A Palm Sunday Message (2009) by the Rev. Frank Stricklen, a Pittsburgh Presbyterian pastor and musician whom I met on Facebook.The hopes of a nation were riding with Jesus on the original Palm Sunday. Could this be the Messiah? He certainly had the pedigree. The two genealogies in the New Testament attest to the fact that he came both from the line of David and from that of the Levites. Messiah was to be both King and Priest and Jesus could be both. So every eye was on him as he made his way down the parade route.
Now this was no lavish parade. No grand spectacle. This was a spontaneous celebration by an oppressed people expressing what hope they could muster with whatever they had on hand. Not the lavish pageants of roman excess but the meager and paltry celebration with rags and leaves and whatever could be found by people under the boot of Rome who had little to celebrate and less to celebrate with. Jesus even rode in on a borrowed animal. Still. Every eye was one him as he entered the city and approached the temple. All eyes watched as Jesus walked in and looked around before deciding it was too late in the day to do anything and left. Still the people watched, and waited, and hung on every word. But gradually their patience wore thin and inside a week, as Jesus failed to live up their expectations, he was carrying a cross through the same streets as the now jeering crowd trampled the dried up palms into the dust.
Dust. Less than 40 days ago, we were reminded that we are but dust and to dust we shall return. Indeed, the Creation account reminds us we are made from dust, from the same substance as the earth. (Perhaps so we would value the earth and take care of it. There’s the green commercial for the day.) The Hebrew word for Earth is Adamah and the name of the first man is Adam which literally translates as earthling. We are a people of dust. But what gave us life was the spirit of God. Spirit and Breath are pretty much the same word in Hebrew. So God breathed us full of spirit and gave us life in hopes that we would remain in fellowship with God.
Alas, we chose otherwise. We chose to exercise our free will and go our own way. We sought to recreate God in our image and to act as if we were masters of the universe and as if all of Creation was our plaything to do with as we pleased. In short, we fell. And fell hard. And what God had said would happen did happen. We began to die. Maybe death was a punishment for sin. But more likely it was just a consequence. Perhaps we cut ourselves off from life and breath when we distanced ourselves from the spirit of God that was our breath. Maybe, without God, we are nothing more than dust and when we’ve been apart from God long enough, that breath, that spirit just ceases to be in us and we die. Like it or not, this story and the grisly events of this week remind us of our sin and the resulting death and that we had nowhere to go and no recourse for ending that cycle.
So we needed a saviour. A messiah. A universal king who could reconcile us to the One who gave us breath. Someone who could atone for us. Set things right. Wipe the slate clean. Give us a do over.
And that is what happens in this week as the palms of Sunday give way to the passion of Friday. But today of all days, as Pittsburghers reel from the senseless death of three policemen who answered a call and lost their lives in an instant, how are we to reconcile God’s desire to love us and be in relationship with us to the grisly death of Jesus on the cross? Read St. Anselm and you’ll hear that it is God who demands death and sacrifice.
We crossed God and now God is going to cross us back. We dishonored God so someone has to pay with their life. Since a human besmirched God’s honor, then a human must pay the debt. And since no human can do that, God lovingly gives the only begotten Son as a scapegoat--human enough to pay the debt owed by humans but divine so as to be able to do what humans cannot. That is, live a perfect and spotless life so that the sacrificial lamb is unblemished and without spot. We made a debit by rejecting God and now Jesus will offer his life as a credit to wipe out our debt. Done. Finis. Mission accomplished. His death pays our debt. Sound familiar? You’ve probably heard it all your life.
But another church father, Athanasius says “Hey, wait. Hold on a minute. Don’t you think that Jesus’ life was also redemptive and not just his death? Didn’t Jesus’ entering into our flesh through incarnation redeem humanity? Wasn’t his life and his teaching and his healing and his preaching and his obedience and his relationship to God also redeeming our fallen nature as he lived in our flesh the life that God had hoped for us all along? And sure, God used the cross and death for redemption. But wasn’t the resurrection redemptive and also the ascension where Jesus carried our flesh into heaven making it possible once again for humanity to live in and relate to God? So then a question comes to mind. If all of Jesus’ actions in our flesh helped redeem us, and it wasn’t just about death and punishment, then who demanded a bloody cross? Was it God or us?
Some modern theologians are beginning to talk about the fact that, rather than demanding the cross, God may have used it, a la Romans 8, to make good out of a horrible tragedy. Perhaps it was we, uncomfortable with having the divine so close and coming up short in comparison to his perfection, who decided we needed to get rid of this guy. Perhaps he was monkeying with our perceptions of religion so that we could no longer act as if we were good enough to earn God’s favor. Rather than admit that we are utterly dependent on grace and give up the illusion of being “good people,” maybe we religious types did Jesus in so he’d quit blowing the curve for the rest of us. Perhaps it was just our sin that nailed Jesus to the cross and God used that for our redemption, making all things-even this horrific and grisly death-work together for good.
But let’s go even further. The scripture today says that “unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies,” there can be no new life, no rebirth. Maybe death, rather than being the punishment we’ve come to associate with the Fall is actually just God’s intervention on our behalf. Perhaps, when God created the world and humanity in the eternal possibility of life and relationship with Godself, all of Creation was in a state of eternal springtime, ever vibrant, ever alive, ever drawing from God’s restorative love and power, with no need for rejuvenation. Perhaps, as God created us, in full knowledge of the depths to which we would sink, God foresaw how we would fall so far short of God’s hopes for us and demand Jesus’ death and how God would use it to redeem us. And maybe, at that time, God introduced the seasons to help us understand God’s ability to snatch victory out of the hands of seeming defeat by making the power of death moot, just a winter, a temporary season of rest from our fallenness and our wanderings so that we and the earth could be reborn into an eternal springtime of love and justice and restored relationship with God. Perhaps the seasons that we have come to know so well are God’s way of letting us know that death is temporary. That through Christ we will one day enter into God’s eternal season of love where death, pain, sickness, sin and harm will no longer be permitted or remembered. As we emerge from the season of winter, we can take comfort in knowing that the seeds and, indeed, the seeds of faith, planted in hope but seemingly lifeless, will spring forth into new life, a colorful testimony to the love and power of God. The sheaf of wheat and cluster of grapes on the piano today, reminding us that one of our own has gone to be with God, point to the fact that those who go before us to God, those who die and are planted in the ground in hope, rise to be with God in a new season we can only long for as we continue to live in the Kingdom dim
ly seen and not fully come.
That is the promise that we carry with us as we move through the darker days of Holy Week toward that dawn of light and life that is Easter. Thanks be to God. Amen.
You can visit Frank's website HERE.
