Then They Remembered

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Palm Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 12:12-16

“¹²The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. ¹³So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord— the King of Israel!” ¹⁴Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written: ¹⁵“Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” ¹⁶His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.”

It SO HELPS to understand the context of and the history behind an action in order to more fully appreciate what message that action conveys – or conveyed at the time that it originally occurred.   

You’ve heard me say before, in approaching scripture, that our greatest challenge is to put ourselves in the place of those who first heard or read the passages that we study – whether in our Wednesday evening studies or in Sunday School or in worship.  At two thousand years’ remove from the original events and places and people we are reading about, we have to slog back through two thousand years’ of accumulated traditional understanding and interpretation and layers upon layers of presumptions and overlays from intervening eras and scholarly and theological commentary, which includes insights that time and distance preclude us from grasping as well as cultural and societal misconceptions and prejudices and skewed understandings due to ignorance of the original situations – and in saying that I am not only talking about any given period among the last twenty centuries, but I am also including our current culture and society. 

While our exploration and reasoning and computer models and scholarly study seem to be unparalleled in history, I must admit to the possibility and even the PROBABILITY that we are potentially as off-base as any of those ‘middle ages ignorant and superstitious alchemists of central Europe’ were, simply because there is no definitive, objective and unbiased record of the events just as they happened at the time from the time. 

Absent that, we go with what we have been able to decipher from the text itself, historical documents unrelated to the text, but which corroborate the story, and known history. 

Growing up, it was always something of a mystery to me how the same people who at the beginning of the week seemed to be welcoming Jesus and praising his arrival could in the space of just a few days turn so completely against him and cry for his execution at the end of the week.

What I’ve come to understand in the study of the events is that, in the very things that I was interpreting as positive, encouraging expressions from the people of Jerusalem, seen in the light of the context in which they were expressing those feelings the seeds of the very same devastating rejection and hatred are evident. 

All three basic elements that we, viewing the events from a post-resurrection perspective understand in the light of that resurrection, have within them the plainly evident indicators of the carnage to come. 

First, to put the scene into it’s timeline context:  It is the day after last Sunday’s meal at the home of Lazarus and Martha and Mary.  It’s been maybe a week or less since Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave.  Today we talk about a ‘News Cycle’ – that is, the length of time that a story can draw attention and capture an audience before they move on to the next big story.  Depending on the story, there is usually somewhere between a 24 and a 72 hour window of time during which any given story can dominate the headlines, conversations around water coolers, and radio talk shows.   In first-century Palestine, the news cycle was quite a bit longer.  People are still hearing about Lazarus’ being raised from the dead for the first time days later.  It is THE topic of conversation.  And here is Jesus, the very one who DID THE RAISING coming into Jerusalem.  You can pretty much BET that everyone that could was going to BE along that road between Bethany and Jerusalem to see him go by. 

Now, keep in mind the larger context:  Judea is under the occupation of Rome.  People have been chafing under that rule for decades.  A Century before the Romans first moved in, the Syrians had come in and conquered Jerusalem and Hellenized the Jews (convinced them to accept Greek culture) to a degree that caused consternation in one group of former priests led by Judas Maccabeus (the name means ‘the hammerer’) they first escape to the surrounding mountains, and then come back and kick out the Syrian conquerors, and set up what ends up being the last independent Jewish state until modern times. 

One key element in that story is that, after the deliverance of the Temple and the city form the Syrians, the Maccabeans used palm branches in their celebrations.  From that time on, the palm fronds were not simply decorative and colorful, they were also reminders of an event where a relatively small number of devout men overthrew and kicked out what would by objective standards be an overwhelmingly more powerful force of an occupying empire. 

So when the people along the road to Jerusalem were waving palm fronds in Jesus’ face as he passed by, they were symbolically encouraging him to do the same thing to the Romans that the Maccabeans had done to the Syrians.  And this was most likely not lost on the Romans.

Their mood was even reflected in their cry of ‘Hosanna!’ – a chant which meant ‘Save (or deliver) us NOW’ – and in their blessing of Jesus as ‘he who comes in the name of the Lord’ (drawn from Psalm 118:26). In the original context this phrase referred to the Temple pilgrim on is way to worship, but here it was reinterpreted by the crowd to mean the king of Israel on his way to conquest. 

In the midst of this demonstration Jesus carried out a demonstration of his own by finding a young donkey on which he sat – hardly the standing or strutting of a conquering hero that would have been the expected form of approach – to symbolize his mission as a man of peace.  The act brought to mind the actions of the King of Israel in Zecharia 9:9, where, even though he is the King, he enters the city as a King, yes, but riding on the foal of a donkey, and proceeds to “cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations;” the symbolism in Jesus’ act is strong – he is stating pretty emphatically that his is not a reign of power over a people, designed and wielded to subjugate unwilling followers, but a reign of a type of power that has not been heard of or seen before.  The power that will voluntarily give itself in the place of the other person, that will surrender to the will of God in spite of the fear and danger and ultimate risk that doing so will bring. 

And here comes the editorial note in John’s Gospel:

 ¹⁶His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.

The Gospel is written decades after the events.  In retrospect, things began to make a lot more sense than they had at the time.  The immediacy of the experience was overwhelming to them – it would be to anyone who was that close to Jesus through his ministry.  On a side note, as I mentioned last week, it didn’t seem to be lost on Mary, or on any of the other women who ministered alongside as well as to Jesus.  That may be a message for a future WMU emphasis Sunday…

Finally, the post scripted note from John:  when Jesus was glorified, THEN THEY REMEMBERED that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.  It took the experience of the resurrection, and seeing and being with the resurrected Christ, combined with the indwelling Spirit after his ascension, their own memory of the events, and the witness of the scriptures that they already held in their hearts to bring them to the understanding of what Jesus was doing and saying in those actions on the road from Bethany to Jerusalem on that day, the first day of his final week.

As the disciples remembered, may we continue to remember the fullness of the meaning of what Christ did, what Christ is doing, and what Christ has done for us and for the whole world.    

Let’s pray.