Sermons
“On Kings and Messiahs” based on Zechariah 9:9-10 and…
On
the evening of the first full moon after the Spring Equinox,1
the celebration of Passover commences. Meals are eaten in
remembrance, with story telling. Passover starts at Sundown
tomorrow, and Seder meals will be eaten this week. During the Seders
and through the week, our observant Jewish sisters and brothers will
avoid eating leavened bread. Leavened bread is bread that has risen,
by either yeast or sourdough. Nearly all the bread we eat is
leavened, even the crackers I make are leavened! Matzah, an
unleavened flatbread, is used during Passover.
Do
you remember why? The formational story of the Jewish (or Hebrew)
people is that of the Exodus. The story starts with the people
enslaved in Egypt, struggling under harsh conditions and impossible
work expectations. They cried out to God for help, and God heard
them.
Moses
was born and was raised knowing he was Hebrew but in the Pharaoh’s
house. He saw a fellow Hebrew being beaten by an Egyptian overseer,
and in his anger he beat the overseer to death. Then he fled to the
desert in fear that his act would become known. While in the desert,
Moses experienced God, and became aware that God had work for him to
do! After great objection, argument, and forcing God into
compromising, Moses returned to Egypt to set God’s people free.
The
story speaks of ten plagues, the first 9 of which are natural
occasional occurrences in Egypt. The Hebrew people took events that
happened and ascribed them to God’s will. It is likely that this
story developed its dramatic sequences over time 😉 The final plague
is by far the most horrifying. In preparation for that one, the
Hebrews are said to have killed lambs and spread the lamb’s blood
over their door posts. Then, the story says, God killed the
firstborn sons of all of the Egyptian people and animals – every
family except those who had lamb’s blood on their doorframes. (I do
not have words for how horrified I am by this story, and the only way
I can deal with it is by assuming it is the creation of hundreds of
years of oral tradition and not anything like factual history.)
The
Hebrews were then KICKED OUT of Egypt, in fear that God would do
something even worse if they weren’t set free. They left so fast
they didn’t have time to let the bread rise before they broke it.
Thus,
unleavened bread.
More
importantly though, the Passover story is one of liberation from
oppression, and a liberation that the people did not believe they
could achieve without God’s help. The enslaved people became FREE.
In her song after the people are free, Miriam refers to God as their
salvation, meaning that God saved them, meaning that God helped them!
This is the first time salvation is attributed to God. The harsh
conditions were traded in for manna in the desert. The God of their
ancestors saved them. The huge Egyptian nation with its vast wealth
and military might caved to let them walk away (and with gold and
wealth too!). Now, the story may not be historically true as
written, but it is metaphorically abundant, and tells of a God who
cares enough to change the reality of oppressed people.
The
gospel quotes from Psalm 118, a Psalm that the Jews recited at
Passover celebrations, one that includes the words, “Blessed is the
one who comes in the name of the Lord,” beautifully intermingling
the freedom that God had given the people with the moment that Jesus
walked into Jerusalem. Psalm 118 has TWO references to God’s
salvation, naming salvation work as God’s work. The Palm Sunday
narrative is saturated with symbolism of the Passover, and of God’s
work to free the oppressed.
Continuing
with a fast history, Moses had led the people to freedom, and led
them to the Promised Land, but died before they could enter the land.
For hundreds of years the people lived simple lives in their
families and tribes without any central government. Eventually
though, they became antsy and afraid (even though nothing really had
changed) and decided to get a king. They got King Saul. He was
either a little bit crazy all along, became crazy over the years, or
perhaps it is just that the propaganda against him called him crazy –
I don’t know. But after Saul was David, and David was … OK, I’ll
leave the David insults for another day. As David was dying he
decided that his son Solomon would become king after him and arranged
for Solomon to enter Jerusalem riding a donkey while people
proclaimed him king. Thus entering Jerusalem on a donkey became
significant.
This
imagery is used, and added to, in the text we read from Zechariah
today. In Zechariah the act of a king riding in Jerusalem on a
donkey, again, is used as a symbol of the coming Messiah. Zechariah
is written after the exile, when there is no longer a king in
Jerusalem and between the destruction of the first temple and the
building of the second. Zechariah is written in a downtrodden time,
when the people yearned to be rescued from their new oppressors and
for their society to be rebuild. The people remembered a time when
their lives were centered on God, and they dreamed of a leader who
would guide them back to that. Zechariah’s words about a king and a
donkey reflect hope for such a leader, usually called the Messiah.
The hope was that the Messiah would bring God’s salvation back, that
God would use one human to save the rest, to free them from
oppression, to restore their nation and their order.
There
are still more symbols in this story that come from Jewish scriptural
context. Another ancient King (pre-exilic), in this case Jehu (who
was even further from perfection than David), who was greeted in his
kingship when people took off their cloaks and spread them over a
stairway while shouting, “Jehu is King” (2 Kings 9:13). This
seems like it is referenced with the laying down of cloaks in the
road for Jesus, once again affirming the perception of Jesus as God’s
chosen leader.
This
is a story that is also post-exilic, but much closer to the time of
Jesus. The Maccabees (200-350 years before Jesus) gained military
victory and freedom for the Jews in Judea and were celebrated with
crowds waving palm branches and thanking God
(1
Maccabees 13:49-52 and 2 Maccabees 10:1-8). Intriguingly, the second
of the stories relating palm branches, parades, and thanksgiving to
God in Maccabees also relates to cleansing the Jerusalem Temple of
foreign influence and reclaiming it for YHWH worship after driving
out the army that had occupied Jerusalem.
The
more I look at the story of Palm Sunday the more I’m struck with the
intensity of the symbolism. It seems clear that the people who told
the story, the ones who wrote it down, and those who edited it wanted
their points to be clear. Now, that means that not all of the
symbolism is likely to reflect history itself, but instead to reflect
an excess of meaning. The Jesus Seminar puts it this way, “In
Matthew and John the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem mounted on an ass
thus becomes the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophesy and
confirms the early Christian conviction that Jesus was the expected
Messiah. The Christianization of whatever event lay behind this
story led the Fellows to declare the narrative a fiction based on
prophecy. At the same time, they held out the possibility that Jesus
may have entered Jerusalem astride a donkey as a symbolic act.”2
In
all of the Gospels, the crowds yell “Hosanna” which means “God
saves” or “God, save us” or “God, HELP!” The salvation the
Jews had experienced in Egypt as freedom from their oppressors, and
the salvation the Jews had experienced in Babylon as freedom from
their oppressors, was being sought in the time of Jesus while seeking
freedom from Rome. I think it is important to remember that the
“salvation” they were calling for was a tangible, physical kind
relating to the opportunity to survive as a community, for each
person to be able to live a just and righteous life while thriving.
“Hosanna” wasn’t about afterlife, it was about desperate need in
THIS life. Hosanna sounds like a shout of glory and acclamation to
us, but I suspect it also carried overtones that would be very
familiar to refugees today.
My
thinking on Palm Sunday follows the lead of Marcus Borg and John
Dominic Crossan in The
Last Week.3
Most definitively, this story tells us that the early Christian
communities who wrote down the gospels believed that Jesus was the
expected Messiah and that his life was as important as any king’s
life had been. Furthermore, it is very clear from the way the story
is told that Palm Sunday is Act 1 to the Cleansing of the Temple’s
Act 2.
For
those who haven’t been present on previous Palm Sundays with me, Borg
and Crossan point out that at the same time Jesus is said to have
entered the city on a donkey via the Eastern Gate, there was a Roman
processional entering via the Western Gate. The Roman governor ruled
from the coast of the Mediterranean, but came to the city for
Passover, along with significant military guard, in order to maintain
the peace while the people gathered to remember their God’s actions
in freeing them from oppression. The parade that people gathered to
see on the West side of the city was a display of military might,
excessive wealth, and the glorification of the Empire. People on
that side yelled, “Hail
Caesar, son of God; Praise be to the Savior who brought the Roman
Peace; Caesar is Lord….” That’s what makes the shouts on the
East side so significant. They defied the power of Rome, and gave the
power back to God and God’s actor. They were blaspheming against the
Empire, and doing so while seeking God’s help in overthrowing it!
Jesus’
parade was a counter to their Imperial procession. It was
intentionally different—meek, mild, nonviolent, the opposite of
mighty, militaristic and powerful. And it was carefully timed. In
other words, it was subversive and courageous. While
we don’t know that all the pieces happened as the stories suggest, we
have reason to think that the stories reflect a kernel of truth –
and that the counter parades offered very different visions of the
world as it should be!
The
Palm Sunday processional along with the indictment of the Temple, and
their timing within the Jewish celebration of Passover, seem
carefully planned to present Rome as the new oppressor – the Egypt
and Pharaoh of Jesus’ present day. In naming Rome as the oppressor,
Jesus also reinforced God as the liberator (savior). The Palm Sunday
parade offered an alternative to oppression, and suggested that the
alternative was in God’s way and God’s vision. Jesus entered the
city while the people called for God’s salvation. This suggested the
Roman officials were NOT the appropriate leaders of the Jews, and
their actions as oppressors delegitimatized them and opened the door
for a rightful leader. Furthermore, I think it was a popular action
and disconcerted the authorities. I still think this is why the sign
over Jesus’ head at death read “King of the Jews,” because this
action claimed that he was. More and more I don’t think Jesus was
aiming at a throne, rather he simply aimed at reminding the people of
God and God’s role as their liberator.
Jesus
MIGHT have gotten away with Palm Sunday if he hadn’t continued on,
and pressed the issue further with the Indictment of the Temple. I
think that the two actions were carefully planned, and meant to
subvert the power of Rome while reclaiming God’s vision for a just
society. They both contrasted God, and God’s acts to save the people
from oppression, with Rome. Jesus acted to reclaim the power of the
Temple for God worship, as he reclaimed God’s leadership of the Jews.
Jesus aimed to reconnect the people to God. That’s why he would have
engaged in planned actions that destabilized Rome’s power and thereby
lead to his own death.
Connecting
the plight of the Jewish people under Roman rule to the plight of the
Jewish slaves under Egyptian oppression was exactly the sort of thing
the Governor came to Jerusalem to silence. Yet Jesus pushed the
package, road the donkey, disturbed the peace at the Temple. It
seems to me that he heard the shouts of Hosanna and was willing to
listen and act. This leads me to wonder: are we?
Amen
1Well,
except when lunar calendars add a leap month and then it is the
second full moon after a vernal equinox, forgive me for
oversimplifying for the sake of a better story 😉
2Robert
W. Funk and The Jesus Seminar, The
Acts of Jesus (USA
-HarperSanFransicso: Polebridge Press, 1998) 230.
3Marcus
Borg and John Dominc Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels
Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem (Harper
Collins: 2006)
Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers