Riding Toward the Truth: “Hosanna!” to “Crucify!”
Exodus 20:15, 16; John 12:12-15; John 19:1-7
A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie
University Congregational United
“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” John 12:13b
“Crucify him! Crucify him!” John 19:6b
It’s amazing just how quickly something can fall apart. It’s amazing how dreams can crumble, how hopes can be smashed, how convictions can be vaporized. We like to think that life will just get better and better, that we will be happier and happier and that it will all happen somehow effortlessly. But it’s not always like that.
It’s good to ponder this for a moment as we conclude this series on simplicity, on not lying and not stealing as hallmarks for solving problems and finding integrity, it’s good to ponder once again, the circumstances surrounding this Palm Sunday story. (And incidentally, my childhood memory of Palm Sunday is that it was the first act in a drama of triumph that really peaked the next Sunday on Easter with the celebration of the resurrection. So I want to be sure that every child here this morning understands that what happened to Jesus in Jerusalem during that week that we call Holy Week was a very complicated and sad story filled with misunderstandings and anger and resentment. People thought Jesus was going to save them from the Romans. People thought Jesus would conquer the Romans with the same amazing power that he used to heal people. But Jesus didn’t come to conquer the Romans. Jesus came to illustrate the incredible power of love.) What is it about us that this particular part of the story of Jesus helps us to understand?
Inside ourselves, we have something let’s call the “little self.” This is the ego, that thing that wants to protect us, it wants us to be happy, it wants us to feel we are OK, it wants to give us a sense of being in control of our lives, of our destiny. The little self is a driver and it doesn’t like taking the back seat. It is so powerful that it can eclipse even the most powerful of relationships as when Peter denies his association with Jesus three times as Jesus had predicted he would. His ego overcame the passion of the relationship he had with Jesus because that little self knew that if he confessed his relationship, he too would be executed.
The people in the crowd cheering as Jesus entered Jerusalem on that day, were people just like you and just like me. They wanted certain things, certain things that would make them feel better about themselves, about their community. They were living in a kind of imprisonment and wanted desperately to be free. It’s an interesting parallel to the enslavement of the Hebrew people in Egypt. In Holy Week, we celebrate a different but related imprisonment, the imprisonment and control of the ego with the consequence that what can seem to be a triumph can very quickly turn to a disaster.
Thomas Hardy wrote a poem about the fine line between concern for self and concern for other. It’s called the Man He Killed. It goes like this. “Had he and I but met/ by some old ancient inn,/ we should have sat us down to wet right many a nipperkin[1]./ But ranged as infantry/ and staring face to face/ I shot at him as he at me/ and killed him in his place./ I shot him dead because—/ because he was my foe/ just so—of course he was;/ that’s clear enough; although/ he thought he’d ‘list, perhaps/ off hand like—just as I--/was out of work—had sold his traps—no other reason why./ Yes; quaint and curious war is!/ You shoot a fellow down/ You’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.”
What Hardy has done is to point out the fickle nature of humanity and the power that the ego has over what might otherwise be compassion or justice or both. In World War I, people shooting each other could see each other and doubtless, the power of this poem comes from the questions that are raised by recognizing the common humanity in the other. But when we are “forced” we shoot and in the case of Jesus’ triumph, the crowd and once again, we are the crowd, turns against him and shouts “Crucify him! Crucify him!” We remain prisoners even when we might actually wish something different.
And that’s what makes Palm Sunday so difficult to grasp. Why, we wonder, did Jesus have to endure suffering? Why did his journey take him through such a dark place as the last supper, the episode of the Garden of Gethsemane, the arrest and the crucifixion? How could triumph have descended so far?
To abide by these two commandments, don’t steal and don’t lie, requires a commitment to integrity and integrity requires a constant struggle with the ego. The ego doesn’t care much for anything except the self. But to have integrity requires a balance of concerns about the self and concerns about others, about community and about the world. Finding this balance is the drama that concerns much of great literature and poetry, such as the one by Hardy, great drama and great films. This struggle seems to be at the absolute center of our beings.
That struggle then becomes a concern for doing the right things, a concern for standing for something that has moral purpose, that is, that serves the common good. In this week’s issue of Newsweek Magazine there is an article with photographs about the new president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Mrs. Johnson is the first elected woman national leader in African history according to this article. The piece actually contains several photographs of African women in positions of leadership, and in the face of each one we can see a determination to contribute to the common good. In many cases this puts these women at personal risk. Leadership by men in Africa (as well as other parts of the world) with some dramatic exceptions such as Nelson Mandela, has been a story of corruption and deception. It is as the magazine suggested that lust for power. This lust appeals to the masculine in every human being and it can triumph if it is not tempered by the very important desire for moral integrity. Most of the drama of human history has to do with these competing forces: the lust for power versus the desire to do good and the concern for the self versus the concern for the other.
The story of Jesus is the story of a fierce determination to put the concerns for the other in the forground of his life and to mediate that lust for power with the power that love brings to contributing to the common good. And as Jesus rides toward that truth, the truth that tragedy can be redeemed, he shows us what the power of God’s redeeming love can do for God’s precious world. Amen.