Untitled

March 24, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Hosanna” based on Psalm 118:1-4, 19-24 and Matthew 21:1-11

Within Christianity, we use “Hosanna” to express joy, and praise, and adoration. Just one little issue with that – the actual meaning of the word. Hosanna is a Hebrew word meaning “Save us, we pray!” The people around Jesus weren’t shouting “Great is God” or “Jesus is good!” or “YAY, Jesus, YAY God!” Instead, they were shouting, “God, save us from our oppressor” which was clearly the Roman Empire, who – let’s be honest – didn’t appreciate that. “God, help us, the enemy is bigger than we can take on ourselves.” “God, we’re in over our heads, help us out here!”

And, of course, they were shouting, “Save us, we pray” during a PASSOVER celebration, when Passover celebrates God’s actions in saving the people from oppression in Egypt, which made the Roman Empire’s representatives a “little bit” antsy.

The Roman Empire’s representative Pontius Pilate was already coming to the city, like he did every year at Passover, with soldiers and fanfare meant to keep the Jewish people in check. The Roman Empire saw QUITE CLEARLY that getting a whole bunch of people together in the city to celebrate God’s acts of freeing them from oppression was a tinderbox for revolt, and they sought to tamp it down with displays of power and reminders of their violent capacity. In fact, they came in from Pilate’s normal abode on the Mediterranean – so from the West. With gleaming horses, and banners with the golden Eagle of Rome, with drums and the crowds shouting “Hail Caesar, son of God; Praise be to the Savior who brought the Roman Peace; Caesar is Lord….” the Empire sought to intimidate people out of revolt.

But.

Then there was Jesus. Jesus who seems to have let the crowd claim kingship of Ancient Israel on his behalf, which sometimes feels a little bit strange but is in the story nonetheless. The Palm branches were a flag of Israel- the opposite of the Golden Eagle. The donkey was expected to be ridden by the Messiah entering the city – but also is rather opposite a gleaming horse. The soldiers accompanied Pilate – while a large crowd of people impoverished by the Empire accompanied Jesus. And Instead of “Hail Caesar” the people shouted “God Save Us (from the empire).”

The Roman Empire took this Jesus parade as a significant threat.

I believe they were meant to. The protest made the violence of the Empire stand out. They crucified Jesus with the accusation “King of the Jews” above his head, as if this was the charge against him. And, after all, they shouldn’t have killed the leader of a PEACEFUL revolt, only a violent one. But sometimes the authorities have a hard time telling the difference between violence and what scares them. (Still true today.)

Then, of course, Jesus did another PEACEFUL demonstration – this time managing to make visible the ways the Empire had put in place Temple leaders who were aligned with Empire and not God’s people. That one many of us learned as the “Cleansing of the Temple.” John Dominic Crossan reflects on the “den of robbers” the Temple is said to be saying, “Notice, by the way, that a ‘den’ is not where robbers do their robbing but where they flee for safety with the spoils they have robbed elsewhere.” (God and Empire, 133.)

Jesus made clear the city of Jerusalem was where “conservative religion and imperial oppression – had become serenely complicit.” (131) And, he dies for it. Crossan says, “He did not go to get himself killed or to get himself martyred. Mark insists that Jesus knew in very specific detail what was going to happen to him – read Mark 10:33-34, for example – but that is simply Marks’ way of insisting that all was accepted by both God and Jesus. Accepted, be it noted, but not willed, wanted, needed or demanded.” (131)

Beloveds, this Palm Sunday parade is one of the most brilliant acts of non-violent direct action I’ve ever heard of, but it is part of the story of why the Empire responded with violence. I can’t hear the Palm Sunday story without knowing that it walks us to the Good Friday Crucifixion and the Holy Saturday grief and disillusion. They’re all a part of this one story – that when you make clear the ways people are oppressing others, there is a fierce lash-back and the power of violence is immense. Thank God, that isn’t the whole story – we get to Easter next week – but it is a real story, one that we can’t dismiss.

This year, the Palm Sunday parade that walks Jesus into Jerusalem sounds terrifyingly like Nex Benedict walking into school on their last day. I can’t separate out Jesus being faithful to God despite the consequences from gender-queer and non-binary people claiming their space in the world – despite the consequences. But, friends, it is sickening.

There is a story out there, one that says people are supposed to stay in tight little conformist boxes that help others make sense of the world and, heavens, the VIOLENCE that comes out when people speak up and say, “this box doesn’t fit me.” And it can be such small stuff:

I’m a woman, but the box “quiet and gentle” doesn’t fit me

I’m a man, but the box “stoic” doesn’t’ fit me

I’m a woman, but the box “looking for a man” doesn’t’ fit me

I’m a man, but the box “looking for a woman” doesn’t’ fit me

… the box “wants to have kids” doesn’t fit me

… the box “monogamy” doesn’t fit me

… the box “woman” doesn’t fit me

… the box “man” doesn’t fit me

… the box “gendered” doesn’t fit me.

And, I mean, you all know this but… WHO CARES? They’re all just silly little made up boxes that no one should be forced into and everyone should have the space to occupy, or adapt or not occupy as they see fit? Sure, some people want the world to be black and white without shades of gray – that everyone is cis-gendered, straight, sexual, and single raced 😉 But, too bad because that’s just not true.

And yet, the violence that comes when people try to force others back into the boxes they think they should live in – it reminds me of the violence of empire. There seem to be gleaming horses, loud drums, and shiny swords all over the place. And, worse, it isn’t just the external violence that attacks people – the very people who are brave enough to leave their ill-fitting boxes behind end up internalizing the violence. They’re courageous, they’re clear, they know who they are and they won’t go back to pretending to be otherwise – but that violence is so darn insidious, and it gets inside them. Those silly stories about how we’re supposed to be are so poisonous. That human need for connection gets twisted around and turned against people. And the beautiful ones who are brave and unique and wonderful end up dead.

Jesus could have stayed out of Jerusalem, except he couldn’t.

Nex could have pretend to have their gender assigned at birth, except they couldn’t.

They couldn’t. It would have been safer, easier, …. some would say wiser. But they couldn’t.

Friends, as you know, the trans and queer communities around the country and world are aching for Nex and Nex’s family and friends. Their death has reminded people of prior losses, of other brave and beautiful souls who also internalized the violence against them. The heartbreaks are everywhere.

This holy week, we will worship through the blessings of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the heartbreak of the disciples, and land on the wondrous reality that God’s work can’t be stopped by violence or death.

But how do we make sense of Nex? And the ones before them? And the ones after them? How do face the violence of the Empire today, and the ways it gets internalized?

There aren’t easy asnwers.

We grieve.

And we share the aches with God.

And we name the problems with each other.

And we keep on learning how to undercut the broken narrative, and break open little boxes, and keep people safe when they leave them.

We aren’t going to do it fast enough – we already haven’t, but just because we can’t do it immediately doesn’t mean we can stop. Jesus showed us the power of violence to stop people, and the ways religion can become complicit with violence. And he paid for it, paid to teach us those lessons. But we have them! So, we know that God and love are more powerful than violence, and love is the way we respond. And we know that religion that oppresses isn’t religion at all, and we shout it from the rooftops.

Hosanna.

God save us.

We pray.

Amen

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

March 24, 2024

Sermons

“On Kings and Messiahs” based on Zechariah 9:9-10 and…

April 9, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

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

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady