Sermon — March 28, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
When I was in college, I did a summer internship in Governor Patrick’s Office of Constituent Services. At its best, this meant helping connect people to the right state agencies to solve their problems, or even getting them on the phone with a real person from, for example, the RMV Ombudsman’s Office. At its worst, this meant being the low-ranking punching-bag fielding random Bay Staters’ complaints about their governor. In retrospect, it wasn’t bad preparation for the priesthood.
I’d received a grant, so I was the only intern there full-time, which meant I had some special privileges. For example, on most I got to open all the mail that had been sent to the Governor, to be sorted and handled appropriately. And it was a special delight that hot summer that I got to do it in a cool, quiet room by myself, away from the constantly-ringing phones. (I just tried not to think about the fact that this was so I didn’t expose anyone else if any of the envelopes contained anthrax.)
On occasion that summer—but more often when I was filing older correspondence down the hall—I’d run into a very strange envelope, containing two things: first, an outraged letter protesting the disgusting fiscal policy of “Taxachusetts,” coated in a fine, brown dust; and second, the source of the dust, a single bag of tea.
You may have thought it was a rumor, but I can assure you that in the early, chaotic days of the grassroots Tea Party movement, there were in fact people mailing bags of tea to their elected officials in protest of taxation. And sometimes we filed them for posterity.
Of course, we’re Bostonians here, and so whether or not we agree with the modern Tea Party, we all know what the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party means: patriotism, rebellion, resistance against unjust taxation; political values that can be evoked, however comically, by a single bag of tea.
And so, while you may not recognize the symbols themselves, you might be able to understand what Jesus is doing when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and the people wave their palms. It was a symbol that the people in the crowd would have recognized, as surely as we recognize the symbolism of a Tea Party. They had heard the ancient words of the prophet Zechariah, repeated over and over during the long years of Greek and Roman occupation. “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!” Zechariah proclaimed. “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.” (Zech. 9:9) There’s nothing glorious about a donkey, of course, any more than there’s something rebellious about a bag of Lipton tea. But the people celebrate because of what it means: the return of the king.
As Jesus begins to ride into the city on his humble mount, the people respond with even more symbols. Some spread their cloaks on the ground to protect even this humble steed’s hoofs from becoming dirty, as they’d done for newly-coronated kings in the days of old. (2 Kings 9:13). Others cut branches from alongside the road and waved them as they’d done in patriotic parades and military triumphs for generations, (1 Macc. 13:51; 2 Macc 10:7) the hadas and aravah and etrog—the myrtle and willow and citron—and most of all, the lulav, the leafy branches of the date palm. Okay, we mostly talk about the palms, but these were the four species of leafy greens used in the festival of Sukkot, a huge national celebration. Along with the menorah, they were the most recognizable symbols of Jewish national identity in Jesus’ day, a millennium before the Star of David was created. These were such cherished national symbols that the armies fighting for Jewish independence in the century after Jesus’ death stamped them onto their coins alongside phrases like, “For the Freedom of Jerusalem.”
So when the people see this charismatic teacher riding into the city on a donkey like Zechariah’s long-imagined king, they react with the most powerful symbols they can. They shield his feet like a newly-crowned ruler. They wave their leafy branches like so many colorful flags. They cry out, “Hosanna!” (Aramaic for, “Save us, we pray!”) “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!” (Mark 11:9–10)
Even the Roman regime couldn’t miss the point. Here was yet another pretender to the throne—so the Romans would think—another man hungry for power, claiming descent from David through some murky paternal line, gathering a band of rebels to seize the royal city.
But it’s not going to mean what they think.
There are many parallels between the prophecies of Zechariah and the life and death of Jesus. Zechariah imagines an “anointed one” (4:14) who is accused by Satan, (3:1) a royal “Branch” who will “command peace to the nations” (3:8, 9:10). A king whose life will be valued at thirty pieces of silver thrown into the treasury, (11:12-13) and on whose great day of triumph “there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord.” (14:21)
But the thing that distinguishes Zechariah’s vision from all the palm-waving rebels to come is that it’s not a human being who will return to rule as king. The kings have failed. “Render true judgments,” Zechariah says God has commanded them, “show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another. But they refused to listen, and turned a stubborn shoulder.” (Zechariah 7:9–11) “Thus says the LORD,” Zechariah proclaims, “I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem.” (Zech. 8:3) “I will encamp at my house as a guard,” says God, “so that no one shall march to and fro; no oppressor shall again overrun them, for now I have seen with my own eyes. Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you!” (Zech. 9:8-9) Lo, your king comes—not some long-forgotten descendant of an ancient king, not some guerilla leader from the desert hills; the Lord Godself is coming to reign.
In the church I grew up in, we didn’t do this whole weird “Passion Sunday” thing. Jesus entered the city in triumph on Palm Sunday. He was betrayed in darkness of Maundy Thursday. He was put to death on Good Friday. They’re completely separate events. Why roll them into one? This strange Episcopalian “Passion Sunday,” I thought at first, must just be a compromise. We know that most people won’t show up on Good Friday, but we don’t want them to skip straight from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the triumph of Easter, without Jesus’ suffering and death in between; and so we move the passion from Good Friday back to Palm Sunday.
But really, this isn’t it at all. The reason we move so quickly from the royal procession to the excruciating passion is not that nobody’s going to come to church on Good Friday. It’s that this is what it looks like when God is king. The Roman soldiers don’t realize what they’re doing when they clothe him in imperial purple and twist together a crown, when they kneel in mock homage and proclaim him “King of the Jews.” (Mark 15:17-19) But when the patriotic crowd has faded in to the background, when the disciples have hurried into hiding, when even Peter has denied knowing Jesus and turned away, it’s left to these sarcastic soldiers to attend his coronation, to crown him with thorns and enthrone him on a cross and leave him to die, beneath the inscription naming his crime: “The King of the Jews.” (Mark 15:26)
And they’re right. Because it’s this moment of self-sacrificial love that shows what it means for Jesus to be king. He’s not there so that the ordinary folks’ coats get dirty to keep his shining stallion’s hoofs clean. He’s there to kneel at their dirty feet, and wash them with his own hands. He’s not there to gather an army to overthrow the Roman state by force, a path of violence that could only and historically would only lead to disaster. He’s there to give himself alone to spare his people from destruction. He’s not there to scheme against his family, turning royal against royal as he clings to the throne in old age. He’s there to ascend into heaven, handing power to his followers a mere forty days after he rises from the dead.
He’s there to show us another way. He’s there to give us the power to rule, and to do better than we had before—not to “devise evil in our hearts,” as the kings of old, not to “oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor,” but to “show kindness and mercy.” Not to seize power as the kings and queens of our own lives, but to enter into citizenship in his heavenly kingdom.
So I invite you to join me, this Holy Week, as Jesus establishes his kingdom of love; to see him, in all the shame and pain of his last days, in all the glory and triumph of his resurrection—so that we might know what it truly means to say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” Amen.