JESUS THE TROUBLER John M. Buchanan
Zechariah 9:9-10 March 26, 1972
Matthew Z21:1-14

George Bernard Shaw once noted that “humanity crucities its best men and
glorifies its worst’. Consider, for instance, the list of names and dates.
Robert Kennedy, June 12, 1968: Martin Luther King, April 4, 1968: John Kennedy,
November 22, 1963. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis, April 9, 1945,
Mahatma Ghandi, shot, January 30, 1948: Edith Cavell, English nurse, shot by the
German government, whose last words were, ‘Patriotism fs not enough", October 15,
1915.

Go back a century. Abraham Lincoln, April 15, 1865. Go back several cen-
turies. Savonarola, hung and burned at the stake in Florence, May 21, 1498.
Joan of Arc, May 30, 1431. And sometime in the year 399 BC a man by the name of
Socrates was tried, convicted and made to drink poison for being a corrupter of
youth.

Some were executed by governments acting officially. Some were assisinate

‘sna individuals for reasons they alone knew, But the reason for their demise,

vuatever ifs form and particularity, was that they were ~ one and all ~ trouble
makers, precipitators of crisis, people of courage and conviction who never learned
the all important lesson of "teaving well enough alone”.

People have never liked to be disturbed. People have never Iiked the In-

‘Jcat wha takes it on himself to point to the obvious discrepency between pubfic

affirmation and private behavior. Consider today the general disdain directed
toward fhe American Civil Liberties Union, that body that keeps insisting that the
Bill of Rights Is, in fact, a reality. Consider the hatred directed toward the
early leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. For many people it was - and still is-
enough to say ~ "they are trouble makers, agitators.’ And the trouble they made
was simply to confront th- whole American peopie with the vast and sinful discrep~
ency between the Constitution and actual public behavior. Consider Ralph Nader,
contemporary trouble maker. Or more modestly, consider the cost to a private
citizen today ~ to you or me ~ If we ask troublesome questions in the halls of

government, in the schools, in the P.T.A., 1 made a telephone cali one time to a

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school official to ask what 1 thought was a routine question, and make what }
thought was a reasonable suggestion. But att | made was an enemy for life and a

(*9tion as a trouble maker. Try sometime, as } have, to ask that most logic!
question - “Why does the P.T.A. exist? And what creative contribution to the
educational process of your chifdren can you make besides selling chocotate bars
to buy basketball uniforms for the B Team?” | can quarantee the rosuit: people wil]
regard yarwith grcat suspicion, and you will never be asked to be an officer.

People in the past, have not Jiked, and today do not like a trouble maker.

If the trouble you make is loud enough and serious enough you will be crucified,
in one way or another. That's what happened on this day, |,972 years ago, when
Jesus rode into Jerusalem.

But the Church - because it, as much as anyone else, doesn't like a trouble
maker - notorously observes this day In the wrong manner. William Stringfellow
observes that , "The disciples of Jesus Christ today keep returning to Palm Sunday,
posessed with nostalgia for the parade." Let us be clear at the outset. [+t was
no day of triumph. Easter is the victory. Palm Sunday Is the day on which
Jesus made trouble, the day which reveals him as a trouble maker, the event which

“-efously still makes us most uncomfortable. During this Lenten season
we have been focussing on the person of Jesus: Jeasus the Man, the Teacher, the
Compassionate, the Savior. The portrait if incomplete until we think about
Jesus the Troubler.

So, jet us look again at what really happened on this day. Let's forget
about al! these Sunday Schoo! pictures of well scrubbed chifdren laying their
branches in his path: let's get away from tho ‘King fer a Day" mentality - not
because It wasn't like that - but in order to see the dynamics of what was
happening. Let's try to keep In mind that whatever else Patm Sunday means, it
was the prelude to Crucifixion: it was the event that made his death Inevitable.

The city was filled with tourists and pilgrims . Jt was Passover week, and
the ancient historian Josephus estimated that 2.7 mildion people came to the city

for the ralehration. The city was also filled with passion and patriotism.

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Passover, you will recall, celebrates the |iberation of the Jews from Egyptian
Slavery. (t was thus a very threatening kind of event for the Romans who were
enforcing their own brand of political oppression at that moment in time.

Jesus could have come into the city anonimously, observed the Passover
rituals at the Tempic, said his prayers quietly, and gone teck to Galilea.

No one would have noticed ~ and obviously there would hae been no crucifixion
five days lafer. Instead he chose to be as obvious as possible, deliberately to
make the kind of trouble peopie don't like.

He chose to ride into the city on the back of an ass - a curious decision
in that no where else in the entire Gospel! narrative do we read about him riding
anywhere, and in that Bethany - his departure point ~ was a mere mile and a half
away. He chose, we must assume, to act out everybody's favorite scripture passage:
Zecheriah 9:9, "Rejoice greatly, 0 daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, 0 daughter of
Jerusalem! Lo,your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and
riding on an ass..... "

We've made a caricature out of donkeys. But in the ancient East the ass was
the beast Kings rode when they came in poace. His choice of transportation was
as significant as Mr. Nixon's decision to travel to Peking in a 707 rather
than a B+52 Bomber.

Everyone knew the passage of scripture that far - toid the coming of the
Messiah, Everyone knew the significance of the beast he rede. More Important,
he knew that they would know.

The Predictable happened. The crowd recognized him: the rabble, the country
people who had secon him in Galiiea: the poor, the sick, the stnners, not the
urbane Jerusalemites. His friends recognized him, and recognized what he was
saying to Jerusalem and Rome, and sa they tore the shirts from their backs and the
very branches from the trees the same way that a football fan is compelled to
participate in victory by flinging a hat in the air or tearing down a goal post.

The wlessiah had come. Thc King had arrived to claim his Kingdom, They got

the message - at lvast that part of it. So, of course, did the Temple priests

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and Roman politicians who were getting a little nervous.

But then he did a very Strange thing. He went to the Fompic, with this
yelling mob behind him. And there he turned over the tables of the mpnoy changers
and drove out the salesmen and profitcers, and then sat down to receive the sick and
poor and jame. And the crowd evaporated just like that. He had made a claim

vr SPae, bub wien iin specifies of that Kingship became clear, the parade stopped.
And he was left alone with the pecpte he fareatoned most severely - the pricsts
and politicians.

Jesus made trouble, first by coning to the city, and not remaining in the
safety of Galilea. and second, by translating a vague idea about a Messiah into
@ man who was the friend af the sick and lonely and outcast. He precipitated a
crisis. He called into question th: religious and ethical status quo: he threw
down the gauntlet In front of the power structure - and in front of overy tndividual
presont. Hc made so much trouble that most abandoned him mmediately, and the
rest began to plan for his execution.

Jesus is like that. He orecipitates a crisis wherever he goes, and whenever
he is taken seriously. And the response to him remains the same. People either
refuse to hear th. claim he makes - Just as the crowd on Paim Sunday saw in him
onty what they wanted to see: oar they abandon him when finally they do hear what
he is saying.

One of the biggest fights i've evur been in had to do with a Statnent of “isstion
! helped to write for th: Synod of Indiana several yoars ago.

Listen to some of the offending exerpts.

‘This statement affirms without equivocation the positive role of the Church
as an agent in conflict well as affirming the confessional stature of the Church
as an agent of reconciliation....

The role of the Church as an agent in conflict develops from the concept that
the church must move into conflict as an active participant. In many cases the
posture of the Church will be that of a mediator and interpreter of crisis in order

that conflict may be posithely resolved. Given tha world in which we live, it ts

mle.
also incumbent upon the church in some situations fo bu the precipitator of crisis
in order that the conflict may b& brought into The open with the hope and intention
that reconcilication will occur... The tragedy of the current situation in the
synced is that reconciliation is nover effected by chosing The status quo, preserving
the past or meerly ignoring conflict...

Well, that statcment was discussed and argued for four days: we who wrote jit
and defanded it were catlud communists, radicals and of course trouble makers.

And the whole point is that cven the Church dousn't reatly like what happencd on
Palm Sunday when wo are honest; nor does the Church really like this Jesus who
marches right into the city and turns over the tables in th. temple.

To know Jesus Christ, to see what he did, and hvar what he said, and feel
his claim on my fife is to be troubled. It's always teen that way. There is no
way to gut around it if we are honost. Paul oscherer tells the story of John Newton,
author of a number of beautiful hymns. Newton ran a slave ship, and it was his
custom “to read the Anglican jiturgy on deck at matins and evensonga, aiate! the mnans
and stench of a doomed humanity boiling up out of the hold. ' But then John Newton
heard and felt the real claim of Jesus Christ and the status qua became unbearable.
He sold his ship and became a priest and wrote his hymns and his own epitaph which
roads: ‘John Wewton, Clerk

Once an Infidel and Liberative

A servant of staves in Africa,

Was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
Preserved, Restored, Pardoned

and appointed to preach the Faith

He had Tong labored to destroy,

Jesus Christ is a trouble maker on the deepest personal tevel. He calls into
question everything we live by. He demands that w examine our status quo. He
comes marching into the center of our lives and if there are tables to be overs
turned, he overturns them.

Understandably, wo would rather not deal with that kind of Lord. #nd so,

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like those people who cheered his entry to tho city, we try to make Nim tate The
Lord we want. We want a savior, mild and gentle, en inoffensive Jesus who stays
on the periphery of our lives. Wo want a popular Jesus who will settle for tip
service and ask no more a Lord content with a weekly affirmation of faith and two
dotlars in the plate.

And that is exactly the kind of Jesus, th: kind of Gospe! and the kind of
Church that is ever so popular. The kind that is content with a decision for Christ,
a verbal affirmation of his Lordship made publically, and repeated over and over
again without ever once calfing into question the deepest convictions and opinions
and prejudices by which men and women reaily tive.

The drame of Palm Sunday means that a verbal affirmation of faith im Christ
means nothing until it cuts into the heart and behavior of the individual who
makes it, The crowd called him Lord. The crowd made public amd verbal testimony -
and then left when the going got tough. Early in his ministry Jesus said: “Not
everyone who says to me Lord, Lord: shall enter the Kingdom of heaven, but he
who dees the will of my Father.

Because he came into the city, a Christian decision today is always a secular
decision; not a testimony made in the satcty of a worship service, but an economic
decision, a political decision,a social d@cision made in fight of his Lordsnip
over my Fife and over all the society. Paim Sunday means that what you say you
believe about Jesus Christ - the verbal palm branches you wave - doesn't matter,
until you begin to feel his Lordship in the dirt and dust of common life.

Issues [ike education and taxes and juvenife justice and prison reform and
war and racism and poverty and welfare - are the city for us today - The city In
which Jesus Christ must be Lord. The city in which he is always a trouble maker;
thecity in which he calls us tole his people.

That, | would suggest is the real meaning of Palm Sunday. Jesus the Troubler.
Knowing that, jet us return to the celebration; grateful that he had one moment of
victory, that he hcard the shouts and saw the crowds. And then fet us be open

to his Lordship in our lives. May our Hosanna’s” sung today mean that we willl

om Fee

not draw ‘back ~ that wa will net abandon him in our city ~ that we wilf indeed

follow, right up to the foot of the cross AMEN

Father, we would be happier if the story ended with the parade. Help us, as we
move through this Holy Week, to feel his claim upon our lives. When we have a
quiet moment, help us to remember thet that this week is Holy - because it is the

week in which he died. AMEN