Texts on Palm Sunday, April 9, 2006
2 Samuel 15: 13-14, 19-23, 30-31& Mark 11: 1-11
When David the king crossed horseless and overthrown out of Jerusalem and down into the Kidron Valley, weeping with all his aides and retainers and their families, he imprinted yet more deeply on the people who would remember him for centuries a question. What is power? What is victory? Here, David has lost the whole thing, it appears. His son, a simmering pot of resentments, has mounted a successful coup d’état, splitting the northern from the southern tribes, and forcing his father to flee Jerusalem, the “city of David,” the capital he had established for all the tribes–and not only those of Israel and Judah but for the indigenous Canaanite tribes as well, and for still more from surrounding lands. David founded his city on the top of a modest mountain–Zion, according to tradition–which faces, to its east, another modest mount, the Mount of Olives. In the valley between the heights there ran a brook called the Kidron. We have heard today but two of several accounts in 2 Samuel of how David handled the crisis of his overthrow. All the stories share this character, that no matter the extremity of his situation, the king paid attention to his people; to strangers like Ittai the Gittite as well as to “all the people who passed by” him in their flight from the violence. David left the town last, climbing up the Mount of Olives weeping, barefoot. Is this power? Is this victory?
He came back, as you may know. After a fierce battle in the wilderness in which his son was killed, contrary to his orders, David must finally have come back, now down the Mount of Olives, moving west across the Kidron Valley and now up Zion’s side, no doubt mounted this time, riding into his city to rule again until his death. That was power, to be sure, and victory. But can power in its shining form be safely separated from its sister, humility, which moves in shadows? Nations always think so or pretend so. After David, though, no one could move down the Mount of Olives on a mount and up the side of Zion to enter Jerusalem in any sort of procession, with any sort of ceremony, and that event not be a political event–either a symbol of taking power for Israel’s cause against usurpers; or, as on that first Palm Sunday, a question about humanity itself. What is power? What is victory?
When from the side of Olivet Jesus sends disciples to find a tied colt in a village on the slopes of Zion, he cannot but reflect on David before him and on the history of his nation and of all the nations in their desperate quest for power to end their wars in a final victory. What the nations almost never see is that their wars, and their desires for leaders into war, arise from their own spiritual emptiness. David, however, weeping, barefoot on the Mount of Olives, foreshadows the spirit of leadership needed in a new humanity. In their wisdom, Israel remembered him. Before this week is out, Jesus will also be found on the Mount of Olives, barefoot and grieving in the garden of Gethsemane, lighting the way for a new humanity. Now his procession is underway. He is mounted and entering the city to cause the world to ask forever, What is power? What is victory?
In 1944, while the “good war” still raged, Lewis Mumford published The Condition of Man. He traced there the history of western civilization’s descent into the fascist barbarism of Nazism. The lines he drew, however, do not portray the social patterns of America and its allies in the colors politicians prefer. He wrote:
Western civilization knows only one religion that compares in scope and vitality with the . . . traditional religions. Even more than the Church, [it is] nationalism [that] gave to the inhabitants of every country and region a common faith: belief in an ideal past, hope for a common future. . . . Very few people were persecuted for their belief in Christianity during the past century . . . [but] the cause of nationalism has produced a legion of martyrs and saints. (353) . . . The nation became god; and the state assumed the position claimed by the Church, as God’s representative on earth. But the new god was a tribal god . . . This paranoid nationalism, with its absurd claim to the uniqueness and greatness of its own chosen people. . . was [a] pathological over-stimulation of feelings and perceptions that were in origin mainly sound. One element was lacking that was needed to counterbalance it: the element of universality. (355)
The one element lacking in Mumford’s searing critique of the religion of nationalism is how ancient is the grievous sin of loving one’s nation more than peace, more than humanity, more than God. The element of universality is precisely what David introduced into his relations with the tribes. The element of universality is precisely what Jesus introduces into his relation with all peoples. Recently, we heard again John’s account of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan–the foreign–woman: “The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem . . . for. . . God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.” The element of universality is precisely what offended the nationalist fever in the minds of authorities both religious and secular in Jesus’ day. And Jesus’ universality still offends . . . Christians!
So many who call themselves Christian today are loud adherents of the religion of nationalism. Recently, a fragment of America’s evangelical leaders delivered to the present administration a manifesto of concern for the environment, whose interests have been trashed by this government, and, more significantly, by our whole national culture. What a breath of fresh air, that a few of those Christians who actually have the ear of national leaders would use their audience for universal principles of eco-justice, requiring sacrifice. But how rare! Now, to acknowledge that in all ages, since before David, the will to live in transformative, transnational love has been weak is not to relax into fact, nor to condone it, for history’s lesson in this matter of weak spiritual will is severe. Nations decay into tribal warfare when their people lose the stamina to seek transformation of their natural and national desires for power and victory. Even while that “good war” was not yet over, Mumford offered this further critique of our nation’s arms:
Without a deep regeneration and renewal, the external triumph of American machinery and arms will but hasten the downfall of the Western world . . . But the actual force of [this triumph of machinery and arms] can easily be over-rated: any positive minority of equal energy, even one as weak as Christianity in the second century A.D., would have enough élan to take over Western society, for we are living in a time of decay. The oldest and most obvious form of decay is that of Christianity, with its millions who go numbly through the motions of a faith that is contradicted by every waking hour of their day. Even the Sabbath is no longer a day of spiritual change, no longer a day dedicated to inner communion and contemplation. With all the talk of reunion between the Churches and the sects . . . there are few real signs of the deeper spiritual effort required for Christianity’s renewal–its willingness to merge, for the sake of the universal values all men should share, with the faiths of other races and peoples which Western man too long spurned. An unchristian pride, disguising itself as a unique revelation of truth not granted to other peoples, still blocks the essential sacrifice. (376)
The essential sacrifice of oneself for all, foreshadowed in David, is now astride a donkey on the way into Jerusalem. This is power, this is victory–if they will but see it, if we will but see it. Palm Sunday stands for the choice, ever present and not patient of annual festivals, to love what God is actually doing on earth, universally and absolutely, to bind all things together. Let the sound of these glad Hosannas stand in you like a bell resounding with the possibility of love light and free in the spirit of Jesus Christ, unburdened from the tragic decadence of our nation’s religion. For the moment of decision hangs like a single violin’s note oscillating perfectly, second upon second, as if waiting for the resolution you will conduct in time. Will this waving of your palms crash down as the nation’s usual clamor to be rid of this fire of love universal on a donkey? Or will this song of love absolute on your lips today ascend like a dove above religion and tradition, driving you deep into the things above for the rest of your life, where you, O Christian, train yourself to see what God is doing–to be what God is doing–by looking through your religion and no longer at it; by looking through Jesus and no more merely at him, to see what God is doing. To be what God is doing.
When you become aware of what it is to break with the crowd on Palm Sunday–what it is to break with the crowd of America waving its flag in worship, red state/blue state, it matters not–you see what power is, and what victory is, in the eye of God, on the back of a donkey. You become free to move like Jesus into your holy week. For he entered Jerusalem, just as we must enter our city and our history. And he went into the temple, not spurning his tradition, though it had decayed into torpor, just as all religious traditions in all cultures decay into props for the national defense. So we too need to enter our temple, which is the tradition of Christianity, and not spurn this tradition, even though it is in many ways decadent and powerless to throw light on spiritual paths leading to spiritual victories for many of its adherents. Still, we must enter. For us, this means to learn well the whole language of the Bible, for you cannot converse with fellow citizens or show a light on a path different from the one this nation is on, the path of decay, unless you know the mother tongue. And you cannot convey to those who have left the tradition that there is reason in proclaiming all things held together in Christ–blue and red in a purple majesty–unless you can speak this universal language of divine love which God has revealed to you in Christ. So, like Jesus, we too must enter the temple of religion, aware of its power to seduce and its power to destroy, but hopeful, nevertheless, that in the Spirit, these pillars, these signs, this cross may yet make these bones thrill.
And then, having left the crowd, when we, like Jesus, have looked around at everything, everything–the beauty of our people’s art and culture, the genius of its government, the awesome power of its military and its industry, the courage of its generations and much more besides–when we have looked around at everything at last, and know in our depth that we are no longer tempted by any of it–neither do we hate it all; nor are we slow to pray for all in thrall to it; nor are we ignorant of what is good in all that we have looked at–then, seeing that the hour is late, we, like our Lord, are now ready to make the essential sacrifice. We are ready to let go of everything we have looked at, at last, knowing there can be no final accomplishment in all these things, no perfection, no great power; yet knowing therefore that we can walk into our holy week, full of the power of God’s doing on earth, rather than our own; ready for God’s victory over all our little schemes; ready to be present, like David, like Jesus, no matter our extremity, to do the thing most needed here, now, without calculating the consequences. Ready to act, ready for the essential sacrifice, ready for life eternal now.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, April 2006
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