Temple currency – usually at a terrible exchange rate. Then when they use that money to buy the animal they need as an offering, the price is also greatly inflated. They lose each step of the way, because it’s a system that cheats those who come from outside, and makes the Temple insiders rich.
As Jesus and the people with him approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”
…. The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,
“Hosanna to the Son of David!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred to ask, “Who is this?” The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”
Jesus entered the temple courts, and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”
The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did, and the children shouting in the temple courts, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant. “Do you hear what these children are saying?” they asked him. “Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read,
“‘From the lips of children and infants
you, Lord, have called forth your praise’?”
And he left them and went out of the city to Bethany, where he spent the night.
Reflection
Paul, when he was in prison, wrote this in a letter to the Christian community in Philippi: “Whether I live or I die is of no account to me; only that I honour Christ in my living and in my dying.”
I wonder if Jesus had a similar thought the night before his planned entry to the city of Jerusalem. Or the morning of it, as the plan was put into motion. “Whether I live or die from this is of no matter; only that I honour the Father, and the way of kingdom of God on Earth in what I do and what I am, whether living or dying.”
It was very likely that what Jesus was doing would lead to his death.
For three years in and around Galilee, in the way he lived out and brought to life the kingdom of God among the people – in his teaching, healing, feeding, forgiving, empowering, including, and gathering all kinds of people into new forms of compassionate and healing community, he was a thorn in the side of the co-operating powers of Jerusalem and Rome. He called into question their unjust systems, their programmatic oppression of the people, and their misrepresentation of God and God’s will. For three years he had been earning the mistrust and hostility of the religious and political leaders. But this – this procession into Jerusalem, was going to raise things to a new level.
It was Passover time, and Jews everywhere would be remembering their ancient liberation by God from Egyptian oppression. Each year, many came from the countryside to Jerusalem for the Passover rituals, hoping against dashed hopes of the past, that maybe this would be the year when God would repeat the ancient miracle, and set them free now from the oppression of the Romans.
Passions would run high. Prayers would be fervent. The scent of uprising and disorder would be in the air. So, before the Passover feasts would begin, Pilate the Roman governor, would send in extra troops for the duration of the festival. They would march in from the west, from Caesarea Maritima – a roman military town. They would come into the city through the main eastern gate with a show of military might, with war horses and columns of armed soldiers, with banners, flags and weaponry on display. All to quell and dampen the enthusiasm of any Jewish activists.
And it’s in this situation that Jesus plans and puts into motion a plan for his own parade into the city. A seditious street-theatre piece in which he enters the city from the other side – from the east, by the road down from the Mount of Olives – a back-door, servants-entrance kind of gate into the city. Not on a horse, but a donkey, with the donkey’s foal trailing along as his back-up ride if he needs one. Not with armed battalions but with ordinary people and children – mostly from out-of-town, hailing him as The Prophet, casting their garments on the road ahead of him as he rides into the city of God. Going all the way to, and then into the Temple. And once there, breaking down and casting to one side every barrier put up by the powerful and privileged elite against the poorest, the least and the outsiders being able to have access to God and an equal place in God’s family.
It’s a series of precise steps and particular actions that would have brought to the mind of any good Jew, the way the Psalms and the Prophets describe the coming of God’s messiah against the power of rulers and leaders who act in ways against the good will of God.
Not that Jesus wants to be king or leader of any kind of institution. He makes it clear that’s not in his job description as Son of God and messiah. But some of those around him are ready and waiting to make him king, and as Andrew Prior – a minister of the Uniting Church of Australia, puts it, even though “any Roman soldier watching this parade has no idea of the cultural referencing that’s going on…[they clearly see] the single raised middle digit” that the people are raising against them along his way.
Clearly, this is not going to end well for Jesus.
But that’s not his concern.
His concern is that the point be made about what’s wrong in the world, and what the true way is. That the way of God is affirmed. That the way of God’s kingdom is lived out, and the hope and experience of it as a living option in the affairs of the world be sown – be planted, like a seed.
That’s why, when the parade finally leads to the Temple, and he overturns the tables of the privileged and powerful gatekeepers, he is content to leave. He doesn't set up camp, gather his supporters, and try to take over. Tables overturned, God's Word proclaimed, he then goes go back to Bethany for the night. Job done.
That’s why, as the next few days unfolds, all he does each day in the Temple is to teach and to heal the blind and the lame -- to help ordinary people to see clearly and to move more freely, and beyond that leaves the powers of the day do with him as they will. Job done.
Because the point all along is not to take control, take over power, become a new boss, or force any changes by whatever might he might have at his command. The point is more simply to bear witness to the truth of the situations and to the way of God’s love for all the world in it. The point is, by his own actions of living out the love of God for all that God loves, to sow that love like a seed into the life of the world.
So that even when – not if, but when he is dead and gone – something is left behind that has taken root in the lives of others, and grow up again. And again. A seed not wasted but sown – not kept safe in its package, but planted and spent for God and for good into the life of the world.
And isn’t that what we all are called to do and to be? To be sowers of the seed of God – and to be the seed ourselves, of God’s love, God’s good will, God’s desire for the well-being and flourishing of all, being sown into the life of the world? Isn’t this what Jesus means, when he says, “Come and follow me”?
Now, following Jesus doesn’t necessarily mean we die a tragic death – that we’re buried in the ground early on and unjustly.
Sometimes it means that. History shows a long list of martyrs for the way of God, including people in recent times like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Oscar Romero. But there are also all kinds of exceptional saints through the ages and into today like Francis of Assisi, Clarence Jordan, Dorothy Day, and Nelson Mandela who follow Jesus in radical, controversial ways, and still die of old age.
The critical thing is not the suffering and tragic dying, but the courage to believe in the kingdom of God at work in the world, and the commitment to act it out in our own lives no matter what – whether we live it out, or die for it.
It also doesn’t always mean becoming well-known and celebrated for it, either.
Sometimes it does, of course. Some saints – some of the world’s followers of the way of justice and love, like the ones I’ve mentioned, do become public celebrities. Known all over the world. And more locally – like Georgina, named Citizen of the Year for the way she has sown seed after seed of God’s love for all, and God’s desire for the well-being of all in to the life of the community.
That such folks are named and recognized does not mean they’re better, different, or more naturally saintly than others – the rest of us. (Sorry, Georgina!) Rather, the award is a marker and a celebration of a certain level of constancy and success they have achieved in their own very-human struggle and journey to be faithful to what they know of God and God’s way.
Which means the award is also an encouragement to the rest of us who know the recipient, to know that if they, as human and fallible as they are (sorry again, Georgina!) – if they can be faithful to the best they know of God, and God’s love for the world and for others around them, and God’s desire for justice and the well-being of all in the opportunities open to them, so surely, by the grace of God, can we be in the opportunities given to us.
Because how many other people were there in that Palm Sunday celebration, who were critical to Jesus and necessary to God to make that procession what it was? To make it a procession of the kingdom of God into the life of the world?
How many people – unnamed, unrecognized, ordinary people, did it take – giving praise to God for the gift of Jesus and the revelation of the kingdom; laying down the garments of their lives at his feet; and with all they were and all they could do, creating a pathway for him to come – a pathway of love and praise, a pathway of justice and peace, a pathway of God’s good will for the well-being of all? A pathway of Christ alive in the world, and of kingdom-come in the day-to-day life of the world.
Because isn’t the same seed planted in all of us – the seed of God’s love for us, for others, and for all creation?
Doesn’t it grow and bear fruit over time in all our lives regardless of where our life takes us – no matter whether it’s in the public eye, or more under the radar in day-by-day ordinariness?
Aren’t we all in our own situations given opportunities to lace the lives of others around us – like spiking a punch, with a taste of God’s love?
As we follow the way of Jesus, aren’t all our lives meant by God to be good seed sown into the life of the world, in both our living and our dying?
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