John 12:12-16
Palm Sunday 2012
I’m being cautious this
morning. Very cautious. I want to make extra sure everything that’s
happening in this worship service is pretty much going as planned and
expected. On any Sunday and on any day
of the week all sorts of variables can come into play and mix things up. It’s not that I’m usually caught too
off-guard by unplanned occurrences … it’s just that today I know to be even more
alert to anything seemingly out of place.
After all, today is, as I’m sure you realize, not only Palm Sunday but
it’s also … April Fools’ Day!
My
awareness of the need to be extra cautious today was raised higher this past
week when a fellow Trustee of Camp Johnsonburg told me about something he was
involved when he was younger at his home church. It was
a Sunday, it was a scheduled day for celebrating the sacrament of the Lord’s
Supper, and it was April 1st. Knowing
a fairly rare opportunity was at hand, he and a friend began thinking about how
leftover rolls from church dinners were kept in a freezer. Can you guess where this is going?
The
service started. The moment to
celebrate the sacrament arrived. The
pastor spoke words of institution, “On the night of his arrest, Jesus took the
bread and …” And as the pastor reached
down to pick up the soft loaf of bread he expected to be sitting there, he
instead took hold of a mostly frozen bit of baked dough. As my friend tells it, there was quite a curious
look on the pastor’s face as he struggled to break it! Afterwards, the boys fessed up and said,
“April Fools’!” Fortunately, the
pastor took this innocent enough church prank lightly, told them they’d gotten
him good, and the story became one they all have shared in the years
since.
Whether
a person responds to an April Fools’ joke – and any prank on any day – in a
positive or negative way is certainly determined in part by their
personality. For example, despite all
my punning around and love of being a goofball a lot of the time, it mostly all
gets set aside when it comes to being in worship and my solemn respect for sacramental
ritual. So I may well have been unable
to take a chilled chunk of holy host very lightly!
I
believe what this sort of fun, foolish business most comes down to in the end
is how well each of our personalities can tolerate tweaks to our expectations. As we enter into all our life experiences,
we bring with us culturally conditioned expectations. These come about as the result of our sense
of self and the influence of our families, our social circles and the general
culture in which we live. So it’s
surprising or shocking when we see, hear and have things unfold
differently. And depending on the circumstance and the
degree of shock or surprise, we can find ourselves quite vulnerable to being
left feeling embarrassed, foolish.
The
way the Gospel of John bears witness to the very first Palm Sunday, it seems
one group of folks that historic day were left feeling a bit fooled. Expectations of Jesus were high amongst
many faithful Jews as Jesus entered the gates of Jerusalem to fulfill his holy
purpose on earth. These expectations
should have first and foremost been based on all the powerful teaching and
healing those following Him had heard and witnessed. But ironically enough, the ones who should
have understood this the most – Jesus’ disciples, his closest friends – were
apparently the folks whose expectations went bust. One particular decision He made revealed
something to them that was in high contrast to all the frenzied, faithful
fanfare of those moments. As the joyful, desperate cries of Hosanna were lifted up along with palm
branches, as this petitioning for salvation and heralding of Jesus as royal king
reached a tipping point, Jesus responded in a curious, seemingly foolish
way. He found and sat upon a small
donkey.
By
and large, the mass of Jewish faithful gathered there had not come to welcome
this holy man with the awe-inspiring, populist, revolutionary reputation,
entering the great sacred city settled on the simple back of a young, not very
highly esteemed creature. They had
different hopes, bolder expectations. Born from a long history of suffering
oppression after oppression as a people, they expected Jesus to be astride a
strong warhorse. They expected Him to
symbolically serve notice that a physical war with the occupying Roman Empire
was imminent. So what in heaven’s name was Jesus’ doing on
itty bitty donkey back? Was he pulling
some kind of holy prank?
What
kinds of expectations do you have of Jesus?
About His kind of power? Are they
ones that lead you to believe He will never disappoint, never be anyone or do
anything other than what you want, what you desperately need and possibly
demand him to be?
The
disciples should have known. They should
have immediately understood why Jesus found a little donkey to carry him toward
the coming crucifixion, to the awful climax of his holy incarnation. They’d been journeying, listening, learning directly
by his side. They’d been participating
in his peaceful, prayerful solidarity will all sorts of sin-suffering people –
be they Jew or non-Jew, social outcasts, synagogue leaders, or slaves of Roman
Centurions. They should have known
that this Nazarene was not about building up any epic human conflict. He arrived that day in Jerusalem for the
singular, sacred, soul purpose of building up eternal peace between God and all
God’s children. He arrived to inaugurate the definitive divine
way of resolving all conflicts humans have with each other and with the
Almighty. The final days of his worldly
walk were a bridge span to his humble self-sacrifice for the forgiveness of all
the wounding, unjust, intricate webs of sin.
By
choosing to ride atop the back of a humble beast of burden, Jesus was not
fooling but rather He was fulfilling.
He wasn’t trying to pull a fast one on the people, He was sending a
loud, clear, precise signal about who His true identity as the long-awaited
Messiah. It’s not like he had a
megaphone to speak this above the din of the massive, noisy gathering. So He let his actions speak louder than any
words as he quietly fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy from Zechariah 9:9 –“Rejoice
greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king
comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” This king of kings arrived for Holy Week as
the Prince of Peace.
Again,
though, even the disciples didn’t at first get that this was fulfillment
instead of fooling around. Scholar
William Barclay explains it was likely that they, like so many on that day, had
“minds full of mob hysteria” who “looked for the Messiah of their dreams and
their own wishful thinking” instead of the “Messiah whom God had sent.”[i]
Does
the Jesus you read about in the New Testament match up with the Messiah of your
dreams? How well do you understand and
accept the breadth of salvation from sin the Son of God was born to teach us
and to die for?
The
good news is that John does tell us the first disciples eventually came to
fully understand. But only after all
of their betrayals, the subsequent bloody business of Good Friday and the miraculous
Good News of Easter morning had occurred.
This
account is all consistent with a key characteristic of John’s Gospel. He boldly
wrote irony into his particular witness to Jesus’ life, death and
resurrection. And he did it to dramatically
communicate the “greatest irony of all … [that] the true king, the true
Messiah, the great human being and Son of God, is a collapsed figure on a
cross” whose “compassion and lowliness confront human image of power and
success.” Over and against worldly
notions of powerful rule and victory, John’s irony tells that the One whom God raised
from the dead was not a “splendid hero, a valiant warrior, but the lowly one
who seemed less suitable as the focus
of human hope and expectation.”[ii]
Effective
use of irony, like the effective use of an innocent April Fools’ Day joke, can make
for a very memorable community building story.
It can add much needed
perspective and help create positive, peaceful, redefining understandings. So this Holy Week, I urge you to take time
to significantly reflect on what your expectations of Jesus are. If you find any of them enticed by sinful
power plays or in any degree representing disregard for the lowliest, meekest
people in our families, our neighborhoods, our state, our country, and our
world … don’t be fooled! Be sure to
re-read the truth-defining irony in John 12 and join the journey of Jesus on
itty bitty donkey back. Amen.
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