Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Palm Sunday, 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Matthew 21:1-11
When Jesus and his disciples had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,
"Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey."
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
“Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”
My first year at St. Paul’s, a group of us from the parish went away together to Harmony Hill, a center on the Olympic peninsula that specializes in providing cancer patients and their caregivers with guided retreats. We went there to learn about and walk their labyrinths. They now have four on their property.
I remember walking two of them. The first was in a stunning location: level and green, with the Olympics on the horizon. The labyrinth, itself, called “The Garden Labyrinth,” as it was called, was fenced and made entirely of banks of flowers which lined the wide, circuitous path toward and away from the center. It was gorgeous and refreshing. And so our group flocked to it, walking it together in joy and wonder.
The second labyrinth was entirely different. It was situated on a slight incline away from any view of the Olympics. Constructed entirely of sea shells that outlined narrow paths made of bark, it was uncomfortable to walk. And we few in our group even tried it. I was one of them. As I walked I was aware the people ahead of me bailed out halfway through. I began to think about doing this myself, but them I started to wonder what might I learn in walking this narrow, uncomfortable and narrow path?
It’s Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday—two seemingly contrasting events, similar to the two seemingly contrasting experiences of walking the labyrinths at Harmony Hill: Palm Sunday: the story of a group of hopeful people accompanying and heralding a new Messiah as he entered Jerusalem, and Passion Sunday the difficult and demoralizing story of that same messiah, now mostly deserted by his followers, walking the narrow, uncomfortable path to the cross.
I used to think that focusing on these two moments in the story of Jesus on one day was the church’s way of imitating what some Greek tragedies do. Right before the critical scene in which the admirable but flawed tragic hero gets it in the neck, the playwright sometimes places a scene of unbridled but deluded optimism about the situation.
But our Jesus is no tragic hero with a tragic flaw that leads to his downfall. He is—and this is the thread that binds both Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday narratives together—he is the bold innocence of God, radical peacefulness that shows up without the protection of any armor, God’s justice that rides into an unjust city with no sword to protect it: bold and defenseless love. And that, of course, is why he must die.
He must die because he chooses to enter the city at all rather than turn back to the silence of the desert or the more peaceful Judean countryside.
He must die because in entering that city in the way that he does, he activates the hope of the Jewish people for a king that would restore their dignity and their power. And yet he must disappoint them because he will not engage in violence to effect that restoration.
He must die because according to Matthew’s account, in activating that hope, he attracts the attention of those who have the most to lose—the religious and political authorities who need to protect religion and politics and economics that serve the few rather than the many and who have the violent means to carry out that protection.
He must die because defenseless and non-violent love, love that is the mind of Christ rather than a mind set on domination and retaliation, must always expect to suffer wounds and unbearable tensions in the loving, must always be crucified in some way in order to open a new way to freedom and life.
Yossi Klein Halevi grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in a community of Orthodox Holocaust survivors. As a child, he was terrified whenever his route forced him to walk near a church, “fearing that grasping hands might emerge from the massive doors and drag me into the basement, where priests would kidnap me and force me to become a Christian.”
As an adult, Halevi went to Israel to serve in the Israeli army where he worked in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. It was there that while on patrol he was struck in the head by a large rock and nearly killed.
While this background hardly seems one to lay the ground-work for a two-year-long attempt to understand and experience both Christianity and Islam from the inside. Yet this was the task that veteran journalist Halevi, Jerusalem correspondent for The New Republic, set for himself. In his book entitled At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden he goes on what I believe is a journey of bold innocence, defenseless love and the willingness to bear unbearable tensions.
Knowing almost nothing about Christianity and Islam, and fearing or loathing what little he did know, he sets out to discover whether religion, which has served as a divisive force throughout most of modern Middle Eastern history, could serve as a unifying force instead. Holding on to his Jewish faith, Halevi met Christian and Palestinian Muslim believers on their own turf and even participated in their rituals as a way of understanding where their experiences of God could bring Jews, Christians and Muslims together.
As you would expect, Halevi meets many fascinating people along the way and has to overcome his own suspicions of some as well as others’ suspicions of him in the process. What he discovers, however is that despite the differences and the suspicions, hope is to be found in coming back over and over again to the simple reverencing of the other’s dignity before God, doing this through countless small but costly gestures that are personal admissions that we cannot live forever in isolation, pride or unforgiveness.
Halevi writes of his time in the Holy Land even as more conflict arises: “It is precisely at times like these that the beautiful teachings of faith become either real or mere sentiment. More than ever, the goal of a spiritual life in the Holy Land is to live with an open heart at the center of unbearable tension…The best I can say is that I’m struggling, and that maintaining a painful awareness of the gap between what I’ve been taught and my inability to embody those teachings defines my spiritual life.”
For us this morning in all our holy lands, this is what it means to put on the mind of Christ, the mind that dared to enter Jerusalem as the humble and defenseless king. It means to walk the path of reverencing the dignity of all before God though it leads to the cross, to keep an open and vulnerable heart at the center of whatever unbearable tension we are living in the middle of.
And so as we begin Holy Week, the path that leads to Easter, a path that takes us into the city, to the cross, into the tomb and at least in one account of the resurrection, back into a garden. As we begin Holy Week, what I want to say to you is this: let his walk be your walk. Let today be your humble and willing entrance into your city of tension and danger. Let your reverencing the dignity of another or the other before God lead you on your uncomfortable path to your cross and into whatever tomblike place awaits you. Let his walk be your walk.
For even now the garden of resurrected life awaits us: the place of astonishment and deliverance, the place of the transformation of our fear and sin into wonder and gratefulness; the place of new life where our wounds are healed but are no longer hidden away. The garden of resurrected life awaits us.
Works Cited or Consulted
Rowan Williams’ sermon preached in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, 2003. Williams led me to Halevi. My sermon draws heavily on Archbishop Williams’ insights and verbiage.
Review of Yossi Klein Halevi's At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden:A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land by Rabbi Charles L. Arian, The Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, drawn on verbatim.
