Let’s
Get Him Right for a Change
March
29, 2021
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Yesterday was
Palm Sunday. It marks the beginning of the most sacred week in the Christian
year, the week in which we walk with Jesus through his prophetic entry into
Jerusalem, his last meal with his disciples, and his crucifixion. After we have
gone through all that we celebrate his resurrection on Easter Sunday. It’s
quite a journey, and one of the striking things about it is the way the people
of Jerusalem turned on Jesus. I once gave a sermon with the title “Hosanna! Crucify
him!” in which I delved into that reversal of the crowd’s attitude toward Jesus
from Sunday to the next Friday. The stories of that change in the mood of the
public go like this.
At the beginning
of the week Jesus enters Jerusalem, and he intentionally does it in a prophetic
way. In the oldest account we have of his entry Jerusalem, the one in Mark, we
read:
Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on
it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others
spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went
ahead and those who followed were shouting,
‘Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in
the
name of the Lord!
Blessed is the coming kingdom
of
our ancestor David!
Hosanna
in the highest heaven!’
Then he
entered Jerusalem and went into the temple….Mark 11:7-11a.
It’s a celebratory scene. It’s
also a prophetic one. Jesus here enacts a scene from Hebrew scripture. At Zechariah
9:9 we read:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O
daughter
Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you
triumphant and
victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the
foal of a donkey.
By riding a donkey into Jerusalem
Jesus portrayed himself as that humble but victorious king. He rides a donkey
not a magnificent war horse. The donkey is not an animal of war. It is an
animal of peaceful agricultural pursuits. Riding one creates quite a different
impression that riding a war horse does. Clearly Jesus was intentional about
creating that different impression.
Fast forward from
Sunday to Friday. Mark describes the scene on that tragic day this way:
Pilate spoke to them again, ‘Then what do you wish me to do
with the man you call King of the Jews?’ They shouted back ‘Crucify him!’
Pilate asked them, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more,
‘Crucify him! So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd…handed him over to be
crucified. Mark 15:12-14.
The crowds that had welcomed him
in celebration on Sunday now want the oppressive, occupying Gentile Romans to
execute Jesus in the brutal, horrible way they executed political criminals, by
nailing him to a cross.[1]
In my experience
Christians tend to react to the change in the crowd’s behavior that these
verses give us in one of two ways. Mostly they ignore it. They hear the stories,
but those stories are so familiar to them that they hear them but don’t think
about them much. Or they do think about them and are puzzled. What happened? Why
did the crowd turn so viciously on the one whose coming they had so celebrated?
It’s not an easy question to answer, but here’s what I’m quite sure is the
reason.
It has to do with
what the crowd says as they cheer Jesus’ arrival in the city. As we just saw
they say,
Blessed is the
one who comes in
the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the
coming kingdom
of our ancestor David. Mark
9b-10.
Notice particularly what these
people are expecting from Jesus. They think Jesus is going to reestablish the
kingdom of David. David was a Hebrew king who lived and ruled around one
thousand years before Jesus. He expanded the Hebrew kingdom to its greatest
extent ever. He has a military leader. He made his name fighting the
Philistines. By Jesus’ time people had developed an expectation of the coming
of a messiah, that is, one divinely anointed to raise an army, drive the Romans
into the sea, and reestablish a kingdom that hadn’t existed since 586 BCE when
the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah.[2]
The crowd that welcomed Jesus that Sunday thought he was that messiah. They
thought he would call the people to arms to attack and defeat the Romans,
probably with divine help. They wanted him to create an independent Jewish
state like David’s had been so many centuries earlier.
But what
happened? Jesus didn’t do any of those things. What did he do? Mostly he taught
his revolutionary vision of God’s will in the temple. He had no weapons. He
called no one to arms. He didn’t even try to attack the Romans. He attacked the
temple authorities, albeit mostly only verbally, but that wasn’t what the people
wanted or expected the messiah to do. So they turned on him. Our text says the
temple authorities stirred them up against him, and maybe they did. Whether
they did or not Jesus had so disappointed them that they were ready to turn on
him. They’d get the Romans to inflict a punishment on him that they could not.
They shouted “Crucify him.” That’ll show him they surely thought.[3]
This is the only
way I can explain how in this story the crowd’s shout of “Hosannah!” on Sunday turned
into “Crucify him!” on Friday. They had built up their hopes for liberation
from the Romans and placed those hopes on Jesus. They thought he would bring
them that liberation, but he didn’t. He didn’t even try to. So to hell with him,
they thought. We’ll get the Romans to get rid of him for us, not that the
Romans needed their demands or support to crucify a troublemaker like Jesus. They
did that all the time. Still, in this story the crowd urged to Pilate to
crucify the one who they considered to be a false messiah in whom they had put
so much hope and who had disappointed them so horribly. Their “Hosannah” became
“Crucify him!”
But of course
Jesus really was the messiah. It’s just that he wasn’t the kind of messiah people
expected or wanted. He taught creative nonviolence not military conquest. He
taught transformation of the world through peaceful inner transformation of
people one person at a time not transformation of the world through violence.[4]
He said God blesses the poor and powerless over the rich and powerful. No one
expected that kind of messiah. I don’t blame the people of Jerusalem for
rejecting Jesus and even calling for his crucifixion the way my Christian
tradition tragically has for nearly two millennia. The people of Jerusalem that
week that Jesus was there really did get him wrong. Their disappointment and
anger are understandable if certainly not commendable, and they explain their
change from Hosannah to Crucify him!
Many people get
Jesus wrong today too. They expect him to return in power and glory to set the
world right, or at least set the world what these people think is right. Sorry
folks. Not going to happen. Jesus wasn’t about worldly power and glory. Rather
he taught us to respect and care about and for those the world scorns and
oppresses. He preached justice brought about by nonviolent opposition to the world’s
unjust ways and systems. He modeled
self-giving love as the way God wants us to live. He displayed righteous anger
toward evil but never let his anger turn him violent. He showed us a life of
spiritual health lived in an intimate relationship with God. Best of all he
demonstrated to us, most powerfully on the cross, God’s presence and unshakable
solidarity with all people in everything that happens in life, especially
suffering and death. So let’s stop making Jesus something he wasn’t and stop
expecting him to do things he never would do the way those people in Jerusalem
did so long, long ago. Let’s finally get who he really is. May it be so.
[1] I
deal here with this story as it is told in Mark. There is a consensus among
scholars about the probable historical inaccuracy of the story. It is almost
certain that Pilate had Jesus crucified on his own initiative. He didn’t need a
Jewish crowd to urge him to do it, and he wasn’t one to be concerned about
satisfying such a crowd.
[2]
The words messiah (from the Hebrew) and Christ (from the Greek) both mean an
anointed one.
[3]
Let me say again that this part of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion is almost
certainly not historically accurate. Tragically the notion that the Jewish
people turned on Jesus and demanded his crucifixion has been a pretext for
Christianity’s horrendous history of anti-Judaism up to and including the
Holocaust. Almost certainly the Jewish people in Jerusalem at the time had
nothing to do with Jesus’ crucifixion. Again, I’m dealing with story here not
history.
[4] See
Mark 5:1-13 and the discussion of that story in Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating
the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition,
Volume Three, The New Testament (Briarwood, NY, Coffee Press, 2019)
39-40.
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