A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Brooks Berndt
New Testament Reading—Luke 19: 28-40
Palm Sunday puts a twist on history, but in order to understand how, one has to begin with what took place 200 years before Jesus’ celebrated entry into Jerusalem. The Seleucid king of Syria Antiochus Epiphanes ruled over Judea. In an effort to force Greek culture upon the people, Judaism was outlawed. The penalty of practicing the Jewish faith was death. Upon the Temple of Jerusalem was erected an altar to Zeus. An apocryphal book not included in our Bible called First Maccabees says that “women who had their children circumcised” were put to death along with their families and those who performed the circumcision. It even says “they hung the infants from their mothers’ necks.”
In response to this situation, a guerilla army was formed by a family known as the Maccabees. After more than 20 years of fighting, they achieved Jewish independence. First Maccabees tells us of the newly liberated people entering Jerusalem in military triumph as “a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel.” They entered with song and music. They entered with cymbals, harps, and other stringed instruments. They entered praising God and waving palm branches. If you ever wondered why we have palms on Palm Sunday, this is the origin. Palm Sunday gives us a twist. A march of military victory and triumph turns into a march of peaceful protest and celebration.
This past week when I first began reflecting on the moment in which the peasants of the Jerusalem countryside flocked to Jesus with their palms I think I might have made the wrong assumption. I assumed that the peasants were expecting to see the leader of a violent revolt, a modern Maccabeen who would free them from Roman rule. In my mind, I thought of something I heard years ago. I had heard that traditionally in Mexican politics the leaders were tall and had fair complexion, so when the migrant farm workers in California heard about this great leader named Cesar Chavez they were expecting someone of that mold, but what they saw instead was this short, dark skinned man with apparent Indian ancestry. They laughed at the idea that he could be a leader. Thus, I initially wondered if perhaps the peasants who flocked to Jesus similarly came with the wrong idea of who Jesus was. But our scripture doesn’t indicate this is the case. The peasants don’t turn around upon arrival and say, “This isn’t the guy. He’s riding a donkey, not a war-horse.” Instead, they are throwing their cloaks on the ground as a sign of respect for royalty. Instead, they remember the scripture that speaks of the king coming “humble and riding on a donkey.” Instead, they are testifying to all of the wonderful deeds they have witnessed from Jesus. Instead, they are shouting that Jesus has come representing the peace of God. All of this was happening at the same time that Pilate rode into Jerusalem on his warhorse with his army of Roman soldiers. The Romans were coming with the express purpose of quelling any revolts inspired by Passover, and yet these peasants don’t turn their back on Jesus and say, “This guy on a donkey is a joke.” The peasants seem to get what Jesus is all about, and Jesus affirms them for it. When the Pharisees tell Jesus to order his disciples to stop what they are doing, Jesus says, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would cry out.” The peasants knew who they were following, and Jesus didn’t want them to stop.
With this new view of the scripture, I tried to think of how it might relate to our present day. When I prepare to preach a sermon, I am always looking for modern day stories that I think are in someway analogous to the scripture. This past week marked the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and it wasn’t hard for me to see an analogy between the U.S. as an occupying force and the Roman Empire as an occupying force, but as I combed through the different news reports, I was having trouble finding what I felt would be analogous to the nonviolent voice of opposition Jesus embodied. The Christian scholar Walter Wink helped me to think about the kind of leader for which I was looking. He once wrote about how we often think of only two responses to violence: fight or flight, retaliation or submission. Wink argued that Jesus offered a third way. This was the way of creative non-violence. In the third way, one seizes the moral initiative. Rather than being a doormat, one asserts one’s own humanity and dignity as a person. In this third way, one can undermine the symbols of power with carefully chosen symbols of one’s own. You can ride the donkey of the true king while your foe rides the warhorse of the foreign imposter. You can turn symbols of humiliation into symbols of pride. You can stand your ground, or in the case of Jesus, you can march straight into the heart of power.
So with all these thoughts floating around in my head, I was struggling to find a modern day champion of the oppressed riding humbly into town on a donkey. As I flipped threw news articles, I kept coming back to one article in particular, and I would say to myself, “This is the only article about the Iraq war that has at least a glimmer of hope, but it’s too bad it doesn’t have anything to do with Palm Sunday.” It was a story about how U.S. military veterans have come together with Iraqi civilians to launch a campaign called the “Right to Heal.” The story featured a woman from Iraq named Yanar Mohammed and a U.S. veteran named Maggie Martin. The two had decided that they were allies rather than enemies. They had decided to work together to repair the harm caused by the war rather than to let the harm continue to widen the distance between our two countries. The story focused a fair amount on the high numbers of children in Iraq born either without limbs or with undeveloped brains as a result of our use in Iraq of nuclear weapons in the form of depleted uranium. In a town of 109,000 people located next to a U.S. ammunition training field, 600 children were born with the same birth defect. Amid this devastating situation that one would think would only lead to increased animosity between our countries, I found it to be extraordinary to find this collaboration between a veteran and an Iraqi civilian. Their campaign has this wonderful website righttoheal.org that is full of information and ways to do something, and I kept thinking it’s too bad this doesn’t relate to Palm Sunday, but just when I was about to search for a different angle to take, an idea occurred to me: maybe I was looking for the wrong kind of leader to be my modern Palm Sunday Jesus.
A few years ago I preached a Palm Sunday sermon on Ghandi because he was this nonviolent leader who participated in marches and galvanized the peasants of India through the symbolism of his actions. I was looking for a similar kind of peasant leader, and it then occurred to me that what I really needed to look for wasn’t a peasant leader of the Ghandian mold but rather someone who was willing to travel into the heart of power and be the nonviolent voice calling us to justice and peace, calling us to a different kind of world, a beloved community. I then realized that was exactly what I witnessed in the person of Yanar Mohammed who had traveled from Iraq to the United States with her unlikely message of peace and her unlikely embodiment of that message in her relationship with an Iraq war veteran. I imagine some in our country might be unsettled to hear it said that the modern incarnation of the Palm Sunday Jesus is not only a woman but has the last name Mohammed. I am reminded of a chapter in a book by Desmond Tutu entitled “God Is Clearly Not a Christian.” After all, aren’t all of us made in the image of God? Don’t all of us have the potential to be doers of love and vessels of the divine? Do we really want to say Christians have a monopoly on God? Tutu declares “that what we call the Spirit of God is not a Christian preserve, for the Spirit of God existed long before there were Christians, inspiring and nurturing women and men in the ways of holiness, bringing them to fruition, bringing to fruition what was best in all.” The more I thought about this the more I thought of how fitting it is to have our image and expectation of what a peace leader looks like be challenged on Palm Sunday. I think Jesus would like it. I think he would raise a palm and shout, “Hosanna!” Amen.