Mark 11:1-11 "Patient Following" Scott Hoezee

At a pre-concert lecture, the conductor of a symphony orchestra was telling the audience about the major work that the orchestra would be performing at that evening's concert. The conductor told the people that if they listened carefully to the music, they would discover that it was both surprising and inevitable. On the one hand, the musical score would take a fair number of rather jarring and unexpected twists. There would be points in the concert when the blare of the trumpet or the sudden rolling of the timpani would seem to come from out of nowhere in a surprising fashion. On the other hand, however, the conductor noted that in the long run, these surprises would themselves become part of a larger coherence. Once listeners heard the entire piece from start to finish, they would find in the music an air of inevitability--how could it ever have been written any differently?

Surprising and inevitable. Whether or not we often reflect on it, most of us have experienced this quirky combination. Maybe on your favorite TV show a new character is introduced at some point but the actress the producers hired for the role strikes you as an incredibly surprising and unlikely choice. You just can't imagine this actress being part of your favorite show. But over time, somehow, it works and so the day comes when you can't imagine anyone else playing that part. She ends up seeming like the inevitable choice In our lives there are any number of surprising twists and turns that our paths take but sometimes, and in the long run, we look back and can't imagine life having turned out any other way.

Palm Sunday and the events of this upcoming Holy Week are both surprising and inevitable. The truth is that we are not completely sure what to make of Palm Sunday. Ever since March 5 when we observed Ash Wednesday, we've been in the deep purple season of Lent. We've been steadily trekking toward the cross, somberly marking our own sinfulness and admitting that our sins are among the reasons for Jesus' terrible death. Now we are nearing the end of that Lenten journey. We are really, really close to the cross today--in fact, we are now so near to Skull Hill that the shadow of the cross has fallen squarely across our path.

But now, after forty days of Lenten travel, we arrive at a day that seems at first blush to be surprisingly cheery. The Palm Sunday parade has color and spectacle, cheering and singing, festive voices and joyful exuberance. This seems like a happy day. Yet it would be completely appropriate if you were to ask, "What in the world is this day doing here given how close we are now to the cross!?" Is Palm Sunday a bright spot in the midst of the otherwise darker hues of Lent? Are we, for just a little while this morning, supposed to forget about all things dreary so that we can cry out some full-throated "Hosannas!"? Or is there a dimness to also this day that we must bear in mind?

Because after all, precisely what is it that we are celebrating? Although it is wonderful to read about how the crowds in Jerusalem hailed Jesus on that long ago day, we know full well that almost to a person--from the disciples on down--those people were celebrating Jesus for all the wrong reasons. We know that the moment Jesus disappointed their hopes four days later, those folks turned on him. The same crowds. The same people. "Hosanna" on Sunday, "Crucify him!" on Friday. "Give us Jesus" on Sunday, "Give us Barabbas" on Friday. "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" on Sunday, "Cursed is the one who hangs on a tree" on Friday. The people about whom we read in Mark 11 were messed up. So just how enthusiastic should we become when we reflect on what they said and did? Is this worth celebrating anymore?

In John Grisham's novel, The Firm, an exceptionally gifted young man fresh out of law school lands a dream job with one of the most respected law firms in the country. The partners in this firm greet him royally, wining and dining him, buying a house for him and his young wife, lavishing him with accolades and praise. It was a glorious start to his law career! But within months it becomes clear that most of those partners are criminals with connections to organized crime. The firm itself hired thugs to keep the partners in line and the cozy house they had bought for the young couple turned out to be loaded with hidden microphones that had recorded all their private conversations, lovemaking, and everything.

Given how things turned out, it's hard to imagine that in later years this man or his wife would nonetheless look back fondly on those early heady days when the firm first hired him! It did not turn out at all well and so there would be nothing good to look back on.

So also with Palm Sunday: there are so many conflicting angles to all this. In fact, even this very story ends on an anticlimactic note. Jesus enters the temple but by then the party had already stopped. There was no royal welcome for Jesus at the house of God and so, after peering around at this and that for a little while, Jesus and the twelve disciples silently slip back out of Jerusalem with no fanfare whatsoever. The next morning Jesus re-enters the city but this time not only does no one greet him joyfully, Jesus himself tears into the place with a full head of steam, driving out moneychangers from the temple and just generally behaving in ways that make a lot of folks hopping mad at him.

The Palm Sunday party was over almost as soon as it began. So is it right to look back fondly on this day? Given what happened in subsequent days, isn't celebrating Palm Sunday a little like celebrating the anniversary of an abusive marriage that ended in divorce? Even if a person did note the anniversary of a failed marriage, wouldn't the memory of that bring regret rather than joy, a disappointed frown rather than a fond smile?

What is Palm Sunday really? Maybe another way to approach that question is to ask another question: what if the gospel story ended with Palm Sunday? Like the disciples, we maybe would like it if the gospel could conclude right here. After all that the disciples had been through, and with their own secret hope that Jesus would be a political success on whose coattails they would ride to prominence, the disciples looked at the Triumphal Entry and thought, "Now this is more like it!" They probably wanted to capture and bottle that festive atmosphere. It was rather like Peter's reaction to Jesus' transfiguration when Moses and Elijah also appeared with Jesus on the mountaintop. Peter piped up and said, "Let's build some tabernacles right here so we can keep this great thing going forever!" So also on Palm Sunday: if they could have hit the pause button on the remote control of life, this would have been a wonderful image to freeze frame.

The problem is that there is no salvation for anyone on Palm Sunday. The people cried "Hosanna," which means "Save us!" But given the world we are in, there could be no salvation from that kind of happy parade. That festive atmosphere, though in one sense befitting the true, deep-down royalty of Jesus as God's Son, still all that hoopla just doesn't fit our world. It doesn't address the problems that need solving.

And maybe at this time of war and carnage, of terror and multiple threats of violence all around us, maybe I don't need to work very hard to convince anyone of this point. If we look back upon history, we see that human sin has resulted not in one long string of happy parades but rather in a series calamatis, one long and sad parade of calamity and sorrow. Instead of a festive throng, history shows us things like the Trail of Tears on which Native Americans tramped into exile. History shows us long lines of Jews marching not in some victory parade but shuffling along toward Nazi gas chambers in Auschwitz. History shows us the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the death squads of Rwanda and Sierra Leone, long lines of Iraqi people begging for food boxes and bottles of water. These are the real parades of human history. Carnivals of sorrow, festivals of death.

We perhaps wish that the lauded and feted Jesus of Palm Sunday represented the real us. We wish our lives and human history generally looked like a happy series of good events. But we know that is not so. We cannot stop here. Jesus could not stop here. Holy Week begins here, but thanks be to God that it did not end with the Palm Sunday spectacle.

But does all of this mean that the church should skip Palm Sunday? Is celebrating this event really the equivalent of celebrating the anniversary of a failed marriage, as I hinted earlier? Yes and no. If you bracket the larger context of the Triumphal Entry--that is, if you try to make this a simple and happy event as a way to ignore for a while the darkness of Lent that is still all around us--then you may well be observing this day in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. But maybe there is a way to sing about and observe Palm Sunday that avoids making that kind of a mistake.

For one thing, we need to avoid making this into a pre-Easter Easter celebration. As Fred Craddock has written, in some churches it is difficult to tell the difference between Palm Sunday one week and Easter the next. The tone of the services is identical, the only real difference is the foliage: one week the place is decked out in palm fronds and the next week it's lilies. But if we do that, we are getting ahead of our Lord and also setting ourselves up for either disappointment come Friday or, worse, we will treat Good Friday as an odd little hiccup that gets sandwiched in between the otherwise really happy days of Palm Sunday and Easter. If we don't see the sadness of what is really a funeral procession today, then we risk relativizing and minimizing the cross.

As Craddock says, maybe it's a little like spring weather. A few weeks ago in mid-March the air was warm, the birds were singing, and spring was in the air. Kids left their jackets on the hook when they went out for recess and the grass was showing signs of greening up. Those of us who have lived in Michigan for a while, however, knew that despite that happy burst of warmth, it wasn't yet time to pack away the winter clothing. Garrison Keillor said that back in his school days, he read children's books that celebrated April's goodness, crooning about April showers bringing May flowers and illustrating this with a picture of a little girl wearing shorts and a t-shirt as her sandal-clad feet skipped sprightly over little puddles. And Keillor said everyone in his class knew that this book's author was not from Minnesota. He wasn't from Michigan, either, as last weekend's miserable ice, cold, and then snow proved. In these parts, it's best not to get meteorologically ahead of yourself. You'll only be disappointed if you do.

Today we don't want to get theologically ahead of ourselves, either. As we noted also last week Sunday morning, it is merely obvious that we cannot deny the fact that we already know about Easter. We view everything through the lens of the empty tomb. But that knowledge can be both a blessing and a burden. We live in and by the strength of Easter and are blessed to know that Jesus is the final victor. But knowing that ahead of time introduces also the temptation of impatience. We are tempted to jump ahead so that we can get to the happy part. Like a child at the table, we put up with the broccoli because we want to get to the chocolate cake. We are impatient. We don't want to skip Palm Sunday exactly but in our rush to Easter, we are tempted to turn Palm Sunday into something that is only happy.

Instead of that, however, we need to nurture the patience required to keep following Jesus even though we know full well where this path into Jerusalem is leading. Today we do well to put down the palm branches so that we can pick up the cross. We need to keep patiently following Jesus not just when the crowd is whipped up in enthusiasm but also later when he slips out of the city anonymously and with no onlookers to cheer him. We need to follow Jesus back into the city the next morning and stick with him even as the people begin, bit by bit, to turn against him in coming days.

We need to follow Jesus back out of the city one more time, too, while he stumbles his way to that ignominious place where, if crowds gather at all, it is only to taunt, to jeer, to engage in gallows humor while naked men are reduced to scarecrows upon spits of wood. We need to follow Jesus to also that terrible place, using our knowledge of the empty tomb correctly. Knowing that Easter is coming must not make us impatient to get to next Sunday morning but instead our Easter knowledge allows us to see the cross itself as the source of our salvation. On that cross our God in Christ saved us.

Knowing what is yet to come a week from today allows us to perceive the paradox of the cross. In the cross we see the glorification of Jesus. Jesus is glorified on a cross, which, as Neal Plantinga has often said, is about as odd as being celebrated by a firing squad or getting enthroned on an electric chair. What keeps us from fleeing the cross is precisely our awareness that God in Christ is accomplishing something incredible in and through that death. Today, knowing about Easter allows us to see the entry into Jerusalem as Jesus' own funeral procession. We don't need to turn Palm Sunday into something it is not. We don't need to treat this as pre-Easter but can see in this march toward Golgotha the first steps toward the gospel paradox: the death that brings life, the sacrifice that solves all that has ever been wrong with this world. Jesus must walk this path and we must go with him.

As I reminded you in another sermon recently, joy for Christian people is a last feeling, not a first. Christian joy is refined and thoughtful because it has passed through death. If you burst into a classroom of 3^rd Graders and surprise them with an out-of-the-blue gift, you will see the whole class erupt in happiness. Come up to a stranger in the street and hand her a $100 bill just for the lark of it, and you will see a look of happy wonderment flash across her face. For the original Palm Sunday crowd, their joyful hosannas were like that: spontaneous, erupting straight from the heart of people who thought an out-of-the-blue gift was getting plopped right into their laps. "Here's your Savior and King!" the crowds thought they heard someone say. And so they erupted in happy shouts. How could they not?

But that spontaneous reaction is not real joy as we Christians would define it. It is not a faith-based joy. True joy is a miracle of grace, emerging as it does not spontaneously the way a little kid will become happy if you slip him a candy bar but thoughtfully the way joy must emerge for us on Friday when we look at a bloody cross and yet still find it within ourselves to shout, "Hosanna! What a Savior!"

Next Sunday we will celebrate Easter and we will do it from the midst of a war-ravaged world. Although this is always the case, it will be easier to see this year that Easter's celebration of resurrection life emerges from the midst of a lot of death. Families all around this nation will struggle to rasp out Easter hymns because their soldier son or daughter was only just recently buried. And all of us should be mindful of, and sorrowful over, the untold thousands of deaths our bombs and bullets have caused. In one sense it is awfully surprising that when the Son of God came to this earth, he died so hideous a death in order to save us. At the same time, however, given the bloody state of affairs we so routinely encounter in this world, it seems also inevitable that God would save us in precisely the way he did. The surprising inevitability of the gospel is, in the end, the only real reason today or ever to shout "Hosanna to the King!" Amen.