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April 04, 2004
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Psalm 24 / Zechariah 8: 1-8
Mark 11: 1-11
April 4th, 2004 (Palm Sunday)
Today is Palm Sunday. All around the world Christians celebrate this day, some with parades in which the people process out of the church and around the block carrying palms branches, saying or singing loudly, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Their neighbors watch with curiosity, wondering what it’s all about.
If you ask someone in the parade why she is doing this, she will tell you, “We’re remembering Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.”
What triumphal entry? We know what follows. It was the calm before the storm. And what a storm it was! Mel Gibson has reminded us how horrible a death Jesus died.
Still, Jesus’ Palm Sunday ride into Jerusalem was a triumphal entry. Why? For three reasons, I believe.
First, the crowds that surrounded Jesus thought it was. They called out, “Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming.” I believe they actually thought Jesus would topple the Romans and resurrect King David’s royal line, making a throne needful in Jerusalem again.
Second, we call this a triumphal entry because two of the Gospels tell us that here Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of the prophet Zechariah. “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! . . . Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass.” Though the Gospel of Mark that we just read doesn’t mention this prophecy of Zechariah, Matthew and John both do.
Third, even though Jesus does not seem to us to triumph over the Romans in the week that followed, Jesus’ idea of conquest was opposite to ours.
Jesus taught his disciples, “The one who wants to find his life must lose it, and the one who loses his life will find it.” This isn’t how we usually think, is it? “Seize the day,” we say, not “Lose the day.” In losing His life that Passover weekend, Jesus was finding it. Indeed, it fulfilled His destiny. This was in keeping with deep truths He taught us.
Jesus said, “The one who serves is the greatest.” “Yeah,” we say piously. Jesus may have said it, but even though we will not say so explicitly, beyond question, serving is servile. And if we serve in an exhibit of Christian idealism, we keep track of our service. Do we not notice if others are doing their fair share?
Why? Is it not because we are governed by a more assertive kind of wisdom? Jesus, in His heavenly wisdom, didn’t see serving as a duty, something to do that you don’t like to do for religious reasons. It was a way of finding life, even for the Son of God. How much life would you like? Here is the measure of how much service to offer.
In the battle of life we fight our pitched battles to preserve our dignity and thereby lose the war of life. But it is a hard lesson to learn that the way to victory in the end is to lose battles now. It’s a lesson hard to learn, on the same order as discovering the blessedness of unlimited service to others.
Even though Jesus suffered and died at the end of this week, we believe a remarkable victory happened on Palm Sunday. In fact, it is a victory we cling to by faith even as we live with a more assertive practical philosophy of life. The great struggle for the Church and for us as Christians is to know how to follow Jesus, while still coming out on top.
I believe God uses the dark tunnels we find ourselves in, in order to see the hope-giving hint of light we can only see if we are in a dark tunnel. If we feel ourselves fighting hopeless battles in which our finest efforts at winning never succeed, so that we sink deeper and deeper into a hopeless gloom, we are in a position to look for light at the end of the tunnel. If we can only learn to follow that light, what brightness will come.
Palm Sunday was a tiny pinpoint of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel for God’s people, the Jews. The Jews had lived in a long, dark tunnel of oppression for most of the previous five hundred years. At times it was unbearable. The Romans under whom they now lived could be cruel. They imposed crucifixion on people as commonly as we throw people in jail. Pontius Pilate was about the worst of a long line of oppressive Roman governors.
Then here comes this very symbolic event. A sign of conquest! Even though Jesus was only accompanied by twelve ragamuffin disciples, no soldiers, no shock troops, Jews who knew their history realized that this was how God did things. They remembered that David defeated Goliath. David’s slingshot was a more lethal weapon than Goliath’s massive sword and spear. They remembered their ancestors destroyed Jericho, a city with tall, strong walls, not with battering rams, but with trumpet blasts. This was how God did things. A humble man with twelve ragamuffin followers was the formula for getting the Roman Tenth Legion out of Israel.
Then there may have been those in the crowd who remembered Jesus fed them using a little boy’s lunch of five small loaves and two small fish. He fed five thousand men plus many more women and children so that they were all full—and there were twelve baskets full left over! They remembered watching the disciples in a boat when a terrific storm blew up on the Sea of Galilee. Then it stopped suddenly. They heard from the disciples that Jesus had said to the storm, “Peace, be still!” And it obeyed his command.
So twelve disciples with Jesus was quite enough to banish Rome from Israel. “Hosannah! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming!” Jesus would do what David did to Goliath. He would lead them in victory over the Romans as Joshua, his namesake, led Israel to defeat Jericho, and then all of the land of Canaan!
But their hopes were dashed. This time the Roman Goliath killed their helpless David. And in the process the people that on Palm Sunday were calling out “Hosannah to the Son of David,” changed their tune. By Good Friday some of them may have been in the mob that cried out, “Crucify Him!”
But we hold no grudge against those people who lined the road Jesus took into Jerusalem. We still look back at Palm Sunday and call it Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We stand with them and look down the dark tunnel of human sadness and recognize that on Palm Sunday a pinpoint of light was shining at the end. He was not intended to provide the full brightness of the Kingdom of God yet. How was this so?
Something very different than anyone expected. There were other Messianic hopefuls before, during, and after Jesus was here. They all ended their attempts at recovering David’s kingdom tragically. They died unwillingly, no doubt sreaming defiance at the Romans who crucified them.
But hope was written all over Jesus’ suggestive ride into Jerusalem. He went to the cross willingly, knowing it was a pyrrhic victory about which His enemies gloated. We recognize this, looking back over the centuries and looking forward beyond Easter to the Second Coming. But there were those in Jerusalem then who sensed that something big was being hinted at too.
The pinpoint of light didn’t turn into a roaring flame that conquered Rome then and there. Instead God was doing something even bigger. The Bible only hints at what this bigger thing was and is. It had to do with the end of death and sorrow, of wars and disease, and ultimately of sin, the great nemesis of the world.
It is the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that is imposed over all the bleak story of human history, over the Holocaust, over Rwanda, over the dreadful massacre now going on in the Sudan. It drapes over the difficulties of your life and mine, over every hospital where people lie dying of AIDS or cancer, over every prison where men and women are locked in barred cages.
Jesus knew the Kingdom of God waited to burst out over this world, so He taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come.” He taught us to pray this because we grow weary of waiting. As we wait God allows tragic things to happen in this troubled world. Meanwhile He plants seeds of hope in our hearts. He provides pinpoints of light, faint glimmers like a suspicion deep in our hearts, that God will prove our hope was not in vain. His love will win in the long run.
How many times in your life have you found one small moment awakening hope in you in a time you were really down? It has been this way for me. Living with chronic illness can seem like being in a long dark tunnel.
Student life too can seem like being in a long, dark tunnel. The weariness of preparing for endless tests and writing papers for professors who are sometimes not the epitome of grace. You catch the flu just when your demands are at a peak. Then your girlfriend breaks up with you. How dark the tunnel can seem. At the moment this seems like all the life there is. Graduation is a word too far off to seem real. But then, a kind word does more for you than you imagined a word could do. It seemed like a light at the end of your tunnel. It lifted your spirits enough to keep on, and you came out of the tunnel alive!
I know a thoughtful and devout older lady who has spent her life in wonderful Christian service. But when she was in her early eighties, a debilitating weakness hit her. She now lives in a nursing home. With all her heart she longs for the work she did and the surrounding presence of the people who shared her vision. But now she’s stuck in a nursing home. It’s a dark tunnel, long, apparently without end. She dreads the thought but suspects it is true, that she won’t leave this place until she dies. But someone from this congregation goes to that nursing home and holds her hand and listens to her and speaks with her, and it is to her like a small hint of light shining at the end of the tunnel.
How various are the tunnels in which we find ourselves. A troubled marriage can be like crawling along a long dark tunnel. Having children with serious handicaps seems like a walk through a long dark tunnel.
John Henry Newman wrote one of my favorite hymns at the darkest period of his life. It is a bit hard to sing musically to modern folk, so we don’t sing it very often. It is a prayer, “Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom. Lead thou me on. The night is dark and I am far from home. Lead thou me on.” It is a hymn I never sing without emotion rising in my thorax. But this sense of living in a dark tunnel, at the end of which we sometimes see a flicker of light, prods us along in the adventure of hope and faith.
I sense that on Palm Sunday God lit a small candle at the end of a dark tunnel for his people. He gave a hint of a triumph that would come.
From the one hundred twenty people who waited in Jerusalem on Pentecost morning, God ignited a flame from that pinpoint of light. It burst into the remarkable movement we now refer to as Christianity.
Christianity spread like a flame across the landscape of the Western world. We look at hospitals and universities and architecture and agriculture as they developed in the West as the fruits of Christian endeavor. And some of the great missionary movements of history sent young men and women from the West to the darkest corners of the world with the Gospel light. And it all began with a small, flickering light in a very dark time.
But nevertheless many people find themselves living in gloom. I wonder what is the nature of your dark tunnel.
While some people in our land are making very good money these days, a lot of people are living on the edge of financial collapse. Beyond our borders, armed conflicts and horrible acts of violence have made Iraq, Israel, the Sudan, Haiti, and so many other places dangerous places to live. The global AIDS crisis is numbing.
The world needs a ray of light now as much as it ever did.
On the first Palm Sunday Jesus provided a spark of hope giving a pinpoint of light at the end of a dark tunnel. Palm Sunday keeps rolling around again each spring. On this day Jesus shines our way again a reminder that we have good reason to trust, to hope, to carry on.
I hope you catch the idea I’m trying to make clear. You who now look out and see darkness, as though you’re in a tunnel, look for the light at the end. How can I say it better than to say as the old Gospel song has it,, “Come to this light, He’s shining for you.” The light at the end of your tunnel is Jesus. Come to Him who is the light. And walk on through your tunnel until you find He has led you out of it.
In a way it sounds so simple, and it is. But looking at the light of Jesus is not a moment’s act. If you have looked at Jesus in a time of darkness, don’t look away when your sense of need subsides. Carry on. Keep looking at Jesus. More than your own need is at issue. If you have seen Jesus, and He is drawing you out of your gloom, you have become a means to help someone else.
Once you have come to the light, in fact, the world is watching to see if what took place was real or a momentary enthusiasm. How disappointed we are when a person who claims to have seen the light of the Gospel lives as though they’d not seen the light, once their dark time has passed. Jesus tells us, “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven.” Or in other words, God intends that you may be the light at the end of someone else’s tunnel too.
Let us pray: O Lord, give us wisdom to look at Jesus so as to see Him clearly, and to follow Him out of our darkness into His light. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at April 4, 2004 09:30 AM