REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

March 24, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Zechariah 9:9-10
Matthew 21:1-17

"The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
"Hosanna'...The blind and the lame came: to him in the teaple, and he cured
them.” -Matthew 21:9, 14 (NRSV)

aN

it was-a "defining moment." A defining moment is an incident of such
singular clarity that later, when you think: about it, it interprets other
incidents and other moments. ;

* President Lincoln mounting the platform at Gettysburg with
his brief address scribbled on the back of an envelope to
dedicate a cemetery - was a moment that defined the glory and
the tragedy of an era.

* The Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima - was a moment that
defined a war. 7

* Martin Luther King, Jr. standing on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial and speaking about a dream in which all God's children
are free - was a moment that defined a time and a movement.

A defining moment has so much content that it helps illuminate
everything that led up to it. It is a still photograph so good that it
tells the whole story.

It was a defining moment when Jesus, on the first day of the week of
Passover, immediately after a noisy, tumultuous entry to the city, and an
altercation with the salesmen of sacrificial animals and money changers in
the outer precincts, walked into the Temple, sat down, and blind people and
crippled people came to hin.

There is'a lot going on in that one moment.

it started when he decided to go to the city. For three years or so
Jesus of Nazareth had been traveling between the villages of Galilee,
teaching in Synagogues. He had built up a bit of a following. His .
_ reputation had spread along with ‘rumors that he had power to heal the sick,

that he was not particularly careful about religious customs, and that al]
sorts of social outcasts were his most enthusiastic advocates. The
religious authorities in Jerusalem certainly raised their eyebrows at his
liberal interpretations of sacred custom and had sent a delegation or two
aut into the countryside to hear firsthand what he was Saying and to engage
him in conversation. There didn't seem to be reason for alarm, however, so
long as he stayed in Galilee.

Then he decided to go to the city for the Passover celebration. His
closest friends tried to persuade him not to do it. His smartest advisers
knew instinctively that it would be a disaster. But it seemed as if the
more tentative and frightened they were, the more determined he became.
“He set his face toward Jerusalem" is the way one of them who saw it
described his determination.

And then, to make matters infinitely worse, when they arrived on the
outskirts of the city, he instructed his friends to find a donkey so he
could ride into Jerusalem. It seemed very deliberate. He knew that when
the people in the city saw it they would recognize immediately a gesture of
messianic dimension. The city was filled with patriotic tourists. They
were in Jerusalem, after all, to celebraté the nation's Passover, the
liberation from foreign domination centuries before. And because the
nation currently was dominated and occupied by Rome, patriotic fervor was
hot. Hope was high that another liberator, another Moses, would emerge to
lead the nation out of its current slavery - the promised, longed-for,
waited-for, prayed-for savior. The Messiah! There was a passage in one of
the prophetic books which told how it might happen. Everybody knew what
Zechariah had written:

“Lo, your King comes to you)...
humble, and riding on a donkey,..."

So when he rode a donkey into the city, this popular itinerant Rabbi, ©
there was a near riot. The common people, the ones who are milling around
the streets during that weekend holiday in the big city, recognized
immediately what he was saying by his behavior. He was claiming the title
of Messiah. And so they stripped cloaks from their backs for him to sit on
and they waved palm branches and they shouted:

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in
the name of the Lord!"

The noisy entourage was headed for the Temple. It must have been
quite a scene when he arrived, the yelling crowd waving palm branches and
the Passover pilgrims crowding into the Temple to change théir money,
purchasing sacrificial animals. A predictable altercation ensued. He
forced the merchants out of the Temple courtyard and when they left he sat
down and pécple who were not ordinarily there, blind.people, crippled —
people, people who were..sometimes intentionally shut out, came to him. And
that is the defining moment of Palm Sunday. :

John Updike, writing an essay on the Gospel of Matthew ina
collection of pieces. by contemporary writers on the Books of the New

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Testament, suggests that in Matthew "two worlds are colliding. Jesus
overthrows common sense... and declares an inversion of the world's order."
[incarnation, p. 8]

It's easy to miss that confrontation, that overthrowing not only of
the money changers' tables, but also the overthrowing of popular religious
expectation, of what moral behavior means, of what faith demands. It's
easy to miss it in our eagerness to turn the day into a celebration.
William Stringfellow noted that modern Christians return to Palm Sunday
out of “nostalgia for a parade." We want so desperately for our dear Lord
to have at least one grand moment of affirmation, we quite miss what's
really going on.

"Hosanna" does not mean “Hurray for Jesus." 1 think the children
might have had it right. I think they loved him for the right reasons, as
children have a way of doing. I think they laughed and sang and: waved to -
him because they saw -— with the innocent clarity of children — his grace and
goodness.

But my sense is that for the adults it wasn't that simple. The
translation of Hosanna is “Save Now"... “Now Save us... Son of David"...
“Save Us... Be Our King. Stir our hearts, call us to sacrifice, rally
us around the flag and lead us into battle against our foes who we know are
always God's foes." "Save us now, King Jesus, by reclaiming the throne,
Starting the revolution and establishing the people's republic."

That's what's going on in the parade and I don't know about you but
that makes me uncomfortable. First of all because Jesus rejected it,
because the defining moment is his eloquent rejection of political
opportunism, his refusal to be king, by sitting in God's temple and dealing
with the least kingly people he could find, the ones who couldn't even see
him, the ones too weak to walk in under their own power.

It makes me uncomfortable because triumphalism and religion seem to
go together. The sad story of the Crusades, the effort of Western
Christendom to drive the pagans out of the Holy Land and to establish the
church by force of arms, is echoed in the 20th century by a new Muslim
belligerence bent on ridding Arab culture of Christian infidels.

It's difficult to let go of triumphalism, the hope that one way. or
another our truth will obliterate everyone else's truth and that our truth
must be expressed in a political order which unfortunately. doesn't have
room for your preferences. It's difficult in the overheated climate of
the new evangelicalism to suggest that Jesus Christ calls us to be faithful
wherever we are: to pay more attention to faithfulness than to market

strategies for getting everybody to agree to our theologies.

It is certainly not a day for attacking the religion of the Temple.
Reinhold Niebuhr, in a Palm Sunday sermon at Harvard once said:

“Let us not observe Palm Sunday by apolemical attitude
toward the Jews and a congratulation for Christians that
Christianity is superior to Judaism. The distinguished
Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, accurately defined the

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differences between the two religions in this way: 'To
the Christian, the Jew is a stubborn fellow, who in an
unredeemed world is still waiting for the Messiah. To
the Jew the Christian is the heedless fellaw who, in an
unredeemed world, affirms that redemption has somehow or
other taken place.'"

“We both still wait," Niebuhr said, “for Jesus to come," [Justice
and Mercy, p. 87}

All that crowd wanted that day was what we all want and that is to
back'a winner, for the good guys to come out on top for once, to be number
one. Just a little triumphalism, really. All] that crowed wanted was what
our culture desperately wants and that is to win, to stand tall and proud
again. And I am made uncomfortable by the fact that my Lord did not even
pause ‘to acknowledge that, but strode into the Temple and spent his time
with blind and crippled people.

Is there any reason to believe he would have it any other way? That
he would not spend his time with the poor, oppressed and outcasts, that is,
people who know their needs? The city is a glorious place for me, for us.
It is hell for others: for 35,000 Chicagoans who are homeless, for the
108,900 whe are unemployed. The city is a very dangerous place, not for
me, but for the young soldier who survived Desert Storm but was murdered on
the streets of Detroit, or for anybody who lives in Cabrini-Greene, and
places like Cabrini-Greene, where far more are killed routinely and without
notice in the press than our nation lost in Desert Storm. The city is a
dangerous place to he a minority child. Our infant mortality rate is
higher than Trinidad, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Kuwait. It is a very dangerous
place to be poor and sick. One out of six Chicagoans cannot afford health
insurance or health care.

Jesus came to a dangerous city and in five days was dead. He was
crucified because he challenged the status quo and he sat down and dealt
with people who were disposable.

Annie Dillard, writing in the same book I cited earlier, reflects on
her childhood exposure to the Bible and Jesus in Sunday School. The Bible
Was in water color, she observed; the pictures of Jesus were always in
pastels: soft, pleasant, lovely. But today, the colors are bright and
dense and passionate.

The Jesus of Palm Sunday will not be marginalized, will not be
domesticated. The Jesus of Palm Sunday is lordly in his intentionality.
That’ strength of his has inspired others to be true to themselves. In Dag
Hammarskjold's memoir, Markings, he writes about his struggle with his own
life, his purpose, his sense of vocation. Hammarskjold died while ona
peacemaking mission for the United Nations. And before he died he wrote
about Jesus on Palm Sunday: ,

"A young man, adamant in his committed life... Only

‘recently, he thought, had he began to see more clearly,
and to realize that the road of possibility might lead
to the cross. ;

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"A young man, adamant in his commitment, who walks the
road of possibility... fulfilling the destiny he had
chosen." (Markings, p. 68-69]

So Jesus on Palm Sunday invites you to that integrity, to do what you
have to do, without reservation: to be true to yourself and to your best
notion of what your life is about: to waste no time; to give yourself to
your dreams; to spend out your life for love; to risk; to hold nothing
back.

And Jesus, on Palm Sunday, in that Tempie, reminds the church what its
purpose is and - Christian people, disciples - what he expects of and hopes
for them.

There is a lot to criticize in the church but sometimes we get it
right:in acts of courage and faithfulness and compassion: when we welcome
those who are not always welcome elsewhere; when the church opens its arms
wide to the lonely and Jost, regardless of who they are; when the church
feeds and shelters, it is reflecting the singularity of that defining
moment on Palm Sunday. ;

Sometimes it is not universally applauded. Sometimes it is a
nuisance to try to include everybody. The Jerusalem Temple was not
ordinarily accessible to blind and crippled people. There were those who
said physical handicaps were the mark of divine disfavor. At the famous
Dead Sea community at Qumran, the crippled, deaf, blind, disabled, were not
allowed because it was thought that they were not whole. And Matthew
reports that after Jesus' eloquent gesture the authorities got very angry.

So, it seems to me the churches, ours included, ought to be more
concerned with the matter of how to include people without regard to their
color, or gender, or income, or anything else about them. I think we ought
to be ashamed at the fact that the only thing that arouses our passionate
moral indignation is the danger that the church might somehow become tco
inclusive.

It is a defining moment. It defines for me the final meaning of this
man, this life, and this death. He welcomed the blind and the crippled.
And so he does still. ;

There are no prerequisites: there are no tests to pass, no
orthodoxies to uphold. It doesn't matter who you are; whether you are rich
or poor, black or brown or white, male or female, a success or a failure.

This Lord sits down and welcomes those who have nothing to bring but
themselves.

This Lord rejects power and prominence in order to be accessible to
everyone.

This Jesus welcomes those who know their own limitations of sight and
strength.

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This Jesus, who could have been king and claimed a throne, chose
instead a last eloquent gesture of selfless love and a death on a cross,

There are, a poet said, different things going on here:

"Festivals at which the poor man is King and the
consumptive healed, mirrors in which the blind look
at themselves and love looks at them back,"

“It's a long way off," he said, “but to get there takes
no time and admission is free, if you will present
yourself with your need-only and the simple offering of
your faith, green as a leaf." [R. S. Thomas, “The
Kingdom,"Later Poems ~ A Selection. ]

It is a defining moment. This year, instead of the triumphalism of
the parade, may I presume to suggest that the defining moment of Palm
Sunday occurs when he sits down in the Tempie and the blind and the
crippled come to him. This year, instead of a momentary triumph, an
interruption on the way to the cross and resurrection, may Palm Sunday be
for you an invitation to bring your need, whatever it is — physical
disability, mental or emotional distress, your worries and fears, your
doubts, you are invited on Palm Sunday to bring your life to this Lord
Jesus who promises that he will not turn you away, but will be your friend,
your Lord, your Savior and God — today and forever.

Amen.

+++ tet.4

O Lord Christ, as you came this day to Jerusalem, so come now to our
city, our church, and our hearts. -

As they welcomed you with shouting and dancing, so may this worship
celebrate your presence in the world.

And as that festive crowd misunderstood you, so may we be quick to
confess our own unwillingness to greet you on your terms.

And as the needy came to you in the Temple, may we now come to
receive your love, your forgiveness, your peace. Amen.

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