Palm Sunday
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 11:1-11

Well, now I think I’ve heard everything. There is an internet company called “Information Age Prayers” and its pitch is “Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.” Going to the website, I see that there are subscription options for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Unaffiliated and other. While all the prayers are voiced in English, for the Jewish prayers the computer speakers are turned toward Jerusalem, and for the Muslim prayers they are turned toward Mecca. You can start with a basic subscription to have the Lord’s Prayer said daily for just $3.95 a month (discounted from the usual $6 a month) or you can get a special bundle of the Lord’s Prayer, a morning prayer, 5 Get Well prayers (names may be supplied later) and a prayer for peace, all for only $19.95 monthly.

Amazing! How could we take seriously the idea that God would actually want to have a relationship with us by proxy? It would be like hiring someone to have an end-of-the-day conversation with your spouse, or paying another kid to tell your mom about your day at school. The essence of the relationship is personal involvement. And yet, for the second thousand years of Christianity, many of its adherents as well as its critics have believed that in Christianity, we are indeed having a relationship by proxy with God. Many people believe that this understanding is essential to Christianity, but as I’ve noted, it didn’t really emerge until Christianity was already 1,000 years old. It eventually became modern-day substitutionary atonement which claims that humans and God were forever unable to be in relationship because human sin created a separation from a just God. The only way to bridge that breach was by a sacrifice, and because Jesus is perfect, his sacrifice pays the price for our sins. There are a number of problems with this theory, and it continues to amaze me that so many people see it as an essential doctrine of Christianity. Let me state clearly – it is not. Christianity developed for its first thousand years without this theology. Let me quickly lay out three significant problems with this theology.

First, it states a false problem. God was in relationship with sinful human beings almost from the dawn of time, according to the Bible. In fact, many of the major players in the Old Testament made significant mistakes – yet God continued in relationship with them. Jacob cheated his brother, lied to his father, and later tricked his father-in-law. Moses murdered a man. King David, described as a “man after God’s own heart” had a man killed so that he could steal his wife. Isaiah, one of the greatest prophets, described himself as unclean. Yet God was in relationship with all of these, and many more, and is recorded by almost every prophet teaching that God is saying something like: I don’t want your sacrifices – I want an open heart. Just come back to me. So the idea that God is requiring a blood sacrifice before a relationship can happen is inconsistent with what the Bible reports.

Secondly, common sense should tell us that God doesn’t require a blood sacrifice for forgiveness. Do any of you require blood to be shed before you can forgive? Me neither, and it seems clear that as a starting point, God should be better than me.

Thirdly, Jesus continually stressed personal responsibility: go and do likewise, follow me, take up your cross and follow me. There is no instance that I can remember, and I’ve read all the gospels several times, when Jesus says, “Let me do this for you.” Parable after parable, teaching after teaching stresses the things that we ourselves should do in following God.

Now, I’d be misleading you if I didn’t acknowledge that there are some verses in the Bible that support the substitutionary view – but the Bible taken as a whole is about God’s love for and patience with people, and our need to make good decisions ourselves. While the Bible teaches that God always loves us, and always open to a relationship with us, it also is very strong on personal responsibility, and the importance of making faithful choices, choices that are often difficult. Taken as a whole, the Bible doesn’t suggest that all we have to do is accept what Jesus has done. Paul reminds us in his letter to the Philippians that Jesus was a model, not a substitute: we are supposed to do it too – follow Jesus so faithfully that we even begin to think like Jesus.

Unfortunately, the idea of substitutionary atonement has taken hold in popular religious imagination, and both Christians and their detractors tend to believe that this is of the essence of Christianity. I believe that this teaching is a huge part of why so many modern people have difficulties with Christianity. It certainly would be a block for me – if I honestly believed that God required a blood sacrifice in order to have a relationship with people, I’d be preaching that such a god should be resisted rather than followed. Unfortunately, you will find many really beautiful hymns with this really bad theology, including many that we sing occasionally either because of their sentimental importance to folks or their beautiful music.

And we should remember that this theology developed during the 11th or 12th century – many years after Celtic Christianity, for example, whose teachings are much more harmonious with the Biblical view: focusing on how we experience God in the natural world, and on the importance of the ethical choices we each make. Most of the stone Celtic high crosses that are found throughout the British Isles date from the 9th and 10th centuries. Some believe that the reason for the circle around the Celtic Cross is to remind us of the sun which was worshipped by early Celts, so we see that reminder of the unity between Christian faith and reverence for nature.

But moving on, if Jesus didn’t die in our place, what was he doing going into Jerusalem on the day we commemorate today as Palm Sunday?

A book on the last week of Jesus, called appropriately, The Last Week, by scholars Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan tells us that there were actually two processions in Jerusalem on that day: the procession welcoming Jesus, and another procession, the one in which Pontius Pilate entered Jerusalem. Pilate tended to come to Jerusalem on Jewish holidays, so that the extra Roman military presence would discourage any Jewish impulses to rebellion in the crowds. To have Jesus enter the city in the palm-welcomed procession suggested to folks that the moment had come when the national glory of Israel would be restored. This is why there was such joy as the folks in Jerusalem welcomed Jesus. They saw him as a conquering hero who would drive out the intruders. What happened in the following days changed everything.

What you will see if you follow my suggestion to read the Gospel this week is that the very next thing that happens is that Jesus strides into the temple, the holiest place in Jerusalem, and instead drives out the people selling animals for sacrifices. Judaism at the time was still, largely a temple religion. And the Temple accounted for something like 85% of the economy of Jerusalem, an economy that exploited peoples’ hopes for a relationship with God by requiring them to buy animals to sacrifice.

In occupied Jerusalem, the temple represented not only Jewish religious identity, but also exploitive economics as well as complicity with the empire. For in Jerusalem, the high priests and temple authorities were the political, economic and religious elite. The Roman governor had the power to fire the high priest, but Caiaphas remained high priest during the entire ten years of Pilate’s reign, so it is safe to believe that they must have worked together cooperatively. Borg and Crossan point out that the high priests may have represented the people to God on the Day of Atonement, but they represented Rome to the people the rest of the year. So the actions of Jesus at the temple were not only challenging a certain kind of consumer-driven piety, but very clearly striking out at the link between temple and empire.

There were other factions in Jerusalem as well, including the Sadduccees, with whom Jesus had a confrontation on Tuesday of Holy Week. And there were other groups who supported the temple authorities – chiefly the scribes, a literate class who not only copied religious manuscripts, but produced legal documents as well. Jesus had an exchange with the scribes on Tuesday also. We tend to lump all these together as a single block of Jewish leadership, along with the Pharisees, who were not connected with the temple but who were trying to define how Jewish law impacted day-to-day life. Jewish life at the time was not monolithic – there were many groups vying for authority. Given the welcome that Jesus received on Sunday, and the actions he took on Monday and Tuesday, confronting the temple authorities, the Sadducees, and the scribes, it is easier to understand why some factions worked so energetically to turn the crowds against him during the week.

And what of his death on the cross – if it isn’t a necessary step in securing a relationship for us with God, what does it represent?

First of all, to people at the time, it represented a political death. Crucifixion was the way that the Roman Empire disposed of its enemies. So by executing Jesus in this way, the Roman government was showing that it understood Jesus to be a political threat. Many of us have been studying Mark’s Gospel from a political perspective since January, and will finish this morning. We have learned that many of the actions and teachings of Jesus had clearly political overtones that were obvious to folks at the time, but are easily missed by us. The palm branches were also a reminder of the way military victories were sometimes celebrated, and show us that people understood Jesus to be challenging the empire. It’s also a reminder that many of the people who greeted Jesus were rural peasants whom he had reached in his ministry at the margins of Judea, and all they had to greet him with were branches, offered in celebration.

But beyond the clear political message of his time, there is the reminder to us that as we understand Jesus to be the incarnation of God – God among us as one of us – we also learn in the crucifixion that God has cast his lot entirely in with us. He doesn’t come among us until it gets bad – there is no limit to his solidarity with us. And Jesus embraces and teaches non-violence, which he faithfully follows without limits to his death. Far from being a symbol that relieves us of responsibility, the cross reminds us that discipleship is costly and can intersect with real life politically and economically when we are called to speak and act prophetically, working for justice and wholeness for all God’s children in the world.

The Palm Sunday procession was a procession of hope at the time – the people saw in Jesus someone who was speaking truth to power, and was caring about the poor, women, the sick – those at the margins of society. It turns out that Jesus wasn’t coming to do it for us, either with respect to God’s justice or justice in the world, but showing us how to live in making a difference for God. He wasn’t relieving us of responsibility; he was recruiting us and showing us that serving God can be costly.

It’s hard to be hopeful – so many things in our experience of the world and of ourselves make us cynical. We know that the world is often governed by what my colleague and friend, Stephen Wright, pastor at Wausau, called “the other golden rule: whoever has the gold, and the biggest military budget, makes the rules.” And we feel kind of powerless in the face of power.

But we also feel kind of powerless in the face of ourselves – we know that we often, in fact, repeatedly, make choices that are not what we intend, even when our desire is to be faithful. The Kol Nidre is the prayer that begins the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. During Communion, Jesse Nummelin and Barbara Wolfman will be playing it on cello and piano. The Kol Nidre is a wonderful reminder of the hope that we can make better choices – for it is a prayer asking for release from the vows we have made to ourselves. Throughout the centuries, unfortunately, this prayer fueled anti-Semitism, for ignorant people said that it proved Jewish people couldn’t keep promises and therefore couldn’t be trusted to enter contracts. But the Kol Nidre only applies to the promises we make ourselves – it has nothing to do with agreements between people. It acknowledges that we often promise ourselves that we will do or be differently, and that we often fail to keep those promises. It is a prayer that essentially asks forgiveness for the promises to ourselves that we will break in the coming year. And so it is fundamentally about hope, and the importance of hope, even in the reality that hope is often disappointed. It acknowledges that we make promises to ourselves, that we fail to keep those promises, and that we make new promises. It asks forgiveness in advance so that we don’t have to be saddled with guilt when we disappoint ourselves, because God expects us to start again.

The hope of Palm Sunday was soon disappointed when Jesus was executed, but is left for us to revive in our own choices, our own repeated efforts to live God’s way in the face of all the challenges in our world. The Celtic tradition that we have explored during Lent is one that embraces the world, and works for justice and unity in this world. And we won’t always live up to our own highest hopes for ourselves, but God calls us to begin in hope again, and so we do. Amen.