Palm/Passion Sunday
March 29, 2015
Mark 11:1-11; 15:1-39
Crowds. Sometimes
we like them, like being part of the crowd at Camden Yards when the Orioles
have just scored the game-winning run! There
are times crowds are great things. There
is safety in numbers. Crowdfunding has
caught on on the Internet. My husband
and I even donated to the re-launch of Reading Rainbow, one of the most
successful Kickstarter campaigns ever.
Many of my colleagues use crowdsourcing on social media to gain ideas
for sermons. And who doesn’t like a good
surprise flash mob? I actually joined one
at Annual Conference last year in North Carolina. A friend of mine from seminary had gained the
bishop’s permission to ask for a moment of personal privilege during a business
session, if you can believe it, and that was the cue for the rest of us to make
our way to the front of the room to sing “Our God” by Chris Tomlin. It’s the one that goes, “Our God is greater,
our God is stronger, God you are higher than any other.” And by the end of the song, almost everyone
there was standing and joining us in singing.
It can be a lot of fun to be a part of a crowd. Other times, though, we’d rather avoid them,
like the malls in December. Being on the
outside of the in-crowd is lonely.
Hanging out with the wrong crowd can be problematic. Being part of a crowd gives you anonymity and
can make it harder to take personal responsibility for your actions. There’s a saying about how persons are smart,
but people, as a collective, can be dumb.
Following the crowd can result in doing something you wouldn’t normally
choose to do. In today’s Gospel readings
we have quite a few different crowds and we’re going to imagine ourselves as part
of each one.
First, there’s the
crowd in the Palm Sunday Gospel where Jesus enters Jerusalem riding on a donkey. This crowd is pretty easy to imagine
ourselves joining, especially since we just reenacted part of it! This is a fun crowd, with everyone happy and
cheering and yelling “Hosanna!” and waving palm branches. Everyone loves a celebration and this is a
celebration. “Hosanna” traditionally
means “save now” and so these are shouts of joy welcoming Jesus, the Savior,
the One who comes in the name of the Lord.
This is hailed as a “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem and in all the
excitement of this crowd, we often miss the subversive details. Jesus is on a donkey, for one. Who sees a donkey in a parade? Usually it’s big, noble steeds, or at least a
horse, for crying out loud. Second, Jesus’ entry mirrors Pilate’s entry
into Jerusalem just a couple days before, and that would have been a grand
entrance; it’s a big deal when the Governor comes to town. The local leaders would have been out to welcome
him with flowery speeches. Roman
soldiers would have accompanied Pilate.
And here we have Jesus, on a donkey.
But there’s such a good feeling in the air, it’s easy to put ourselves
in this crowd. After all, where else
would we be, but waving our own palm branches and shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of
the Lord!”
That’s why being in the next crowd is a little bit
harder. It doesn’t have that happy,
upbeat feeling. This one is a mob that’s
ready to riot if it doesn’t get its way.
This is the crowd that has
gathered at dawn at the Governor’s mansion, the courtyard of the palace, to see
what Pilate will do with Jesus. It
is daybreak of the day before the Passover festival and the previous 12 hours
have been busy. If there had been 24
hour news coverage, we would have been glued to our TVs, or turned it on first
thing to see what had developed overnight.
The chief priests and scribes had been looking for a way to quietly
arrest Jesus, so that there’s no uproar about it, at least not until it’s too
late. Ideally, they want to have Jesus
killed, and they want to have it done before the holidays. So, the chief priests and scribes manage to
arrest Jesus at night, in the dark, and they hand him over to Pilate, since
he’s the one with the legal authority to do something. Jesus’ chief offense is blasphemy, which is
not punishable by death under Roman law.
But any threat to the Roman Empire is, which is why it’s emphasized that
Jesus called himself the “King of the Jews.”
There can be no king but Caesar, so that is a serious offense. And by dawn, there is a crowd at Pilate’s
house. There is no TV or internet to
find out the latest news, you heard it word of mouth or you went to see for
yourself what was going on. There is a
crowd that has shown up to see for themselves what’s going to happen. Now, it was Pilate’s custom to release a
prisoner at the holidays and he wants to let Jesus go. After all, Jesus hasn’t really done anything
wrong; this charge of being “king of the Jews” doesn’t really stick. So Pilate offers to let him go. But the chief priests and scribes have
stirred up the crowd; see, now it’s favorable to them to have a riot, because
the crowd isn’t upset with them. I did a little research and it takes only
approximately 6% of a crowd to change the entire direction of the crowd.[1] So, if you put yourself in this crowd, which
initially started out as curiosity, wondering what’s going to happen, now this
crowd is getting restless, and the general direction of it has changed. Instead of wondering what’s going to happen
to Jesus, we don’t want him released.
Someone whispers the name “Barabbas,” and that becomes the prisoner we
want Pilate to let free. Barabbas, who, if we were thinking
straight, we’d remember is a criminal, a guy who hung out with murderers, a guy
who himself is in jail for being an insurrectionist, someone who has revolted
against the authorities. We want him released, not Jesus. It seems like a case of “better the devil you
know than the devil you don’t know,” although you’d think that some of this
crowd knew Jesus. I guess they got
carried away with the crowd.
So, then Pilate asks the crowd, not that he needs their
permission, but he’s trying to calm down the anxiety and the general mood, he
asks the crowd what he should do with Jesus.
And it is the crowd’s idea to crucify him. This is the same crowd that welcomed Jesus to
their city just a few days before. Now,
we want him dead, and not just executed, but crucified. We’re comfortable enough saying that it was
our sins that nailed Jesus to the cross, but it’s hard saying we’re part of the
crowd shouting, “Crucify him!” It is not
easy to imagine ourselves part of this crowd.
Part of a mob borderline rioting?
Not us. Part of those who know
Jesus but deny him now? We say with
Peter, “Surely not I, Lord!” We don’t
want to imagine ourselves here, and yet why not? Where else would we be? Everyone
deserted Jesus, and that would include us, too.
The Palm Sunday crowd is easy.
The Good Friday crowd is hard.
Surely, if we were part of this crowd, we wouldn’t join in the
shouting. Surely, if we knew Jesus
personally, we wouldn’t go along with the crowd. And yet, everyone does. Even Pilate has Jesus whipped and ordered
crucified in order to appease the crowd.
The crowd has gotten out of hand, and the crowd got its way.
Finally, we find ourselves part of the third crowd in our
reading this morning, the people who see
Jesus hanging on the cross, those who physically witness the crucifixion. Jesus has been beaten so badly that some
people die from being scourged. He was
too weak to even carry his own cross to Golgotha. They hung him up on the cross and it was six hours before he died. Most legal execution scenes today are pretty
somber. They’re in sterile environments
and doctors and lawyers are present to make sure it goes right. Others who are present usually are
respectful, but not those who witness Jesus’ crucifixion. Mark says the people walking by insulted
him. The chief priests and scribes made
fun of him. Even those who were
crucified with Jesus insulted him. Talk
about adding insult to injury or pouring salt in the wound. We haven’t just gone from a celebratory
welcome to an almost-riot, now that we’ve gotten our way, we’re still stomping
on him while he’s down. I have trouble
imagining myself as seeing anyone
hanging on a cross, much less Jesus, and making fun of them. I think it’d be too bloody and too painful
that I want to think I’d have compassion on them, instead. And yet if I think of someone I really can’t
stand and put them up on the cross instead, well, I think that at my best, I’d keep
my mouth shut. Or maybe mutter under my
breath that he deserved it. Or maybe
that’s because my personality is quiet, anyway.
Perhaps if I weren’t a quiet person to start with, then I’d be louder,
and if the filter was off, then who knows
what I’d say. I’d probably yell and hurl
insults at him, too. This is another
crowd it’s hard to be part of, because we know it’s Jesus. We know better. And when it’s an abstract idea, just an
exercise of imagining ourselves there, our head still knows what the right
thing to do and say is. It’s a lot
harder when you’re actually faced with it, when it’s in person, when you hear
the shouts yourself, whether they’re shouts of “Hosanna!” or “Crucify
him!” If it’s a crowd you usually agree
with, it’s a lot harder to turn the other way and not go along with them when
they cross a line.
Holy Week is a week that starts off happy and great and
ends happy and great, but we’d rather avoid the middle part. We like being part of the crowd laying down
their cloaks and waving their palms and we like being part of the crowd that
gets to see the resurrected Jesus. But
being part of this crowd in the middle, man.
We don’t like to admit how fickle we can be. We don’t like to think that we’d be among
those ready to riot if Jesus didn’t get crucified. And yet, where else would we be? We may not always be those who follow the
crowd, but in this drama, there is nowhere else to stand. “Were you there, when they crucified my Lord”? The answer is yes.
The
good news, though, is that the crucifixion is not the end. The good news is that the crowd at the cross
is not the last crowd we are part of.
We’ll move this week through Holy Week, and come back next Sunday to
celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, his defeat over death. Because, ultimately, the last crowd we will
be part of is the crowd in heaven. The
last crowd we’ll join is the one who has eternal life thanks to Jesus’ death
and resurrection. With God’s kingdom fully
come, singing praises in heaven throughout eternity, inside the pearly gates, where
there’s no more hunger or sadness, or however it is that you imagine heaven, that’s the last crowd. And ultimately, that’s the one that matters
most. Our final hymn goes through from
creation’s beginning to its completion, the first day back in Genesis 1:1, to
what is called the eighth day, the new creation, creation completed and
made right, a world without sin and riots and jeers. That’s the end game. That’s the end of the story. That’s the last crowd, and the most important crowd, we’ll be part of.
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