I
long thought that Palm Sunday was a big Yay-Jesus parade, where
people shouted Hosanna to say “YAY God!” and it was clear that
everyone got how great God really is and how God was working through
Jesus.  I thought that the enthusiasm for God and Jesus was just so
big that the stones themselves were on the brink of crying out.  Then
I read John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg’s book “The
Last Week”
and learned that wasn’t it.

The story of Palm Sunday is so
much bigger, so much deeper, and so much BETTER than what I
originally understood.  It was, indeed, a Yay-Jesus parade, and it
did, indeed, reflect people celebrating their excitement over God’s
acts in the world.  But a WHOLE lot was happening underneath and
around it, and to understand that, we need to look at the Jesus
movement itself, the thing that was being celebrated.

I’m
working today largely from John Dominic Crossan’s book “Who
Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel
Stories of The Death of Jesus.”  When
he was here last fall for a Carl lecture we learned that he goes by
“Dom.”  As he often does, Dom manages to get into the heart of
things by explaining the context.  Context is what makes his
scholarship so awesome.

Jesus was a Galilean, whose
ministry was centered in Galilee, right?  What was Galilee?  Galilee
was a colony of the Roman Empire, and it was a part of what had been
the Northern Kingdom of Israel.  We talk about the Northern Kingdom
of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judea because under King David
and his son King Solomon there had been a single united Jewish
country, Ancient Israel, for about 80 years after 1000 BCE.  It then
had a civil war and split into two – north and south.  The Northern
Kingdom of Israel lost a war to the Assyrians in 722 BCE and its
leadership was taken into exile.  The Assyrian empire took over the
land and imposed their customs.  The Southern Kingdom did better, it
didn’t lose and go into exile for another 150 years, AND the Southern
Kingdom also got the chance to  return from exile and rebuild.
Afterward, it became extra judgmental of its secessionist northern
neighbors, both for the differences that had been present in the
civil war AND for the fact that they were no longer a pure Jewish
state, in faith or custom.

We know some of this history
because of the stories of the Samaritan woman at the well and the
Good Samaritan.  Samaria is, after all, directly north of Judea, the
Southern kingdom.  What we sometimes forget is that Galilee is the
region NORTH of Samaria.  It was ALSO a part of the old Northern
Kingdom. The difference is that in the time of the Maccabees, about
150 years before the birth of Jesus, faithful Jews from Judea moved
up to Galilee to try to resettle faithful Judaism up north.  The
Galilee of Jesus day was multicultural and multilingual,  rural, and
full of faithful Jews as well as lots of people who weren’t Jewish at
all.  It was also a colony of the Roman Empire.

Now,
as Dom says, “The Jewish peasantry was prone … to refuse quiet
compliance with heavy taxation, subsistence farming, debt
impoverishment, and land expropriation.  Their traditional ideology
of land
was enshrined in the ancient scriptural laws.”¹
Galilee itself was a fruitful place, and the land was useful to the
empire.  Dom explains, “Lower Galilee’s 470 square miles are
divided by four alternating hills and valleys running in a generally
west-east direction.  It is rich in cereals on the valley floors and
olives on the hillside slopes.”²
It was also pretty rich in radicalism, perhaps BECAUSE of the
percentage of very faithful Jewish people who believed land to be a
gift from God for the people of God.

Now,
John the Baptist did NOT do his ministry in Galilee.  (I JUST figured
this out.)  His ministry across the river in Perea, in the DESERT.  I
hadn’t realized that Galilee didn’t have deserts until Dom pointed it
out.  The other side of the Jordan is the side people had waited on,
it is the side they entered the Promised Land from.  Galilee, like
Samaria and Judea, had been part of the Promised Land.   According to
Dom, John the Baptist “is drawing people into the desert east of
the Jordan, but instead of gathering a large crowd there and bringing
them into the Promised Land in one great march, he sends them through
the Jordan individually, baptizing away their sins in its purifying
waters and telling them to await in holiness the advent of the
avenging God.”³
He was re-enacting the entrance into the Promised Land, that gift of
LAND for the people.  Thus he was challenging the religious,
political, social, and economic bases of Roman control.⁴
 This got him killed.  

Being a colony isn’t a great
thing for people.  That’s obvious, right?  Colonies exist to bring
wealth to the country that controls them, and that means that the
people in the colony are means of wealth production.  Dom explains a
bit more:

“When
a people is exploited by colonial occupation, one obvious response is
armed revolt or military rebellion.  But sometimes that situation of
oppression is experienced as so fundamentally evil and so humanly
hopeless that only transcendental intervention is deemed of any use.
God,
and God alone, must act to restore a ruined world to justice and
holiness.
This demands a vision and a program that is radical, countercultural,
utopian, world-negating, or, as scholars say eschatological.
That terms comes form the Greek word for ‘the last things’ and means
that God’s solution will be so profound as to constitute an ending of
things, a radical new world-negation.”

The best known example of this
in the Bible is when God acted to free the people from slavery in
Egypt.  The people were oppressed, they cried out, God heard them,
and sent Moses and set the people free.

That particular story is
celebrated and remembered at the Passover.  The Passover is holy
celebration of God’s action to set the people free when they had no
power to free themselves.    The Palm Sunday parade was a formalized
entrance to the Jewish celebration of Passover in Jerusalem, at the
time when Jerusalem was ALSO under Roman Imperial control.  It was,
thus, a very dynamic situation.   The potential for Jewish upraising
at Passover is the reason that the Roman Governor showed up then,
with a lot of military might and show..  In fact, the Roman Governor
came into the West Gate with a LARGE military parade, at about the
same time that the Gospels say that the Jesus movement came in the
East gate with a populist God parade.  

Can you feel the tension rising?

Dom
goes further into explaining how religious ideas of eschatology, of
last things, work.  He says that there are two models, and John the
Baptist used one while Jesus used the other.  The John the Baptist
way was passive for humans and active for God.  It was the idea that
God is going to come save “us,” where us indicates a single group
defined by those who know that God is about to act.  This sort of
eschatology is based on a future
promise that God will
act to save us.  Dom says, “This future but imminent apocalyptic
radicalism is dependent on the overpowering action of God moving to
restore justice and peace to an earth ravished by injustice and
oppression.”⁵
That might sound pretty good, until you hear the one Jesus used.  

As
a reminder, Jesus was baptized by John.  That means he was a DISCIPLE
of John (a student of John’s), but one way or another he branched off
of John’s teachings and went his own way.   The second way that Jesus
ended up going is called sapiential
eschatology.  Dom
says, “The word saptientia
is
Latin for ‘wisdom’ and sapiential eschatology announces that God has
given all
human beings
the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so
live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to
all observers.  It involves a way of life for now rather than a hope
for life for the future.  … In apocalyptical eschatology, we are
waiting for God to act.  In sapiential eschatology, God is waiting
for us to act.”⁶

As
far as I can understand it, this is the crux of it all.  We follow
Jesus, who taught us about God who is already present to us, who
works with us to change things for the better.  We aren’t waiting on
God.  We’re working with God.  Jesus’s ministry was one of
proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  Dom explains this well too, “the
sayings and parables of the historical Jesus often describe a world
of radical
egalitarianism
in which discrimination and hierarchy, exploitation and oppression
should no longer exist.”⁷
 The Jesus kingdom movement, “is not a matter of Jesus’ power but
of their empowerment.  He himself has no monopoly on the kingdom; it
is there for anyone with the courage to embrace it.”⁸
All of this may explain why they could kill Jesus, but not his
movement.  

It
also explains why the crowds were so excited on Palm Sunday and
throughout Jesus’ ministry.  Jesus was speaking to their problems,
oppression, debt, loss of land, loss of subsistence, loss of dignity
AND he was offering them the reality that God
was already with them and they could change it themselves!
No wonder they were having a Yay-Jesus parade.

I
think the big questions this leaves US with today are about how we
best live the Kingdom.  If it is already here, if God is already with
us, if we can partake in the radical egalitarianism, if  God has
given all
human beings
the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so
live that God’s power, rule, and domination are evidently present to
all observers… then what is it that we need make space for so that
we can LIVE it!???  How do we access that wisdom we already have, how
do we live that life that God has made  possible?

Or, to put it another way, how
do we step out of the world’s obsessions with consumption,
acquisition, fear, existential anxiety, competition, hierarchy, and
distractions SO THAT we can live the GOOD life God already made
possible?  Since the goal is to live in love and allow lovingness to
expand in us, and I wonder if it is a matter of balance.  There is a
need for rest, to savor the goodness; AND there is a need for
activity, to respond to the goodness.  There is a need for more
learning to know how to best respond, AND there is a need to teach
others what we know.  There is a need to attend to the goodness of
life AND there is a need to attend to the brokenness and see it
clearly.  There is definitely a need to play – to live into joy,
laughter and delight AND a need to be courageous and loving in
seeking justice for all.  Because part of the call of Jesus is to
live a good life, and the other part is to make it possible to for
others to live a good life – but not JUST a good life!  The call is
to a life that is a transformed, courageous, God-soaked with love.

In
the end of our story we hear, “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd
said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’  He answered,
‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’”
This is the part I had entirely wrong.  It isn’t that the stones are
bursting with joy.  It is that the people cannot be silenced because
they’ve been empowered.
God’s empowering love is with them, and they’ve learned that they
already have what they need to change their lives and change the
world.  And once people know that, they can’t be silenced.  Thanks be
to God!  Amen

1John
Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of
Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA:
HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 40.

2Crossan,
42.

3Crossan,
44.

4Crossan,
44.

5Crossan,
47.

6Crossan,
47.

7Crossan
48.

8Crossan,
48.

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

April 14, 2019