Palm Sunday 2011
When I was a child, Palm Sunday was one of my favorite Sundays in the Christian year. I loved waving a palm branch as the children’s choir led the procession while the whole congregation sang, “All glory, laud, and honor to Thee, Redeemer, King, To whom the lips of children made sweet hosannas ring!” I love a parade! Growing up as I did in good Lutheran churches, Palm Sunday’s triumphant entry was a welcome relief after all the gloom and impending doom of Lent. What I know now that I didn’t know then is that Palm Sunday is the spiritual and liturgical equivalent of the eye of a hurricane. When a well-defined eye of a hurricane is passing over land, the wind and rain disappear and the sky above is clear. Fear subsides, and people come outside. They are sometimes fooled into thinking that the danger, the gloom and the doom, are past. But when the other side of the eyewall arrives, the winds and the rain return with a vengeance.
That’s the part I did not understand as a child: the return of the storm in the events of Holy Week. The impending passion of Christ in Maundy Thursday’s Last Supper, betrayal, and trial; Good Friday’s crucifixion, and Holy Saturday’s descent into hell were lost on me as a child on Palm Sunday. It was only palm branches and children’s choirs and “sweet hosannas ring.” “All glory, laud, and honor to Thee, Redeemer, King.” Is this morning about the palms, or is it about the passion? Is it about the triumphal entry of a king who has come to reign or the arrival of a suffering servant who has come to die? That either/or makes Palm Sunday the most ambiguous Sunday on the Christian calendar.
It also makes Palm Sunday an excellent example of one of the great religious and theological and spiritual challenges our world faces in the 21st century. It is the challenge of selective listening and selective reading and selective believing and selective living.
We all know what selective listening is. One mom characterized it in her family this way. Her family’s “sense of hearing is, at best, unstable, and seems to work in their favor, rather than mine,” she wrote. “If I drop a few coins, my 14-year-old daughter . . . can identify their value by the pitch and tone as they hit the kitchen floor. This same girl, however, can’t hear the dog barking five feet from her while she’s watching television. Presumably, ‘selective listening’ is a genetic disorder, since her father, who was sitting on the couch beside her, didn’t hear the dog either” (http://www.parentinghumor.com/categories/familyparenting/sensorywarfare.htm).
Humans are not the only organisms afflicted with this malaise. I read recently that the law of selective listening is one of many “laws of cat physics”: “Although a cat can hear a can of tuna being opened a mile away, she can’t hear a simple command three feet away” (http://www.pawsperouspets.com/humor/catphysics.html). Cats, like teenagers and husbands, are notoriously selective listeners.
I’ve heard that selective listening even happens in church—so I’ve heard. “A Husband came home from church, greeted his wife, and lifted her up and carried her all around the house. The wife was so surprised, and she asked, ‘Did the pastor preach about being romantic?’ The husband answered, ‘No, he said we must carry our burdens and sorrow’” (http://blogs.rediff.com/prannath/2007/09/19/selective-listening/, alt.). Selective listening.
Selective listening is what made it possible for me as child to hear and to sing the Palm Sunday hymn, “Ride on, ride on in majesty, in . . . pomp, ride on” without hearing the totality of the second line: “in lowly pomp, ride on to die.” I heard the majesty and pomp of the triumphal entry and filtered out the humility and the death at the end of the parade. It’s a dangerously common religious disorder.
In his just-published book titled When Religion Becomes Lethal: The Explosive Mix of Politics and Religion in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Charles Kimball—who in some ways still considers First Baptist Greenville a “home church”—describes the Islamic movement of Wahhabism, the “uncompromising, puritanical approach to Islam [that] took root in Saudi Arabia beginning in the 18th century and became “the most conservative of the four major Sunni legal schools” (p. 194). It features a strict adherence to what one particular 18th century Arabian cleric named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab “understood to be the beliefs and practices of the earliest Muslims.” In the second half of the twentieth century Wahhabism was exported around the world from Saudi Arabia, and it is now most infamously associated with the extremism and the violence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin. Wahhabism is a religious and theological and spiritual disorder of selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living.
But the threat that Wahhabism poses to the West in particular has given rise to a similar disorder among non-Muslims who are choosing to misunderstand and misrepresent all of Islam as though it were all Wahhabi. And it is not. If you associate all Muslims with the radical extremism of Wahhabism, then to be consistent in your thinking, you must say that all Christians are skin-heads and snake-handlers. But you know better than that. And you should know better about Islam also. Selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living is a common religious disorder.
The crowd on the road to Jerusalem in this morning’s gospel lesson wanted a messiah-king so desperately that they threw down their coats on the road and cut branches from the trees to pave Jesus’ way into the city. They turned his arrival in Jerusalem into a parade with singing and cheering, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” They got the part in Zechariah 9:9 that reads, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he!” They got the “Ride on, ride on, in majesty” part. But in their desperation for a king in the image of their own projection, they ignored the rest of the verse: “humble and riding on a donkey” instead of instead of swashbuckling astride a stallion. They didn’t hear that part; they didn’t read that part; they didn’t believe that part; they wanted no part in living that part.
So later in the week, they were all surprised and offended when he offered no defense in response to the accusations that were made against him. When he was struck, he turned the other cheek. When he failed to meet their expectations as the kind of king they wanted they called for his crucifixion. That’s the kind of self-righteous sin that selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living can lead to. And every one of us is susceptible to it.
Some of us, for example, latch on to “Jesus Christ our Savior,” as Titus 3:6 puts it, and wish to hear nothing more of Jesus than that which feeds our personal faith and assures our “entry into the eternal kingdom” in the words of 2 Peter 1:11. Some of us, on the other hand, echo the words of the crowds in this morning’s gospel lesson who announce, “This is the prophet Jesus” (Matthew 21:11). We want an Old Testament Jesus, a reformer of the world order whose mission is centered on creating the ideal society, in spite of the fact that the Jesus of the gospels shows no interest whatsoever in establishing an ideal national or global or ecclesiastical society. He never ran for a seat on the Sanhedrin and he never endorsed a candidate for the Roman Senate. Pietists and policists alike turn their prized image of Jesus into a dashboard mascot whose head bobbles up and down in support of their every whim.
In contrast to the pietists and the politicists and self-centered crowds on the road to Jerusalem, the most important words in this morning’s gospel lesson are spoken by the bystanders in Jerusalem who on hearing all the commotion ask, “Who is this?” “Who is this?”
Every time you figure you have who this is figured out, your figuring will be inadequate. Every time you think you have found out who this is, your thinking will be confounded. Every time you believe you have who this is nailed down, the cross on which your believing nailed him will turn up empty. Who is this?
The New Testament says this is Joseph’s son (John 1:45), Mary’s child (Matthew 2:11), the brother of James and Joseph and Simon and Judas (Matthew 13:55), a Galilean (Matthew 26:69), a Nazarean (Matthew 2:23), a Savior (Luke 2:11), a prophet (Matthew 21:11), a blasphemer (Matthew 26:65), a madman (Mark 3:21), a rabbi (Mark 9:5), a slave (Philippians 2:7), a master (Luke 8:24), the king of the Jews (Matthew 27:37), the king of Israel (John 1:49), the Messiah (Mark 8:29), the Son of God (John 11:27), the Son of David (Mark 10:47), the Son of Man (Mark 8:31), God with us (Matthew 1:23), a glutton and a drunkard (Matthew 11:14), a friend of sinners (Matthew 11:19), the lamb of God (John 1:29), the lion of the tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5), the Word (John 1:1), the true light (John 1:9), the Savior of the world (John 4:42), the bread of life (John 6:35), the light of the world (John 9:5), the good shepherd (John 10:11), the gate for the sheep (John 10:7), the way (John 14:6), the truth (John 14:6), the life (John 14:6), the vine (John 15:5), Lord and God (John 20:28), the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8), the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), the firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15), the last Adam (1 Corinthians 14:45), the crucified one (1 Corinthians 1:23), the risen one (Luke 24:34).
The mistake that the crowd on the road to Jerusalem made was not that they welcomed Jesus as king; their mistake was that they could not or would not see that the Jesus they welcomed is always and everywhere much, much more than a projection of our own expectations and desires. And that’s precisely why Palm Sunday is so important in the annual cycle of the Christian year: it is palm branches and passion.
The truth be told, not one of us can avoid selective reading and selective believing and selective living any more than teenagers, husbands, and cats can avoid selective listening. The question is not whether you are selective or not; the question is what your principle of selection is. What do you select and why? What are the consequences of your selection for your listening, reading, believing and living?
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the parade while the palm branches are waving and the sun is shining and the band is playing. We all love a parade. But Palm Sunday is the eye of a religious and theological and spiritual hurricane, a temporary respite before the storm begins anew with a vengeance in the upcoming week of the Christian year because who Jesus is is more fully and authentically revealed in the cross than in the parade.
So even now, as Holy Week begins, we turn our attention in the direction that Jesus’ attention had been focused all along: to the cross, to the cross, to the cross. There is no better principle of selection for listening, for reading, for believing, and for living than the cross. After all, it was the cross that was waiting at the end of the parade: “Ride on, ride on, in majesty ride; on in lowly pomp to die.”
Photo by davecurlee, used under license of Creative Commons.
This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.
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