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March 20, 2005
Looking at Jerusalem from Afar
Looking at Jerusalem from Afar
Zechariah 8: 1-8 / Matthew 21: 1-11
March 20th, 2005
At this hour last week I sat with my friend, Malcolm Elliot-Hogg in an exquisitely beautiful baroque church in Prague-Czech Republic. Everyone wore winter coats because the building was not heated. We could see our breath it was so chilly.
Yet my heart was warmed even though I could not understand a word the young priest said. It was simply good to be in a house of worship on the Lord’s Day. A tiny, apparently poor, hunch-backed old woman and a young girl with pretty blond hair walked down the center aisle with the Communion bread and wine.
I always return from these mission trips with a fresh perspective on things. My sense is that the Church in Eastern Europe is in great need. I read much of James Michener’s novel Poland on the flight back this past Thursday. It is historically accurate, I was told. It provided me a window through which to see why the Church in that part of the world may be as it is today.
Christianity was largely introduced by force hundreds of years ago. Can you imagine, “Become a Catholic Christian or die!” There were Orthodox Christians who died as though they were pagans at the hands of men with large black crosses sewn on tunics defending the honor of Jesus. Campus Crusade for Christ’s appeal sounds much more like the Gospel I know. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”
The countryside of Poland is soaked with the blood of people who have been victims of invasions and the violence of neighboring powers that played with Poland like a Doberman with a rabbit. It is a miracle that Poland still exists. It was the setting for some of the worst crimes against humanity during the Second World War. I visited Auschwitz on Tuesday and came away sick at heart and numb. Then came Communism. The story of Poland is profoundly sad but the people I met were resilient and good-humored.
Our business as Christians is the Gospel, which is “the power of God for salvation to every one who believes.” Salvation has to do not just with “eternity,” a life beyond this life. Salvation is healing of the soul now. It is to have visible effects. The Gospel is the means by which the Kingdom of God invades this world, spreading the effects of grace from person to person. The Church is the tool God uses to spread the ways of the Kingdom displayed in the lives of people and as an earthly society, a company of the committed, to use Elton Truebloods’ term.
I thought of these things after my teaching duties ended. I had to turn my thoughts to this morning’s Palm Sunday service when we remember Jesus’ suggestive donkey-ride into Jerusalem at the start of the week before He was crucified. I read the extended section of Matthew’s Gospel in which is found this morning’s Gospel lesson. The section begins with Jesus announcing to His disciples that He would soon suffer and die, but would rise on the third day.
They were understandably shocked and Jesus seemed uncharacteristically mean when he replied to Peter’s protest, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” We are startled at Jesus’ response. Why should he rebuke a friend for wanting Him not to suffer and die? They could not possibly have understood the resurrection.
Jesus then spoke very straight to His disciples. “If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Those are emotion-stirring words, but I think Jesus must have said them quietly.
We customarily dissect Jesus’ words here. We think of “following Jesus” as automatic for anyone who makes some sort of statement of belief. “Coming after Jesus” includes a vast throng, I suppose, in our thinking. And we are careful to guard each person’s dignity and not challenge whether the “coming after” produces a way of life that is intentional in its difference from an ordinary life.
We come to the “Let him deny himself,” and we start to get edgy. Deny what? we ask nervously. The Apostle Paul suggested an everyday sort of self-denial when he said, “Let each of you esteem others better than himself.” “Look not every one on her own concerns but take regard for the concerns of others.” Denying myself, we sometimes hear, means, “God first, others second, myself last.” It sounds spiritual, but it’s pretty hard to live up to. Jesus’ words echo embarrassingly through time, “If you want to come after me start by DENYING yourself.” “You have to lose your life to find it!” No! We shout back at Jesus. “I must express myself.” Jesus may have said, “The meek will inherit the earth,” but it ain’t so in Camelot where we live.
We’d like to eliminate this part of the Gospel. We’re more into “express yourself” than “deny yourself.” From the very start with our children our goal is to see them express themselves—with a parenthesis between ages two and nineteen when it gets a bit inconvenient. And we coach them to maximize their opportunities. We hope good sermons, Sunday School, and VBS will come to balance their self-fulfilling desires with the high idealism of the Gospel, but let not the balancing go too far.
Second, Jesus said, “Let him take up his cross and follow me.” My cross and yours has nothing to do with the ordinary difficulties of life, sickness, bills, etc. You are not my cross, nor am I yours. My cross is the means by which I am crucified with Christ. Our cross is the means by which we die to self in order to live as Christ did, doing the will of the Father, even to the point of dying for the sake of others. Whenever my desires collide with what I know would be Jesus’ advise to me, I’m seeing my cross out of the corner of my eye. When we see our cross Jesus tells us, “pick it up, don’t push it away. Pick it up and climb onto it. Sure it hurts.” Mel Gibson helped us see how physical crucifixion hurt. So does crucifying self-serving desires. But when we do, or try to begin to, it means we’re stepping into the Jesus’ way.
Third, Jesus said, “to find your life you must lose it.” It is a logic that makes us choke. No, Jesus, I must find my life. I must seize the day. Carpe diem. And thus we muddle on, and look at the world, and look at the church, and wonder why the Gospel doesn’t work.
Well, the days went by until what we call Palm Sunday came. Then Jesus made a very unwise career move. Denying Himself meant riding conspicuously into the very jaws of His enemies. Riding on the donkey colt was very suggestive to any Roman soldiers who happened to be watching. This was apparently an open show of rebellion. There were rebel leaders in those days. There was a whole class of Jewish rebels against Rome called Zealots. There was one named Jesus, in fact. It was a common name then. The soldiers must have watched carefully as Jesus of Nazareth rode into the city with people waving palm branches and throwing their coats in front of the donkey as he rode by.
But nothing outwardly revolutionary happened. Instead, Jesus went into the Temple of His own people and cleaned house. He infuriated the leaders of His own people. Nobody then thought of the words of the prophet Zechariah that told how this started, “Tell the daughter of Zion, your king comes to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.” Jesus led the way in the inward rebellion against the claims of personal advantage and security.
I chose for our Old Testament reading other verses from the prophet Zechariah. Will Gray read for us God’s promise, “I will bring them to dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness.” Because here we see the larger picture in which Palm Sunday’s donkey-ride into Jerusalem is just one detail.
The section Will read ended with the words, “in faithfulness and righteousness,” words that seems to apply to God. But I wonder if they apply instead to the phrase before in which the Lord says, “they shall be my people.” “They shall be my people in faithfulness and righteousness.” And “I will be their God in faithfulness and righteousness.” I read on in the prophet Zechariah to the end and discover that God’s beckoning call extends far beyond Israel.
God promises in the Book of Zechariah an ingathering of peoples at the great Jewish feast of Ingathering, the Feast of Booths. “And if any of the families of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, there will be no rain upon them.” This passage ends with words that point forward to what happened in the Temple on Palm Sunday. “There shall no longer be a trader in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day.”
Here I have to introduce something that some of you might consider a technical theological subtlety. There are those who study the life of Jesus as it fulfills prophecies such as this and think that Jesus thought He would fulfill the prophecies within His own lifetime. They think Jesus was wrong in His sense of timing. It was one of the things Jesus did not know, a part of His humanity. He emptied Himself, Paul tells us in that wonderful passage in Philippians 2.
Instead of fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies in His own lifetime, Jesus was introducing a new era in God’s work that would point to the final consummation of God’s re-claiming of this world. Jesus announced the doom of Satan, of sin and death, but it would not be yet.
But when I read the whole sweep of the Gospel of Matthew as it leads up to Palm Sunday, I see something different. Jesus told His disciples very clearly what following Him would mean for them. He was simply leading the way. At the very beginning Jesus told them, and He tells us—and this is the big issue for you and me—that if they and we are going to come after Him, it means denying ourselves, taking up our crosses, and plugging along after Him. The result would be rejection and even persecution.
In between this description of what it is to be a Christian and Jesus death and resurrection we find in chapters twenty-four and twenty-five Jesus’ teaching about a very scary time to come that seem to suggest the end of the world. In 24: 34 Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place.” Some who read this in the most literal sense believe Jesus thought that the end would come within the lifetime of His disciples. Obviously, we’re still here. The end hasn’t come yet. Was Jesus wrong in thinking the world would end soon? No. Jesus had a far more expansive idea of time than we do.
In the Church these days there are plenty of people who are concerned with Bible prophecies that seem to suggest the days of our earth are numbered. We see wars and rumors of wars. We have seen that self-expression has gone to extremes of the most glaring evil, in violence, in the grossest kinds of sexual perversion, in ruthless subjugation of peoples, in rampant disrespect for decency, in materialism that threatens the earth’s resources. And we wonder, are all these signs of the approaching apocalypse?
But when we read history we know that we now simply maintained the ways of humanity since the days of Noah. Then Genesis tells us, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” In that day, Noah stood out. He found favor in the eyes of the Lord. This means he had to cut against the grain of his society.
This is what Jesus did on Palm Sunday. He cut against the grain of society in denying Himself, riding on donkey back into the grasp of those who hated Him. He did so for a reason: He loved a world that needed the costliest sacrifice possible to redeem it. In Noah’s day God destroyed the world with a flood. In Jesus’ day the tables were turned. God sacrificed what was most precious to Him to save the world. John 3: 16 encapsulates this truth: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
And every circumstance of your life which is difficult is merely a personal opportunity to step behind Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame.” It costs something to follow Jesus. It has to, because the world is in bad shape. Your life’s sorrows and mine encapsulate the sorrows of history as found in the life of one person.
In this troubled life, as it often is, you and I need to climb on a donkey’s back and ride with Jesus into Jerusalem, knowing that a trial and crucifixion will follow. But it is when we accept this invitation to follow Jesus that we start to find life. And when many people in community do this we find something called “the Church” where the Lordship of Jesus is more than an idea.
I pray that God, by His grace, may lead us this very day to find good donkeys to ride behind Jesus into the Jerusalem before us. To climb aboard that donkey you and I must deny ourselves and flex our muscles to carry the cross on which we will be crucified to self. But we do this knowing we will rise to a new life in Christ. This is the Gospel of Palm Sunday. I hope it is clear to my heart. I hope it is clear to yours. May the Lord Jesus here find a whole herd of little donkeys occupied by people following after Him.
Let us pray: Lord, we have tried to understand the part of the Gospel that tells us of Jesus’ self-denial, riding to His death, by which He fulfilled His care for us. Help us to see where we fit into the picture of those who come after Him. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at March 20, 2005 09:30 AM