April 5, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 14:1- 15:47

      Let us pray.  Holy God, we are profoundly thankful and deeply humbled by our remembrance of your triumphant entry into Jerusalem. On that day 2,000 years ago people were exuberant in their praise and adoration of you, and so it will be again when God exalts your name above every other. But in between lay the way of the cross, when you emptied yourself, leaving glory behind, and embraced the cross for the sake of all humanity. We are awed by the depth of your love and sacrifice. We so want to identify with the cheering crowd but are afraid that we would be no less fickle than they, ending up denying you as though we never knew you. By the power of your Holy Spirit, draw us to you in renewed love and devotion this week, as we remember your lonely and painful journey to Calvary. Amen.

      There is an old story that some of you may have hard before about what happened to the donkey on Monday, following the Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. The donkey awakened, his mind still savoring the afterglow of the most exciting day of his life. Never before had he felt such a rush of pleasure and pride. He walked into town and found a group of people by the well. “I’ll show myself to them,” he thought.

      But they didn’t notice him. They went on drawing their water and paid him no mind.

      “Throw your garments down,” he said crossly. “Don’t you know who I am?” They just looked at him in amazement.

      Someone slapped him across the backside and ordered him to move. “Miserable heathens!” the donkey muttered to himself. “I’ll just go to the market where the good people are. They will remember me.”

      But the same thing happened. No one paid any attention to the donkey as he strutted down the main street in front of the marketplace.

      “The palm branches! Where are the palm branches!” he shouted. “Yesterday, you threw palm branches!”

      Hurt and confused, the donkey returned home to his mother and tearfully related his experience.

      “Foolish child,” she said gently. “Don’t you realize that without him, you are just an ordinary donkey?” Without him, we are just ordinary.  (Various sources.)

      On Palm Sunday, Jesus was a huge hit with the crowds. He is at the peak of his polularity.  Compare his popularity on that day with that of other prominent leaders, and Jesus wins hands down.  But Jesus as a popular person somehow doesn’t seem to be what the gospel is all about. Do some of you remember, a generation ago now, when John Lennon of the Beatles thought Jesus was a popular fellow. But then in 1966, he infamously proclaimed that he and his Beatle mates were even “more popular than Jesus.”

      Do you remember how that claim set off a storm of protest in a then much more conservative post-war United States as well as around the world…particularly in the Vatican. Problem was that whether you were looking at things from Lennon’s perspective or from that of, say, the average churchgoer, there really wasn’t a way to check the facts of the claim. Lennon was looking at crowds of screaming fans every day, while churches were not exactly being overrun by hordes of teenagers rabidly wanting to get up close and personal with Jesus.

      Taken in context, Lennon’s comment was in reality directed as a slap at Christianity, rather than at Jesus himself.  What he actually said was that “Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.   It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”).  In the midst of all the uproar nobody seemed to want to verify empirically if what he said was actually true or not.

      These days, no rocker could pop off with such a statement without Gallup and a host of bloggers and pundits running the actual numbers. In fact, Internet search-engine giant Google offers a quick way for anyone to compare the relative popularity (or at least the number of Internet searches and news stories) between two celebrities or entities, called Google Trends. Type in “Jesus” and the “Beatles” in the Trends search engine and out comes a graph that compares the Google search history of both in the form of a graph. While we don’t know what the graph might have looked like in pre-Internet 1966, as of today (this past Tuesday actually) the Beatles garner only half as many Internet searches as Jesus does. I am just speculating, but it could be this way because the Beatles haven’t cut an album in decades and half its members have passed on, while Jesus is still the main subject of the world’s number one best-selling book and, according to Christians, still very much alive and at work.

      In the midst of his comments to The London Evening Standard on March 4, 1966, Lennon also said, “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. I don’t know which will go first — rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.” Well, according to Google Trends, Christianity and rock ’n’ roll are both still very much with us and, interestingly, running just about dead even in search popularity.

      On the original Palm Sunday, however, there was no doubt about where Jesus was trending, at least among his followers. Coming up to Jerusalem from Jericho, Jesus and his disciples would have likely fallen in with hundreds of other pilgrims who would swell the population of the Holy City from about 40,000 to more than 200,000 for the celebration of the Passover feast. Passover was a time of celebration, but it was also a time of high tension in Jerusalem. While the festival celebrated liberation from the tyranny of Egypt generations before, first-century Israel was still under foreign domination. The Roman occupation of their homeland was a tremendous irritation for many Jews, tempering the joy that was supposed to be part of the festival. Riots and uprisings were fairly common during the Passover, so Rome made sure that there was a military presence during that week, garrisoning more troops at the Antonia Fortress, which overlooked the temple complex.

      If residents and visitors to Jerusalem had been online in those days they may have run some comparisons of their own. Those of you who took part in our book study last year will remember that Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, in their book The Last Week, say that on that particular Sunday people in Jerusalem would have witnessed two processions, not one: the Pilate Procession and the Jesus Procession.

      The procession of Roman governor Pontius Pilate and his accompanying military force coming into the city from the west provided the additional military for the festival. Googling Pilate would have yielded some disturbing results. According to the contemporary historian Josephus, when Pilate first brought Roman troops to Jerusalem from Caesarea some time earlier, he committed an unprecedented violation of Jewish sensibilities by allowing the troops to bring their military standards and busts of the emperor into Jerusalem by night and set them up in the temple. A massive protest demonstration in Caesarea’s stadium forced the removal of the standards, but only after the Jews used tactics of nonviolent mass resistance, lying down and baring their necks when Pilate’s soldiers, swords in hand, surrounded and attempted to disperse them. Josephus also speaks of protests that broke out on another occasion when Pilate appropriated temple funds to build an aqueduct for Jerusalem. On this occasion, Pilate had Roman soldiers, dressed as Jewish civilians and armed with hidden clubs, mingle with the shouting crowd and attack the people at a prearranged signal. Many were killed or hurt. Pilate would certainly have had a lot of search hits, but he was not very popular.

      On the east side of the city, however, another parade was being planned and the Bethany bloggers would have no doubt been burning up the bandwidth in reporting the arrival of one who would hopefully be a different kind of ruler. Jesus sent his disciples to get a colt, which we assume was a small donkey (Mark isn’t specific). When the colt had been secured, Jesus rides it down the steep road from the Mount of Olives to the Golden Gate of the city, with a crowd of his supporters shouting “Hosanna!” – a Hebrew word that mixes praise to God with a prayer that God will save his people and do it very soon. They spread their cloaks on the colt and cut branches from the surrounding fields – actions that were done only in the presence of royalty. Trust us: They weren’t laying down cloaks and branches for that other guy. On that day and for those who were with him, Jesus was maxing out on the trend chart.

      When we are waving those palm branches around on Sunday morning, one of the things we have to be careful not to miss is that Jesus was intentionally setting up a comparison between the violent and powerful trend of the empire and the peaceful and grace-filled trend of the kingdom of God. Borg and Crossan see the Palm Sunday parade as a kind of pre-planned political protest, and a look at the context seems to back that up. The symbolism of a ruler riding on a donkey would not have been lost on those putting their cloaks in the road, for they would have remembered the words of the prophet Zechariah: an image of a king coming into Jerusalem with shouts of joy from the people. He is “triumphant” and “victorious” – words that Romans and other imperial leaders would have embraced – but he is “humble” and rides on a donkey instead of a war horse (Zechariah 9:9). In fact, continues the prophet, “He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem.” This king is not a conquering hero who uses weapons of mass destruction, but one who will break the power of military might with humility, justice and a “peace” for all the nations (Zechariah 9:10).

      Jesus’ parade is thus an intentional parable and statement of contrast. If Pilate’s procession embodied power, violence and the glory of the empire that ruled the world, Jesus’ procession embodied the kind of kingdom that God was ushering in through Jesus’ ministry of healing, his message of good news and, ultimately, his sacrificial death on a Roman cross.

      Pilate and the empire he represented were the most powerful force in the region on that Sunday, but if you Google “Jesus” and “Roman Empire” today and it’s not even close. Jesus wins in a landslide.

      The rest of Holy Week really comes down to a continued struggle for popularity. Jesus has it on Sunday but, in Mark’s time line, on Monday he turns over the tables in the temple and his reputation takes a serious dip, at least among the religious elite. His verbal sparring with the Pharisees and temple officials had him charting well with the people and led the religious leaders to look for a covert way to bring him down (Mark 11:18; 12:12). “Jesus” vs. “Pharisees” is, again, no contest when it comes to trends. It’s no wonder they were determined to get rid of him.

      However the bigger contrast is the clash of worldviews represented in the text – worldviews that are still at odds. The empire’s worldview of status, power, military might and coercion is as present and dominant in today’s world as it was then. So is the desire for comfort, security, self-interest and wealth, particularly in contemporary American culture. Compare the “Kingdom of God” to the “American Dream” and the kingdom loses big time.   We may admire Jesus, but we’re not necessarily ready to follow him down that road of suffering, sacrifice and servanthood that ultimately leads to the redemption of the world. As if to underscore the point, the traditional route Jesus took down the Mount of Olives went through an ancient cemetery, as it still does today – a stark reminder of where this particular parade will lead.

      Many of the same people who were waving branches on Sunday were gone by Friday, having abandoned Jesus to the powers of the temple and the empire. They read the trends and chose self-preservation over the way of Jesus. The question we have to ask on Palm Sunday is whether we do the same thing when following Christ becomes inconvenient at best or, at worst, seemingly impossible. Following Jesus often means sharing his unpopularity, be it at school, in the workplace or even at home.

      What we have to remember, though, is that Jesus was looking to trend the whole world upward, bringing hope and wholeness through his obedience and submission to God. After all, as Paul tells us, in the end everyone will acknowledge him as the ultimate chart-topper (Philippians 2:10-11).

      Don’t you think it is time to join the right parade!  Amen. 
 
Sources: 
 
Borg, Marcus, and John Dominic Crossan. The Last Week. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2006.  
 
Cleave, Maureen. “How does a Beatle live? John Lennon lives like this.” The London Evening Standard, March 4, 1966. Reprinted on About.com Web Site.   
 
Google Trends, google.com/trends.