Cedar Park United Church

A RomanticTableau?

Psalm 118
Matthew 21:1-11

When I returned to church after having left it in university, I found that understanding the cross and what it meant was a real struggle. Til then the only sermons I’d heard were about Jesus dying for my sins, and God showing love by sacrificing his son. Frankly, that did not make a lot of sense to me. In fact it turned me off big time. If you’ve been part of our Heart of Christianity courses or of the Saving Jesus course, you know that the Bible contains stories of the historical Jesus, the flesh and blood person who lived more than 2000 years ago. But it also contains interpretation of the Christ of faith; how the early church saw and spoke about Jesus.

Much of our ways of speaking and singing about the cross come through the lens of the Christ of faith, and over the centuries I would suggest some of that pretty distorted faith. Mel Gibson, with his famous movie, is just the latest manifestation. (If you get bored during the sermon you can look at the hymns beginning #135 and ask yourself what message about the cross the hymn writer is giving.) It was only as I was able to understand the crucifixion through the lens of the Jesus of history that it started to make sense for me and have real power. Increasingly, the church is reclaiming the Jesus of history; the Jesus who lived in the face of the Roman Empire.

That’s what I want to talk about today. I make no apologies for preaching a very similar sermon each Palm Sunday as I feel it is essential for modern Christians to understand the historical and political dimensions of the crucifixion so that we have it to lay along side our spiritual reflection, our identification with the spiritual power of death and resurrection.

There are so many questions. What on earth was Jesus doing as he entered Jerusalem? How did the One proclaimed today as “Blessed, the one who comes in the name of the Lord” later this week become victim of a trumped up charge and state execution?

Political execution to silence voices of dissent happens right into this century. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harvey Milk, Ghandi, Steve Biko, Tom Fox, Benazir Bhutto to name just a few. People, like Jesus, who believed in something enough to die for it.

On the surface, the story seems a romantic benign tableau. A nice man on a donkey, children waving palms- a festival! This picture ignores the political cauldron that Jerusalem was on that day. It ignores the clash of levels of governing, each with different agendas. It ignores the result; the murder of an innocent human being a few days later. As you hear the story, I invite you to make the connections with current rise of militarism and empire, with the erosion of civil liberties as a result of the War on Terror. There are many, many parallels.

Jesus knew that there were strong forces gathering against him. They had already killed John the Baptist, his mentor. There had been many itinerant rabbis who attracted attention by calling for throwing off the Roman yoke and proclaiming a new age of Jewish rule. John had been particularly dangerous as he had spoken of a Messiah who would come to lead them into a new age. Pilate was furious when John had escaped to the north, where he was finally arrested by Herod. Pilate felt cheated out of an opportunity to show Rome his firm grasp on the Jewish territories.

So when news of Jesus’, a new John-like preacher came to him, he was not going to let this one get away. Jesus was well aware of the political intrigue that dogged his footsteps. Spies from both Herod and Rome watched his actions. He knew the forces were out to get him. Yet he did not stop doing what he was doing. He was doing what he believed in.

He walked to Jerusalem with integrity, knowing how dangerous it was. In his willingness to die for what he believes in, there is something that transcends tragedy.” There is life; ongoing, indestructible life. And it multiplies in those left behind. They are inspirited with the same resilient courage.

Hear Martin Luther King’s words: “Even if they try to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they are worth dying for. And if a person has not found something to die for, that person isn’t fit to live!”Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered while saying mass by right-wing death squads in El Salvador said, “If I am killed, I will be resurrected in the people.”

None of us can ever exhaust the meaning of these holy week events. But we need to have some sense of the context in which all of this happens. Jerusalem, and Palestine as a whole was under Roman occupation. The Roman army was everywhere. They had learned the empire over that working through a puppet government, was the most effective way to govern, to avoid local unrest. Give the puppet government the illusion that they still had power, and they would use their own to do the dirty work. There were always puppets only too eager for the special privileges that came with the role, and the Romans got the job done. In Galilee Herod did the job on the political front. The Sanhedrin, the religious court handled matters religious.

But even within these levels of authority there were power struggles and rivalries. There was strong rivalry between Herod and Pilate. Rome was just itching to find a way to depose Herod and put the whole country directly under Rome rather than governing through the princes.

During this week Jesus falls between these rivalries and layers of government. The Roman governor Pilate, looking forward to retirement from this Godforsaken place with its barbaric ways, wanting to avoid bad reports of any unrest to the Emperor; Herod, unwilling to clash with Rome and the Sanhedrin to save an innocent life, and the Sanhedrin, portrayed in the gospel as still angry over the turning of the tables in the temple, anxious to keep its orthodoxy and its privileged relationship with Roman authority intact. All it took for an innocent man to die, was for people with power to be unwilling to stand up to injustice and violence, claiming that it had nothing to do with them. Sounds like the Mayer Arar case and many others coming to light these days. Or we have the example of Buddhist monks half a world away who rise in peaceful protest against domination in Burma, or more recently Tibet and are beaten and killed . It has nothing to do with us right?

Jerusalem was a tinderbox . It was Passover. Jews from all over the nation swelled the population of Jerusalem ten times to celebrate the liberation of their enslaved nation from Pharaoh. Anti-Roman sentiment ran high. Rome was labeled the new Pharaoh. Anything could happen.

Pilate, the Roman governor felt the tension of the huge rowdy crowds. He had to report back to Rome, and there many who would be only too eager to send back information to Rome to undermine him. Pilate knew he didn’t have enough troops to keep order if the city erupted. He’d round up some Jews to execute on crosses at all the entries to Jerusalem—something to give a clear message to the pilgrims exactly WHO was in charge… To add to the tension, word was out that some prophet from Galilee was arriving- a man named Jesus who gathered crowds of trouble makers wherever he went. Informers said he spoke of a kingdom. Just like that John who got away! There was only ONE kingdom. ROME. Could be dangerous! HE would make a good example.

Jesus’ death was not the first time there had been conflict between Pilate and the Galileans. Josephus, a contemporary historian tells of the crushing of a Galilean uprising in Jesus’ early days, in which over 2000 rebels were crucified. More recently, Pilate had launched a bloodbath in Jerusalem among Galilean pilgrims considered insurgents. To arouse suspicion in those days one had only to come from Galilee. Even Peter’s accent later in the week would suggest that he was an anarchist, one of the Galileans, engaged in subversive agitation. Racial profliling first-century style.

It’s hard to figure out what really happened that first Sunday of the Palms when Jesus came into the streets of Jerusalem. It seems to have been well prepared, almost street theater. It is hard to believe that a donkey came from nowhere. Some say the palms were symbolic of national independence used by the Maccabean dynasty. Some suggest that the more radical disciples, people like Judas, or the two brothers called the sons of thunder, wanted Jesus to BE the political leader to overthrow the Romans. They orchestrated a political demonstration as Jesus entered Jerusalem spreading the word that if people gathered and welcomed him as king, they might be able to force his hand- force him to take leadership of this kingdom he kept talking about. Some suggest that Rome staged a military entry at another gate; a show of force to keep the peace and the Jesus parade was in protest. Some suggest that the Palm parade never happened in this way at all, but was added in by the early church to show Jesus fulfilling prophecy.

I’d love to know what was on Jesus’ agenda as he came to Jerusalem that day. In Matthew, Jesus goes directly to the temple and angrily throws over the tables of the money changers occupying the court for gentiles for prayer.This court was a huge romanization project around the sacred temple…football fields of glittering court designed to show the glory of Rome. This certainly begins to sound like political demonstration by symbolic act, a common practice in the ancient Prophets. He then teaches in the temple and his teachings are disturbing for those in authority. (I encourage you to read the whole story of Holy Week in Matthew through this lens)

To see the events of this holy week as Jesus going through preordained motions, like a puppet, to pay a blood price for the sins of the world, for me, trivializes and misses the point of the cross. The early church spoke of Jesus going to Jerusalem to be crucified, and a theology steeped in sacrificial imagery tried to make sense of what happened through that imagery and language. While I understand historically why this sacrificial understanding of Good Friday happened, to take it literally in these days, to me makes no sense. What does it say about God to suggest that God would send God’s beloved to pay a blood price for sinful humanity? Is that a God you would want to be intimate with? Does this sound like the God Jesus knew in his ministry? or the God you know from your own experience? The early church, critical of the aristocratic priesthood of the temple, were more likely saying that Jesus put an end to sacrifice..You don’t need the temple…Follow Jesus.

A long familiarity with historical Christianity has numbed our imagination; we hardly perceive anymore the full horror and scandal that lie at the very heart of this week, and of the execution to which it leads. The cross was the worst form of execution for the lowest in Roman society. It was a social faux pas to mention crosses or crucifixion in the presence of women and children of high social standing. It took many centuries for the early church to depict Jesus on a cross.

Ched Myers in his commentary called Binding the Strong Man, states that the cross is not just one among many ways of dying. The cross is uniquely related to political domination. “The threat to punish by death is the bottom line of the power of the state; fear of this threat keeps the dominant order intact. When one was condemned by the Roman state, the condemned literally had to “take up his cross” and carry it to the public place where he was to be crucified. It was part of the humiliation process, the mechanism of social control for which crucifixion was invented.

The early Christians in proclaiming a crucified Christ, were boldly standing up against oppression, refusing to be controlled by fear and even the instruments of torture used to create that fear. Seen this way to take up the cross is resistant refusal to allow the fear of the power of death to control your actions.

Modern theologians wonder about the way the gospel writers have presented the crucifixion story. Modern scholars suggesting that the blaming of the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus was actually an attempt by the early church to shift the burden of responsibility away from the Romans. The gospels are written against the backdrop of the Jewish war and the destruction of the temple, in 70 A,D. when the Jewish resistance movement was squashed. Until then followers of Jesus had coexisted peacefully in a tolerant Judaism, as just one more radical sect. But tensions began to arise…Judaism under threat became less tolerant of fringe groups…more needing to consolidate…At the same time Christians, trying to spread Christianity through the Roman Empire found it dangerous to proclaim a Messiah who had been executed by the Roman authorities as a Jewish anti-Roman political offender. From both sides the split between Judaism and Christianity happened and the gospels were written in this time of angry tension. The blame for Jesus’ death was shifted to “the Jews”-a political decision that has resulted in some of the most heinous crimes of our millenium-and to the lie of the Jews as Christ-killers- a lie that would last all the way to Auschwitz.

Many scholars believe that there could never have been the trial before the Sanhedrin that the gospel writers speak of since it would have been impossible during the Passover Holy Days. The Trial before Pilate certainly did take place however, and Pilate was well known as a blood thirsty executioner of Galilean insurgents-using his favorite instrument of torture-crucifixion. Yet the gospel writers go to great lengths to suggest that the blame falls on Judas, the namesake for the Jewish nation, and that Pilate, the good Roman governor saw Jesus’ innocence, and begged the Jewish crowd to release him, not once but three times. Who could believe that a bloodthirsty Roman governor would pay one bit of attention to what the crowds thought?

We who are Christians need to reflect more about this key event in the history of our tradition. We need to understand the political dimensions of it, and the radical act it was for his early followers to spread the message of a crucified Christ. We need to atone for the devastation that our interpretations of this story have wrought in history. We need to reclaim Jesus as the Jewish teacher he was—steeped in that tradition—desiring to reform and renew Judaism-particularly the prophetic part of that tradition. We need to reclaim our Christian roots as the radical movement of the Spirit of God that it originally was, before it became co-opted by the Roman system and turned into a state religion. In doing this we could just free ourselves to work for a world where other innocent people will not continue to be crucified, caught between the layers of government-each level washing their hands, abdicating responsibility, passing it on down the line, thinking if they get rid of the costly problem it will go away.