A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — April 5, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Isaiah 50:4-9;  Mark 11:1-11  —  Palm Sunday
[After the sermon, read Mark 15:1-39  —  Passion Sunday]

The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher,

to listen as those who are taught. — Isaiah 50:4

Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their
cloaks on it; and he sat on it. — Mark 11:7

It can be really hard to see and learn anything truly new.  The quote in our bulletin describes education as beginning “to learn how to learn.”  But once we know something, we may have to struggle to learn anything new that doesn’t fit into the pattern of what we already know.  What we already know creates expectations in us for how the world will be, expectations that all too readily become old, established truths we are reluctant to set aside.

I remember how hard it was for me in college physics when I got to quantum mechanics and had to “unlearn” things about atomic structure and also about the very nature of reality itself.  Einstein’s theory of Relativity was the same—just mind-boggling.  Unlearning and then learning something new is hard.  Did you know there’s no such thing as a brontosaurus?  One of my favorite books as a kid was All About Dinosaurs.  My favorite dinosaur in it was the brontosaurus.  But it turns out that paleontologists had it wrong.  For the original skeleton, they’d combined bones from two different dinosaurs.  What looks most like what I knew as a brontosaurus is really an apatosaurus.  I had to look that name up.  I can never remember it because I originally learned “all about” the brontosaurus.  (I griped once to my kids that “when I was a kid the largest non-meat-eating dinosaur was the brontosaurus,” whereupon they accused me of being really, really old.)

Science isn’t the only area where knowledge gets in the way of learning.  Religious authorities condemned Galileo rather than unlearn that the earth was the center of the universe.  And new understandings of God, Christ, and the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection have always faced opposition in the church, as people cling to old understandings even when they no longer make sense.  Take God as King, for example—a highly problematic term when kings in our world are either relatively powerless figureheads (except maybe for Elvis) or else they’re corrupt despots.  We need to learn some new things here about divine power.

Teachers are in an especially difficult position when it comes to all this.  For they need to know what they know well enough to teach it, yet all the while keep from letting their knowledge prevent them from seeing and learning anything new themselves.  And while they teach what they already know, somehow they must go beyond that to help their students begin to learn how to learn themselves.

I love how Isaiah 50:4 captures the delicate balance of the ideal teacher.  It begins:  “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may sustain the weary with a word…”  The ideal teacher does more than say to the student, “Here’s what you must know,” and then test to see if it has been learned.  There is a sense of caring, connection, and support that sustain and encourage the student.  Then, the ideal teacher strives to go on learning.  “Morning by morning the Lord wakens…” [What does the Lord waken?]  “…the Lord wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.”  This teacher in Isaiah remains always a student, ever open to hearing and learning new things.  This is crucial, for the very structure reality reflects the newness that is continually brought into being by the Creator God.

I raise this issue because each of us—from youngest to oldest—is both learner and teacher.  And we are all just as prone to failing to see and learn something new as all those people in Mark’s story who continually misunderstand what Jesus is doing.  The people of Jesus’ day had firm expectations of what a Messiah was to be and do.  They already knew and weren’t at all ready to learn anything different.  And we, who have the gospel stories?  Well, we know them too well, making it hard for us to hear or learn anything new in them.

Consider the familiar story we celebrate this Palm Sunday—what many Bibles label as “Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem.”  Crowds of people rush to greet Jesus as he enters the city, coming from the Mount of Olives, where tradition says God will do battle to restore Jerusalem, down the same road from Bethphage and Bethany used by conquering kings. The people wave branches in the air—Mark does not say they’re palms—as signs of victory.  They cry, “Hosanna!”—a word that means “Save us!”  “Hosanna” comes from the same Hebrew root word as “Yeshua,” the name, “Jesus.”  Then they shout out a verse from a psalm that celebrates victory in battle—Psalm 118, verse 26: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”—essentially proclaiming Jesus to be the new Davidic king.

As far as the people can see, the signs are all there.  And we, who know the story so well, sing hymns of triumph, filled with Hosannas—“All glory, laud, and honor to thee redeemer king.”  The people misunderstand, and so do we in many ways.  They see Jesus was a warrior king who will lead them into battle and provide victory.  Tradition and expectation keep them from seeing anything else.  All too often we also tend to see Jesus as one with power and might who takes our side.  And surely, with mighty Jesus on our side we will ultimately triumph.

But stop and look closer, for the signs are mixed.  In the occupied land of Israel, the waving branches and the psalm do declare victory, but Jesus himself comes riding on what?  Not a war-horse—a stallion—but a colt, a minor agricultural beast, not a weapon of war.  It’s sort of like the Grand Marshal of a vast military parade refusing to ride in an armored vehicle or limo and choosing instead to pedal a unicycle festooned with flowers and balloons or perhaps drive one of those little Shriners’ go-karts.  Other gospels will refer to Zechariah 9:9 to explain that the colt symbolizes Jesus coming in total nonviolence as a king of peace.  But Mark lets this bit of absurd street theater stand unexplained for his readers, who already know so much about kings and power they fail to see and grasp this “new thing,” a king of peace and love.  Most of our “Hosanna hymns” sing too much of royal power, majesty, and triumph for us to do more than begin to glimpse the nonviolence at the heart of Palm Sunday.  Although the final verse of the offertory anthem the choir will sing an a few minutes does catch a part of the mixed signals:  “Ride on!  Ride on in majesty!  In lowly pomp ride on to die.”

We, like the crowds and religious scholars in Mark’s story, miss Jesus’ nonviolent methods because they don’t fit into cultural expectations.  We learn early that  “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”  More than that, victory must be “winner take all.”  “March Madness” with its single elimination tournament could be a model for our world.  Winners overpower opponents.  Losers are gone.  In Jesus’ time, the Romans were but the latest in a centuries-long line of conquerors of Israel, yet the people still expect a mighty king to lead them in glorious battle and overthrow the foreign power.  Jesus refuses to be that king.  It’s always dangerous to fail people’s expectations.  Rather than learn a new way, the same crowds who cried “Hosanna!” cry out a few days later for Jesus’ death.  In the crucifixion story, the phrase “King of the Jews” occurs 6 times in 30 verses, often as a way of taunting Jesus.

The church of Jesus Christ is rooted in the life-giving power of resurrection.  Yet almost from the beginning, Christians have thought in terms of winning by way of the powers of destruction and death.  Over and over the church has aligned itself with worldly power.  It has marshaled its forces to overpower and destroy anyone it sees as an enemy of God.  Church history is littered with holy crusades and religious wars, with inquisitions, excommunications, and executions.  In more modern times, parts of the church of Jesus Christ have misused the power of God to justify cultural imperialism in the mission field, the holocaust in Germany, the Ku Klux Klan in this country, and “ethnic cleansing” around the world.

Even today, our society engages in “culture wars” and churches fight theological battles—vehement, winner-take-all conflicts.  One side focuses on defending traditional family values and busies itself attacking personal sins; while the other side emphasizes issues of justice and battles against the systemic sins of social, economic, and political oppression.  Both sides have strong convictions, and both have important and valuable points to make.  Yet the very words—culture war, attack, conflict, and battle—betray what is going on.  Far too many Christians are busy fighting for some “one true way,” seeking to crush the opposition and achieve total victory.  And if “victory” can’t be achieved, then the remaining option is separation, with one side or the other withdrawing from all fellowship.

Yet Jesus proclaims another way—the non-violent way of self-giving love and forgiveness.  The crowds of Jerusalem couldn’t see it, couldn’t learn it, because they “already knew it all.”  We are much the same, for we know (or think we know) all about how power works in our world.  We expect the church’s actions to be practical.  So we too fail to learn what Jesus teaches.  God’s action in raising Christ from the dead is not about supreme power, but about supreme love.  It’s not about force or combat, but about reconciliation and new creation.  At one point Paul declares, “In Christ God was reconciling the world to [God’s] self…”—that’s the entire world, for the word there in Greek is kosmos.  Everything is reconciled.  And all opposition to God found in sin and trespass is not destroyed, but rather redeemed and transformed.  In God’s grace, there are no losers, only winners.  For in Christ, God is about the business of reconciliation—that is, bringing all of humanity and, indeed, all of creation back into covenant relationship with God.

This is hard for us to hear, because clearly the divine promise of reconciliation has not been fully realized in human affairs.  So we think we know how the world works and how to be practical in the world.  But if we stop… and look… and listen… and open ourselves to something radically new, then maybe we can begin “to learn how to learn” Jesus’ way of non-violence, of new life, of self-giving love and forgiveness and grace—seeing it, hearing it, and learning it in and through the Holy Week story of crucifixion and death… and in and through the Easter story of resurrection.  Thanks be to God.

Listen now for the word of God as we move in Mark’s story from Palm Sunday to Good Friday — Mark 15:1-39 (from The Inclusive Bible)

As soon as it was daybreak, the chief priests, the elders and religious scholars and the whole Sanhedrin reached a decision.  They bound Jesus and led him away, and handed him over to Pilate, who interrogated him.  “Are you the King of the Jews?” he asked.
Jesus responded, “You are the one who is saying it.”

Then Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.  At that moment the curtain in the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom.  The centurion who stood guard over Jesus, seeing how he died, declared, “Clearly, this was God’s Own.”

Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church!
Thanks be to God!