Palm Sunday: The Triumph

When we read our Gospel lesson from Luke this morning, we have to put ourselves into the shoes of those seeing these events unfold. Jesus tells his disciples - in full view of the Pharisees - to go and untie an unridden colt so that he can proceed into Jerusalem where he will face, head on - the ultimate betrayal that leads every human being to death: their denial of God.

The Gospel quotes the prophet Zechariah: “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” At last, the disciples, the Jews are thinking: victory. Our land, our power, our control, our capacity, all will be restored. We shall be triumphant. Victorious. Without suffering, pain, poverty or disease. Right?   

But Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem was triumphant not because Israel overthrew Rome or gained back their land or made them powerful. It was triumphant because when Jesus was faithful to his Father - which got him executed by Jews and Gentiles alike - he destroyed the power death has to extinguish your life, and the life of everyone you love, forever. 

Recall from both the Old and New Testament Scriptures - all the prophets and the law lay this out over and over as they recount God’s history with his people: to deny God is to fall into the ways of the world that are based in survival at all costs in a world that often demands brutality to survive, and so forcing others to bear the costs of our survival and triumph. 

It is that willing choice not to trust in God’s sufficiency and provision for us; that willing choice to believe we had a better way, that began with Adam and Eve and filtered down to us; it is this that Jesus overcame because of his perfect love for his Father. A love that necessitated, not survival, and not triumphing over others, but rather proclaiming the truth without lashing out, without returning insult or injury, without sword, or army, without killing, without imprisoning, deporting, or taking away another's land; his triumph was not the ways of this world that we see in every aspect of our countries today, but in speaking God’s truth, calling us to repentance and opening ourselves to God and being willing to suffer the consequences of that claim, willingly allowing himself to be executed by us on the Cross. Our God is not a tool politicians or soldiers can wield to control people. He is the one who joined us to himself so we might have life forever - if we desire it - with him.

This is the perfect love of God. The love of Jesus for his father, exercised in loving us even in our sinful betrayal and rejection of him; a perfect faithfulness in not abandoning us to our own frail and faulty thoughts and actions; our own brutality and immaturity; his is a perfectly faithful love that is received by the Father and poured out to all of us who desire to join ourselves to Jesus and follow his mission of gathering others to his Father. That’s it. And it’s really everything.

Our relationships and the emotions tied to them are constantly changing, beginning and ending, impermanent and not the reality of who or what we are. Nations, Empires, cities, leaders, governments, economic systems, church denominations, they have all come and gone and will continue to do so. They are, as Scripture puts it, like grass that is blown away with the wind. 

Too often we live as if Jesus conquered Rome instead of conquering death. That is, we confuse or conflate success and triumph, good things happening for us, good health, our possessions, our achievements, with being under the wing of a “god” who provides us with worldly success, good health, good feelings, power and control. 

Our Gospel reading this morning points to a very different reality. Jesus’s triumph begins on a humble donkey, and goes through a garden where he experiences fear, doubt, the desire to run away from us and his mission to reconcile us to God, with arrest, torture, betrayal, abandonment, no super hero rescue, no last stay from civil authorities, no heroics from his own disciples: just the stark, cruel, anguished drive of nails piercing skin, bones, tendons and ligaments, hanging on a cross with prisoners who - until their dying breath - knew nothing of him. 

So do not confuse your worldly success or your good fortune, or your health or power, with the way of Jesus, with his divine blessing. Be thankful for what you have, indeed; but do not count these things as evidence of blessing; or their absence as evidence of being cursed. The things of this world are passing away and all that will be left when Christ comes again to burn away the chaff from the threshing floor of this world are those who clung to him so hard through their own trials in the Garden of life, the sea of tempestuous waves, that all that remains of them are the faith, hope and love, shared with others. For this is the substance of our humanity. AMEN