The evening before had been remarkable. That evening, after sunset had cleared away the Sabbath laws, Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples had come to the house of Simon the Leper in Bethany on the eastern side of the Mount of Olives. There, Jesus was the guest of honor at a feast catered by Martha, probably this time with some enthusiastic help by her sister Mary. Their brother Lazarus was also honored, lying beside Jesus beside the low table on the cushions that were common at the time as they ate the feast. Lazarus was honored for having come back from the dead – he had been dead four days! Jesus was honored for having brought Lazarus back from the dead.
These were just two of the remarkable things. The others?
The feast, honoring a Jewish rabbi, was held in the home of a leper! What a remarkable location! Jesus had come to home of an untouchable man!
And then, there was the point in the evening where Mary took a pint jar of pure oil of spikenard, very expensive perfume worth an entire year’s wages – how much do you make in a year? – and she poured it over Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair, an amazingly intimate act that set tongues wagging. The house was filled with the smell of the perfume! Judas Iscariot, the disciple who held the money bag, was outraged – the perfume should have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor. They could have raised a year’s wages - $30,000 in 21st Century money! But Jesus simply said that the poor would always be with us, but that He would not be around much longer. And everybody wondered what He meant. Was He leaving town?
And since Bethany is only a couple miles from Jerusalem, many people had gone out to see Lazarus and Jesus, wanting to see with their own eyes that Lazarus was truly back from the dead, raised about ten days earlier by Jesus. And both of them were there. Alive. Laughing together.
So that morning, when the crowd began to walk back to town, everyone had someone they wanted to tell about Lazarus and Jesus and the miraculous story. And everyone wondered if the teacher from Galilee, the man from the rural north could actually be the Messiah, the savior figure who would kick the Romans out of Jerusalem and Judea, and restore the kingdom of David to its rightful place in the world. Was this the man who would make Jerusalem great again?
As Jesus and his closest disciples approached the crest of the hill, He sent two of them to get a donkey’s colt. Once again, Jesus knew exactly what the disciples needed to say to borrow the animal without trouble. He climbed on the animal and then He, His disciples, and the rest of the crowd walked down the hill toward Jerusalem, waving palm branches they pulled from the trees on the side of the road.
The road from the East that crosses the Mount of Olives is visible from much of Jerusalem as it crests the hill and comes down toward the Eastern Gate. And so, the group of people began to attract attention. In fact, they sang and chanted as they approached with words from Psalm 118:
“Hosanna”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the king of Israel!”
The Temple of God was just the other side of the wall. In fact, there was a gate that opened directly into the Temple area. So it is likely that the leaders of the Temple heard and saw this victory parade coming. In fact, the Gospel writers say that the parade was upsetting to those very leaders, and so they decided to remove Jesus at that point. But the crowd was so supportive of Jesus that they could not make a move on Him.
Why was the crowd so excited? Why were the leaders so upset? Why did things change so drastically that week?
Human beings, throughout history, have demonstrated time and again that we are mostly timid, lazy creatures who want other people to think for us – and do all the difficult things for us. In I Samuel Chapter 8, the elders of Israel gathered together and went to Samuel, the High Priest. They asked for a king to rule them. They were tired of being ruled by God through the High Priest, or through temporary judges. They wanted a king like everyone else had.
Samuel prayed to the Lord. The Lord told him that the people had not rejected Samuel, but they had rejected the Lord as their king – just as people throughout time have rejected God as their king, preferring to keep God at a distance, as far away from them as possible, safely in Heaven on a throne that they never plan to see until after they die. God makes people uncomfortable, for encountering God and bowing to God means that we are NOT God, we are not truly in control of anything, we are not the masters of our own lives. We prefer our rulers to be kings who can die, presidents who can lose their re-election, men and women like us whom we can remove from office when we don’t get our own way. We don’t really want God to rule us, because we can’t get rid of God if we accept Him as our Lord. WE have to change. WE have to do what God asks. WE lose our ability to micromanage our ruler when we accept that God is our ruler.
Kings have rights, you know. They can announce taxes. They can draft young men into the army. They can draft young women to be household servants. They can take your land, your livestock, your cash. And it doesn’t really matter if you call your king a governor, a mayor, a president, or an emperor. The man or woman who rules on earth has all those same rights. And that ruler may be strong, that ruler may be wise or stupid, that ruler may be concerned about the people or about the ruler’s legacy. Kings have rights.
God told Samuel to warn the people about the rights of a king, how he would have taxes and take young men and women to fight in his army and work for him. But the people refused to listen. Their response is instructive: “No. We must have a king over us. Then we’ll be like all the other nations: our king will judge us, go out before us, and fight out battles.”
They wanted to the king to “go out before “ them and “fight” their “battles”. They thought that they would have a champion to do their fighting for them. Somehow, they forgot that they would still have to be in the battles, standing shoulder to shoulder with their friends. They thought that the king would handle it. And in ancient Israel, God led Samuel to anoint the very tall, strong, man Saul, who became the first king.
Even today, we want a political leader who will “take it” to our enemies. We want political leaders that will show the other side of the political battleground the truth by showing up the hypocrites on the other side, by finding the cutting insults, by taking away the industries and jobs which support the other side financially and by providing new jobs at higher pay for “us.” And the wise among us realize that this happens on both sides of the political divide. The wise realize that this is gradually splitting the nation. The wise realize that treating politics like high school football rivalries is bad in the long term. The wise realize that no government is much worse than bad government by the other side. The wise realize that a much worse other side exists who loves nothing more than to see people who should be working together falling into fighting amongst themselves instead.
In ancient Israel, it wasn’t long before King Saul came up against the leader of the other side, a 9 ft tall man named Goliath who had chosen the side of the Philistines. And Saul, a brave man, wasn’t an idiot – Saul knew that in hand-to-hand combat Goliath would beat him. So Saul kept the entire Israelite army camped on one side of a ravine, daring the Philistines led by Goliath to cross the ravine where the Israelites could take them as they climbed up the steep slope toward the Israelite army. You see, it took the entire Israelite army playing defense to hold back Goliath and the Philistines. Saul was concerned because he feared Goliath.
Today, we have formed political armies we call “political parties”. And we still look for the Goliath for our side who will lead the attack on the other side, whichever side we’re on. And we fear the Goliath of the other side who will lead the attack on us.
In ancient Israel, though, a young boy, David, realized that God fought on Israel’s side – if Israel would remember this. And so, young David attacked Goliath and destroyed him with God’s help. David, you see, did not rely upon an earthly king to fight his battles – He relied upon God. And after some time, David became the most successful of Israel’s kings.
At the time of Jesus, the crowd once again wanted a king to fight their battles, this time against the Roman army. And they believed that Jesus was the man who would become the king, the king of Israel in the sense of becoming a military leader. And so they cheered for Him as they marched down from the Mount of Olives. Here was the man who would destroy the Romans for them. Here was their new Goliath – although they called Jesus the King of Israel.
The leaders of the Temple and the religious council were concerned because they feared the Romans. They were afraid that a riot would break out, an insurrection. They were concerned that the palace of Pilate, the Roman governor, would be stormed by a group of rural extremists. The were concerned that, while this might defeat or kill Pilate and the local garrison, they understood that the Romans had legions upon legions with which to return to Jerusalem. They were concerned and feared that the Romans would come back, destroy the Temple, and kill those who led the Temple – themselves. They were not stupid or evil or fools. They had legitimate concerns. But they did not accept that Jesus was the Son of God. They understood that He was simply a charismatic man, a popular leader of the ordinary people. And so they determined that the best way to stop an insurrection was to kill Jesus. Quickly.
Throughout history, the story has repeated itself. A man – or sometimes a woman – rises in popularity. A political group chooses this person to be their king or queen, to fight their battles for them. The Emperor Napoleon fought the battles of the democracy-and-liberty-focused French against the kings of Europe – until he lost. Geronimo fought the battles of the free-living Apache against the American army – until he lost. Hitler fought the battles of the poverty-stricken German people against the French, the British, the Russians, the Americans – until he lost. You can undoubtedly name many other leaders who became war kings – until they lost.
Jesus was not the crowd’s puppet leader. He was not going to fight a war against the Romans until He lost. For Jesus was already born to be a king – and he was already a king. His kingdom had already begun with His core followers. He told Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world. He had plans to conquer the Roman Empire. Indeed, He had plans to conquer the entire world. But it was not going to be a conquest by the sword and the chariot. And it certainly was not going to result in the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman armies because of a revolution led by Jesus.
The conquest that Jesus planned would be by the heart and the Spirit. He would change the hearts of men and women, boys and girls, and by changing their hearts with His Spirit, he would build a huge army of people who would fight the war against evil locally with the deadliest weapons of all – their tongues, their love, their hugs, their submission to every injustice done to them by the enemy. They would win because they could not be killed – only their bodies could be destroyed.
The Spirit would guide and coordinate the attack upon the enemy. Forget trumpets, forget runners with messages, forget semaphores, radios would never be needed, codes were not necessary – the soldiers of the Spirit would communicate by asking the Father for help and the Father would send help and guidance where it was needed.
It took years and decades and a dedicated group of Christian believers for the army to grow. Meanwhile, a group of Jewish Zealots rebelled against the Romans around the year 65, defeating the Jerusalem garrison – and the Romans destroyed the city in 70 A.D. when they returned with extra legions of men. A second rebellion in 130 A.D. meant that the Jews were exiled from Jerusalem, never to return until 1967.
And through the ages, Christian men and women listened to the Spirit, followed the teachings of Jesus, and conquered, mostly without bloodshed. The Roman Empire became ruled by Christian Emperors. The Spirit conquered Europe, then America. Even now it is conquering Africa and Asia.
But people still look for a champion, a king to fight their battles for them. A king to lead them into Jerusalem. But what the people didn’t realize was that their king was always with them, and had been from the beginning. Jesus was not needed at the head of a procession riding down a hill on a donkey’s colt. For God the Father and God the Spirit were already there. No, Jesus did not plan to conquer Jerusalem and the Roman garrison by killing Romans. He planned to conquer Jerusalem and the Roman Empire and the rest of the world by dying in front of Roman soldiers on Friday afternoon – and then, by rising from the dead on that Sunday morning He would begin the counterattack as one person after another surrendered to Him, acknowledging that He had defeated the common enemy of all humans – Death was destroyed by Jesus Christ. The Romans surrendered one-by-one to follow Jesus over the centuries.
Even today, there are those who fight political and personal battles by the swords of insult and embarrassment – there are those who want to destroy their political opponents, there are those who want a king to fight their political battles for them. There are even those who fight in the name of Jesus. But they are not following Jesus. For Jesus has always taught that converting enemies into friends through gentleness, persuasion, and love is the way to win wars – not by attacking with weapons or even with words.
For Jesus always fought by healing His enemies. He fought by giving them the choice of following Him and living forever – or by continuing to fight Him and being destroyed by Death. For the true Christian realizes like David that Goliath cannot harm us, for Goliath can only destroy the body – while because we follow Jesus, we live forever. Spread the eternal Good news of Jesus – this is far more important than any politics that only affects this life.
When you and your team is doing well, it is worth remembering that the crowd loved Jesus on that Palm Sunday. They cheered for Him and told of His great deeds, His healings, His teachings, His raising of Lazarus. But the crowd was fickle. By Friday morning, the crowd was chanting “Crucify Him”.
And hours later, Jesus was dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment