Sermon for Sunday, April 4, 2004  

HE SAID A PRAYER OF THANKS

7th in a Series on "Jesus, Paul and the Way of the Cross

By
Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

 

Scripture:  I Corinthians 11:23

²³ For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread

   I Thessalonians 5:16 -18

¹⁶ Rejoice always, ¹⁷ pray without ceasing, ¹⁸ give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

 

The crowds were overwhelming in Jerusalem for that Passover celebration when Jesus and his friends were there. That festival, celebrating the release of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, attracted some 300,000 or more Jewish pilgrims from across the world.

People would come to the city for several days and, because there were so many of them, the little villages around the city like Bethany, home of Mary and Martha, were almost overrun. Other pilgrims would camp out overnight outside the city at places like the Mount of Olives because there were some caves there where they could find shelter during the night. 

Jesus and his friends came to the Passover festival because he was a very observant Jew. He was known to some of the people in Jerusalem because he had gained a reputation as a charismatic teacher and preacher and healer in the region of Galilee, seventy miles away from Jerusalem. He knew that when he came to Jerusalem he would find bitter opposition to his teachings, not from the common people who seemed to hang on his every word, but from the leaders of his faith who were intensely threatened by what he did and by what he said. They had confronted him many times already in the towns of Capernaum and other small places where he had been teaching and had done what the other prophets before him had done: asked people to abandon empty rituals and give their whole hearts to God.

In Jerusalem on the day that we call Palm Sunday, Jesus rode into the city on the back of a donkey while the crowds hailed him as son of David and laid palm branches in his path. The palm branches were a symbol of Jewish nationalism and patriotism so the Romans, when they heard about this, began to take notice of a possible uprising against Rome.

Jesus went on into the temple where he saw the temple bureaucrats had created a monopoly on selling sacrificial animals and were grossly overcharging pilgrims for animals and for money exchange. He did something we like to gloss over. He made a whip and drove out the merchants, overturning their tables and castigating them for their abuse of this holy space. This is not "gentle Jesus meek and mild" that we sang about in Sunday School long ago. The priest and other leaders knew he had sealed his fate because he was meddling in their economic affairs now. Jesus knew that as well. He also knew that the temple police could not arrest him during the day while he was teaching in the temple courtyards - the crowds were on Jesus side and would cause an uproar if he were arrested. He was worried that they might try to find him at night when the crowds were not around so he and his friends slept outside the city in a hidden location - hidden at least until Judas gave away their location at the end of the week, betraying him in hopes that he would force Jesus' hand and Jesus would start a bloody revolution that would defeat the Roman rule and restore power back to the Jewish people so they would have the glory and status they had under King David.

After all, Judas thought, that is what the messiah is supposed to do - to be a military warrior king like David.

Every day Jesus went to the temple and taught people about God and about what it means to live under the rule of God, the reign of God. It is not like living under an earthly ruler, he said. It means giving your heart and soul to God and treating your neighbors and your enemies with compassion. It means treating others like you want to be treated. It means putting God in first place and putting money and status and prestige in a much lower place. It means living generously instead of being ruled by greed and ego.

The crowds were extremely attentive and they grew each day, but the legalists and ministers tried to trap him with trick questions. What about paying taxes to the emperor, they asked, knowing they had him. If he supported the oppressive Roman taxes, the crowds around him would lose interest. If he told them not to pay, he would be arrested for sedition and treason. Remember what he did? He asked for a Roman coin - something that no one was to have inside the temple gates because it had the emperor's graven image. He said that since Caesar's image is on it, that people should give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and should give God what belongs to God. What does belong to God? We do! All that we are and all that we have comes to us from God.

It was a brilliant answer and one that truly amazed the tricksters who had asked it. That week was packed with meaning. While he is in the temple, many wealthy persons come and drop their money into the temple treasury, making sure people notice them. Then a poor widow comes and puts in two small coins. Jesus stops in mid sentence and says that this poor woman gave more than the others -  because the others gave out of their leftovers. What they gave did not cost them anything.  It was not sacrificial. But what the woman gave was sacrificial. And, Jesus tells us, our giving to God and others is to be like hers, not out of our leftovers but instead it is to cost us something because that it what it means to be his follower.

It was an amazing week. On Thursday night, Jesus and his closest friends celebrated the Passover meal and after they left the upper room, they went to the Garden of Gethsemane where he talked honestly with God about his human desire not to go through with this mission. But he ended his prayer in faithfulness to God and to his own integrity. He was arrested, rushed through a mock trial, charged with the political crime of treason against Rome and then executed by the cruelest, most humiliating form of death available to the Romans.

There has been much furor in the past two months around the Mel Gibson movie about who killed Jesus and why he was killed. You will not learn that if Gibson's movie is your only source. You will know more about that if you have been reading your Bible or if you have come to the Tuesday night film showings here or if you come this Tuesday night to the final one.

One preacher said a few weeks ago that the only thing that is important about Jesus is that he died. You might come to that conclusion if all you have is Gibson's movie to go by. I think that is a horrible over simplification and a complete perversion of the gospel story about Christ. Jesus was killed because he was dangerous to both the religious bureaucrats and the political bureaucrats. The kind of loyalty he was proclaiming was and is a threat to the values of greed and selfishness and raw power which are around us now and were then as well. Jesus was doing what the Hebrew prophets before him had done, calling people away from going through the motions on Sunday and then cheating and hurting people during the week. He was saying that it is not our words that count; it is our deeds of justice and compassion. He refused to cater to the posh and powerful and instead reached out to those on the fringes who had been told they did not belong. He was subverting and overturning the superficial trappings of faith and calling people to love God with all their heart and soul and mind and strength and their neighbor as themselves.

He told people to ignore the rules if the rules got in the way of being just and compassionate and fair and of doing what is right.

He had his most scathing words, his angriest words for hypocritical religious leaders who failed to practice what they preached, who were smug and self-righteous. And when people today like Lance Armstrong in his book and Barbara Ehrenreich in her book are critical of the abuses of organized religion and ask us Christians to be more concerned about the little people, they are squarely in the tradition of Jesus of Nazareth who if he returned today, might still have his greatest problem with us religious people who keep trying to exclude and demonize folks who don't fit our narrow opinions of  "the right kind of people".

Jesus was killed because he told the truth and because he upset the powerful and because he welcomed sinners and because he said God would not settle for half hearted nominalism-a tip of the hat to God while we pursue our bigotries and materialism and greed - but that God asks for our lives and our hearts and promises in return the best, most fulfilling, most rewarding sort of life there is.

On that Thursday night there in the upper room in Jerusalem, Jesus is with the people who are his closest friends in the world. He knows what is about to take place. His friends can sense the tension and the danger in the air each of the past few days, and they are scared and confused. But Jesus does what each of us can do also in a time of fear and confusion - he leads them in the ritual of Passover which reminds them and us that God is the one who delivers us, that God can make a way where there is no way. And he takes the unleavened bread from the Passover ritual and he says a prayer of thanks. Paul gives us this memory. On the night he was to be given over to be killed, he took the bread and said a prayer of thanksgiving. Blessed art thou, O God king of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.

He grounded his life again in God who is our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble.

Because of all these things we have recalled about Jesus I am a committed, enthusiastic, excited and I hope, contagious disciple of Jesus Christ and I hope you are too. And if you are not yet, let me invite you to become one of his followers today. And let me invite each of you to be present with us for the events of this holiest of weeks, for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Do not move from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday without experiencing the dark valleys of this week so our shouts of Christos Aneste, Christ is Risen, will witness to God's power to being new life, a new way of life, to our hearts and to our world.

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