Re/trace: Mark 11:1-11
Palm Sunday
When Jesus and his followers approached Jerusalem,
they came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives. Jesus gave two
disciples a task, 2 saying to them, “Go into
the village over there. As soon as you enter it, you will find tied up there a
colt that no one has ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 3 If
anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘Its master needs it, and he
will send it back right away.’”
4 They went and found a
colt tied to a gate outside on the street, and they untied it. 5 Some
people standing around said to them, “What are you doing, untying the
colt?” 6 They told them just what Jesus said, and
they left them alone. 7 They brought the colt to
Jesus and threw their clothes upon it, and he sat on it. 8 Many
people spread out their clothes on the road while others spread branches cut
from the fields. 9 Those in front of him and those
following were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessings on the one who comes in the
name of the Lord! 10 Blessings on the coming
kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest!” 11 Jesus
entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. After he looked around at
everything, because it was already late in the evening, he returned to Bethany
with the Twelve. (CEB)
“Hosanna, hosanna in the
highest!” It’s Palm Sunday again,
church; how strange. Last year, I was
sitting in an armchair in a completely different part of the state, waving a
leftover palm from the year before that at my laptop screen in the
virtual parade we never expected to have.
It’s a bit strange to be in this sanctuary with all of you, I’ll be
honest, and to those of you watching along online, I hope you have something to
wave in honor of the day—if it’s your cloak, I do hope you have something on
underneath. But, y’know, optional.
“Hosanna,”
that word that never comes out except on this piece of the Christian year. We sing it, we shout it—well, no, we’re
mostly white Midwestern Methodists, so we politely say it in a louder-than-conversational
volume. But here’s the thing—hosanna isn’t
quite as celebratory as we might think. Peter
Woods explains that hosanna “originally comes from Psalm 118:25: ‘Save
us, we beseech you, O Lord! O Lord, we beseech you, give us success!’.
“By the time of Jesus this Psalm
verse had found its way into common parlance as a greeting and blessing. When
one looks into the Greek version of the Old Testament the Septuagint, the word
for Hosanna in Ps 118:25 is translated σῶσον δή (soson dei) which, if you don’t
have Greek, means ‘save us’... At face value it would seem that the Jerusalem
fan parade is glorifying God’s name but they are not really. They are simply
demanding their own liberation. ‘Save us now!’”[1]
It’s a
discomfortingly short leap to imagine that we really mean it when we say in our
louder-than-conversational volumes, “Hosanna.”
Here in the United States, it’s officially been a year of the pandemic
and we’re tired; because we’re tired, many people have decided that we are
going back to “normal”—whatever normal was, anyway. And with a return to “normal,” alongside
rising COVID numbers, has come a return to regular mass shootings.
Hosanna, save
us.
The
Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012 forms the basis of the
definition that a mass shooting is when three or more people are shot—not
necessarily killed—in a public place, not including the shooter or shooters
themselves.[2] There have been eleven mass shootings in the
last week.[3] From them, 18 people are dead. Forty-seven people are injured.
Hosanna, save
us.
“All forms of
violence are detestable, but guns make violence more deadly and more frequent,”
says the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society. The United Methodist Church urges
“congregations to advocate at the local and national level for laws that
prevent or reduce gun violence,” including universal background checks, establishing
a minimum buying age of 21, banning large capacity ammunition magazines, and
ensuring all guns are sold through licensed gun retailers.[4] Hosanna, may we do some of the work to
save ourselves.
I say all of
this partly because it needs to be said, since every time we have a shooting
that makes the news we get caught up in weird conversations about the original
writing of the Constitution rather than an acknowledgment that every other
country that takes gun regulation seriously has nowhere near the amount of
violence we have. The poet Brian Bilston
has an entire poem titled “America Is a Gun,” positing that it has become the
emblem of the nation in the same way that tea is for England or a kangaroo for
Australia. But I also say this because
it is so important, on this Palm Sunday, that we say “hosanna” only if we know
what we’re asking for, if we really mean that we want God to save us, if we
have any idea what we want to be saved from.
Here at the
end of Lent as we pick up the quick and heavy journey of Holy Week that leads
through Maundy Thursday to Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and the grand
celebration of Easter, we come to a new word in the “re” series: retrace.
The main definition of “retrace” is “to go back over the route one has
just taken.”[5] The crowd in Jerusalem as Jesus takes the
slightly-stolen donkey over the branches cut from the field, the crowd
shouting, “Hosanna! Blessings on the
coming of our ancestor David!” is looking to retrace their lineage, their
power, their hope. They are a conquered
people under the heel of an empire and here comes Jesus, enacting everything
that gives them hope of drastic and immediate change. Yes, bring back the kingdom of David, bring
back the time when we were a people to be respected, when we had a king who
spoke for us! Dean Ira Brent
Driggers writes, “It helps to recall that, for Mark, the very title ‘Christ’
denotes royalty. The Greek christos translates the Hebrew mashiach,
meaning ‘anointed one’ (thus making ‘Christ’ and ‘Messiah’ equivalent terms).
It is true that various kinds of Old Testament vocations entailed anointing;
not only kings, but also priests and occasionally prophets. Mark, however,
gravitates towards the royal connotation when referring to Jesus as the
Christ/Messiah. This is in keeping with one relatively popular Second Temple
Jewish hope, whereby God was expected to send an anointed king in the last days
to defeat God’s enemies and restore God’s people—even creation itself—to a
state of everlasting peace. It also
helps to recall the history of Jerusalem as a royal city. It was King David who
made Jerusalem the capital of his kingdom, and it was David’s son, King
Solomon, who built the first temple in Jerusalem. The Old Testament historical
books consistently remember Jerusalem as the ‘city of David,’ while certain
psalms explicitly connect Jerusalem, or Zion, with God’s king (Psalms 2:6;
48:2; 149:2). Among those Second Temple Jews who envisioned a royal Messiah, it
was not hard for them to envision the Messiah ruling from Jerusalem. In this
way, the end would recapitulate the beginning.
“No wonder, then, that by the time
Jesus arrives in Jerusalem for Passover (his first and only visit in Mark),
public opinion has turned decidedly messianic. Bystanders welcome Jesus into
the city not only with the standard pilgrimage refrain of Psalm 118:26 (‘Blessed
is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’) but with an explicitly
royal/Davidic elaboration: ‘Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor
David!’ (Mark 11:9-10). They also ceremoniously cover the ground in ways that
signal Jesus’ royal identity: with cloaks echoing the coronation of King Jehu
of Israel (2 Kings 9:13) and with branches echoing the conquering of Jerusalem
by Simon Maccabeus (1 Maccabees 13:51).”[6]
Hosanna, save us; restore us, reestablish
us, retrace the wandering paths that led us to be a people less than in this
Roman world. Aren’t we who are tired of
the pandemic, tired of having to learn new ways to do worship, glad to be back
in the sanctuary just as it was, ready to retrace our steps to the year before
the one we lost? Aren’t we ready to say hosanna,
Lord, restore us to the times we call “normal”?
I dearly hope not. Because if that’s what we want, if that’s
what we’re waving our palm branches for, if that’s what we hope Easter’s
resurrection will bring, we are going to be sorely disappointed. Jesus did not come to retrace the path of His
people—He came to build an entirely new one.
The people in Jerusalem called for the kingdom they knew but David’s
reign was far from perfect; we call for a return to normal but normal was
killing us, quite literally. This year’s
remembrance of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus will not be like it
was before the pandemic—it will be something new, as it is new every year
because God keeps moving and the Church has to keep up. Hosanna, save us not for a
glorious restoration but from our own desire to tell God how to operate
in this world.
Can we ask that, we with our palms or
our hands or our t-shirts or whatever it is that we can wave as the Christ
comes to our Jerusalem, to our festival that we repeat every year with such
longing in our hearts for the God Who calls us to the practice? Can we truly say with our souls as much as
our mouths save us, Blessed One Who comes in the name of the Lord, hosanna
in the highest? Or are we, like the
crowd who laid their cloaks down in hopes of a king, wanting Jesus on His colt
to come and be the descendant of David we think we understand Who will give us what
we assume that we need?
Andrew Prior writes, “It's hard to
know what happened when Jesus came to Jerusalem. I grew up imagining a
triumphant entry something like John Martin's Christmas Pageant, with crowds
lining the streets. It's most unlikely that ever happened. Security was on high
alert for the festival. He would have been arrested on the spot….Then I thought
maybe it was a political demonstration.
It was planned—he had a donkey lined up ready. And he came from
the Mount of Olives.
“The Mount of Olives was, in
Israel's Sacred Memory, the place from which an assault on Israel's
enemies was to begin (Zech 14: 2-4)…One might have expected, then, that Jesus
might storm the Temple and take it by force.”[7]
But He didn’t. Here in Mark, Jesus goes to the Temple, looks
around, and leaves for the day; this parade was never about violence or
usurpation. It was not a matter of force
or of power. It was Jesus announcing
that yes, He was the son of David, the One Who came in the name of the Lord—and
invoking that Name would set the stage for overturning every single expectation
of what salvation was going to look like.
Hosanna, save us.
Prior closes his Palm Sunday
meditation with the eerie sense of waiting and the dark turn that all Palm
Sundays must have. We cannot, we must
not skip straight from Palm Sunday to Easter, from one raucous celebration to
another, or both will be empty confectioner’s icing with no substance. We must take the time of this week called
holy to sit with the doubt, the fear, the grief, the reality that this faith is
founded on a resurrection made miraculous because it follows the absolute
anguish of death. So I, like Prior,
close with this prayer, recognizing that it is at least as dangerous an ask of
God as hosanna. Save me.
“Jesus rain on my parade.
Water my world weariness, and
wash off my anxiety.
Dampen my thoughtless enthusiasms;
drown my proud pieties;
make a river between me
and worldly success.
Jesus rain heavy on my parade
so I may rest
in the safety of deep waters.
Disturb the pool to which I have been
sent
so old hurts may heal, and
weariness be lifted.
Jesus reign in my parade—
Let there be no drought.
May the stream rise from the earth
and the sky open at the rainbow
even as clouds come over
the whole land.
Jesus rain on my parade.” Amen.
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