Palms, Power, Pain, Betrayal, Prayer

Triumphal Entry, Emmanuel Nsama, Zambia 1969

Our service started this morning on the lawn outside our church, with guitars and palms and a short Palm Sunday reading.

It was a cold morning, hovering on the edge of snow. Our voices sounded thin in the cold air. The waving of palms was half-hearted and the hosannas were more like murmurs than the robust shouts the occasion called for. As I said, it was cold. And we’re Episcopalians– not much given to shouting.

Even so, there was something in the observance, and the readings that followed, that opened a window to something unexpected.

I’d been talking in the church atrium just before, over coffee and bagel, with a fellow parishioner who had asked what I thought of the presidential election. He mentioned the 2014 Charles Marsh biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory, and for a few minutes we wondered together how the German church had found itself supporting Adolph Hitler, why there were so few who joined Bonhoeffer in determined resistance.

Standing in the cold with a palm in my hand, I glimpsed, for just a moment, that emotion on the streets of Jerusalem, the cry of support for someone coming in power to smash the enemy and set things right.

It’s the same emotion that welcomed the Israelite kings, that cried out in praise of Caesar, that echoed through the Nuremburg parade grounds when Hitler held his rallies.

We all struggle with the voices inside us; we’re susceptible to that inner cry that wants to affix blame for the things that have gone wrong, that wants someone strong to come and take our side.

Demagogues, by definition, gain power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people. They promise to use that power to trample opponents and make life better for the people who support them.

And if we are the chosen ones, and they are the enemy, what’s to stop us from crying Hurrah! Hosanna! Heil!

Our service this morning led us back into church, where we followed the readings of Holy Week: the Passover meal in the upper room, the agonized prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ trial and beatings, Peter’s betrayal.

I’ve never understood Judas’ motivation: why sell out someone he’d followed for three years?

Yet this morning, listening to the familiar words, I suddenly felt Judas’ anger, his outrage, his own sense of betrayal: the one who was supposed to seize power and smash the Roman conquerors was kneeling to wash his followers’ feet. How dare he! As if Donald Trump, on Election Day, called time-out to make lunch for his campaign staff and quietly explained that he had no intention of winning. What a wasted opportunity!

Judas’ betrayal, I believe, was prompted by his own sense of betrayal, his anger that the story he envisioned was going wrong, that Jesus refused to grasp power and spoke of pain instead.

Peter’s betrayal was more from confusion, when he grabbed his sword and sliced at a soldier’s ear, and then from both confusion and fear, when he said, with mounting panic: “I don’t know him! I DON’T KNOW HIM!”

In one sense, he was right. He didn’t know him. Didn’t understand that Jesus would be the one to conquer power by choosing his own great pain instead.

The brief sermon this morning focused on the need to stay present in the story of Christ’s passion: to not rush to resurrection, to not run past the reality of Christ’s death on the cross.

We would all like to think the world is a mess because of those people over there. Immigrants, unions, Republicans, Obama. Refugees. Muslims. Terrorists. Christians!

Gone.

Whoever they are.

Whatever they’ve done.

But Jesus invites us to see our own complicity in the pain of the world.

Our own brokenness.

Our own sin.

Our own selfish refusal to listen or love.

And then he offers to take the consequence himself. To gather to himself our own death, our own darkness, our own outraged, outrageous anger.

That makes us angrier still.

How dare he.

We’d like them smashed, fixed, changed.

In 1933, just days after Hitler's long-sought appointment as chancellor, Bonhoeffer preached a courageous sermon on Gideon and the inevitable attraction of power:

Gideon’s warriors must have been flabbergasted; they must have shuddered when he gave them the order to go home. The church is always astounded, and shudders, when it hears the voice of the One who commands it to renounce power and honor. To let go of all its calculations and let God alone do God’s work. We shake our heads and are scandalized as we watch many a Gideon among us going his way. But how can that confound us who see in the midst of our church the cross, which is the sign of powerlessness, dishonor, defenselessness, hopelessness, meaninglessness, and yet is also where we find divine power, honor, defense, hope, meaning, glory, life, victory. Do we now see the direct line from Gideon to the cross? Do we see that the name of this line, in a word, is “faith”?

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith alone conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God’s victory means our defeat, our humiliation. . . . It means the world and its shouting is silenced, that all our ideas and plans are frustrated; it means the cross. The cross over the world . . . .

The people approach the victorious Gideon with the final trial, the final temptation: “Be our lord, rule over us.” But Gideon has not forgotten his own history, nor the history of his people. . . . “The Lord will rule over you, and you shall have no other lord.” At this word, all the altars of gods and idols fall down, all worship of human beings and human self-idolization. They are all judged, condemned, cancelled out, crucified, and toppled into the dust before the One who alone is Lord. Beside us kneels Gideon, who was brought through fear and doubt to faith, before the altar of the one and only God, and with us Gideon prays, "Lord on the cross, be our only Lord. Amen.”

I listen to Christians explain why we should support Donald Trump and hear echoes of the cry for Gideon to gather his forces.

I listen to friends explain that Trump won’t win, we have nothing to fear, and think of the long years of German struggle, years of growing anger, of propaganda, of scapegoating, of longing for Germany to be great again, of feeding that voice that cries ‘let’s get rid of those who are causing the problem! We need someone strong who will make things right again!” 

When we feel betrayed we are most at risk of betraying the one who invites us to the cross.

Christ's Crucifixion,  Master of
 Vyšší Brod, Bohemia, ca 1630

He invites us to set down our plans. Our swords.

Our rights. Our guns.

Our longing for privilege and power.

Our fear that the world we know and love has been ruined by forces we can't control.

Invites us to kneel with Gideon.

With Bonhoeffer.

With Peter, once he came to his senses.

Invites us to embrace the pain of betrayal.

Invites us to love our betrayers.

Invites us to kneel and pray:

Lord on the cross, be our only Lord. Amen.




An earlier Palm Sunday post: The Call of the Cross, April 1, 2012
For more about the cross and its significance: Thank You for the Cross

Invitation to the Cross

As part of my Lenten observation this year, I'm taking a break from writing new blog posts and updating and re-posting earlier material. Today's post was first shared on April 1, 2012.  For another Holy Week post from the past, consider also Thank You for the Cross, April 17, 2011.

Black Crucifixion, Fritz Eichenberg, 1963, New York

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look,

he said.
The son looked. . .

On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it,
As though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
  (from "The Coming," R. S. Thomas)

There is something unsettling about the story of Palm Sunday. Crowds gathered to cheer a likely candidate, one of their own who could draw a crowd, who could take back Jerusalem from the evil empire, who could promote their agendas and ensure their safety.

It’s easy to picture the crowd. The objects waved might be different (flags? pennants? streamers?), but the energy is the same.

It’s not so easy to picture Jesus, riding the donkey through the crowd. Luke says, "as he approached Jerusalem he wept.”

Not normal hero behavior.

Did the crowd notice? Did they wonder why?

With the cheers of the adoring crowd echoing in his ears, Jesus went on to the temple, where he upset the economic order by throwing over tables: money changers, merchants of sacrificial doves, commerce sent scrambling. The accommodating (well-recompensed?) religious leaders were enraged: how dare he?

From there, he went on to tell a series of stories meant to alienate the insiders, the holders of power, those most convinced of their own righteousness.

Then the Passover meal, with talk of sacrifice and death, and the embarrassing scene with the bowl and towel.

Foot Washing,  Gunning King, 1936, UK

It’s an odd story, shifting from adoration, to alienation, to anticipated grief.

There’s nothing in the story that sounds invented, “mythic,” polished.

It’s told in each of the gospels with a sense of quiet amazement, with a raw honesty unexpected in religious text. Facts outlined, dialogue sketched, strange stories reported as the lauded candidate for coming king deliberately dismantles the grand expectations of friends, followers and crowd.

.Vinoth Ramachandra, a Sri Lankan who has written and lectured extensively about pluralism, world religions, and the uniqueness of the Christian faith, notes in The Scandal of Jesus: Christ in a Pluralistic World:

If you wanted to convert the educated and pious people of the empire to your cause, whatever that cause may have been, the worst thing you could ever do would be to link that cause to a recently crucified man. To put it mildly, that would have been a public relations disaster. And to associate God, the source of all life, with this crucified criminal was to invite mockery and sheer incomprehension! This was indeed the experience of the first Christians

This message, if true, subverted the world of religion. For it claimed that if you wanted to know what God is like, and to learn God’s purposes for God’s world, you had to go not to the sages, the lofty speculations of the philosophers or to the countless religious temples and sacred groves that dotted the empire, but to a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem. The world of the first Christians was every bit as pluralistic, if not more so, than ours- culturally and religiously. But for the Jews a crucified Messiah/Saviour was a contradiction in terms, for it expressed not God’s power but God’s inability to liberate Israel from Roman rule. For pious Greeks and Romans, the idea that a god or son of a god should die as a state criminal, and that human salvation should depend on that particular historical event, was not only offensive, it was sheer madness.

This message, if it were true, also subverted the world of politics. It claimed that Rome’s own salvation would come from among those forgotten victims of state terror. Caesar himself would have to bow the knee to this crucified Jew. It implied that by crucifying the Lord of the universe, the much-vaunted civilization of Rome stood radically condemned. The Pax Romana was a sham peace. Like all imperial projects, it was built on the suffering of the many. And God had chosen to be found among the victims, not the empire-builders. Little wonder that the Christians’ ‘Good News’ (‘Gospel’) was labeled a ‘dangerous superstition’ by educated Romans of the time.

Now, it is the madness of this ‘word of the cross’ that compels us to take it seriously. I am a Christian today because there is something so foolish, so absurd, so topsy-turvy about the Christian gospel that it gets under my skin: it has the ring of truth about it. No one can say that this was some pious invention, for it ran counter to all notions of piety. And nothing was gained by it. All who proclaimed it suffered as a result.

Ramanchandra goes on to explore further the subversive nature of the cross: it subverts not only our ideas of religion and political power, but of self, autonomy, family, tribe, national identity:

White Crucifixion, Marc Chagall, 1938, Russia

"When illustrating what it means to belong to the kingdom of God, Jesus takes as his paradigmatic examples those who had least status in his contemporary society. In a world where children had no legal rights, economic possessions or no social standing, he makes them the model for those who receive the kingdom of God (Matt.18: 1-4; Mark 10: 13-16). When, on the eve of the crucifixion, he washes the feet of his disciples like a household slave, and requires them to do the same for each other (John 13:3-15), he makes slaves the paradigms for leadership in the kingdom of God. If the kingdom of God belongs to people such as slaves, the poor, and little children, then others can enter the kingdom only by accepting the same lack of status. The cross brings all human beings, men and women, rich and poor, religious and irreligious, to the same level before God. It is at the foot of the cross, that all human beings, without exception, are revealed as the objects of God’s forgiving and re-creating love. This is the egalitarian politics of grace." 

Jesus doesn’t invite us to Palm Sunday, to a triumphal politics of power, a proud exclusionary religion of exceptional righteousness.

He invites us to the cross, to the foot of the cross, to align ourselves not only with him, but with every marginalized, forgotten, condemned person who ever lived.  He calls us to set aside status, entitlement, self-justifying argument, self-protective agenda, and find a new home in his family of grace.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, struggling to understand the call of the cross in the face of Nazi fascism, wrote: 

“The Cross is not the terrible end of a pious happy life. Instead, it stands at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” (from  Discipleship and the Cross )

Come and die.

Christ of the Homeless, Fritz Eichenberg, 1982, New York

Jesus said “greater love has no one than this than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. . . This is my command: Love each other.”

The Christian faith is more than words, buildings, organizational structures, theological frameworks, philosophical exposition, like-minded people sharing like-minded values. At its core, the Christian faith is a community of deeply broken, deeply loved people, knit together by allegiance to a dying friend on a distant hill, choosing each day to sacrifice personal preference and self-fulfillment for the needs of a deeply wounded world.

Come and die. Not great ad copy. Not a catchy campaign slogan.

Yet that call sounds across the centuries, and we can trace the outlines of history through the lives of those who have understood and answered that call.

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments.