Sermon for Palm Sunday, April 1, 2007

THE LAST WEEK

4^th in a series on Meeting the Original Jesus

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture: Mark 14:12-16; 22-27

 ¹² On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him, "Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?" ¹³ So he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, "Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, ¹⁴ and wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, "The Teacher asks, Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' ¹⁵ He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there." ¹⁶ So the disciples set out and went to the city, and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal.

 ²² While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body." ²³ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. ²⁴ He said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. ²⁵ Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." ²⁶ When they had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. ²⁷ And Jesus said to them, "You will all become deserters; for it is written, "I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.'

The last six days of Jesus life are so important that they take up one third of the gospel of Mark in the Bible. This is a very dramatic amount of time devoted to happenings between Sunday and Friday.

Jesus arrives outside Jerusalem on Sunday. He has come there from his itinerant ministry in Galilee 60 miles to the north. In the small towns of the Galilee he has had some good success in attracting people to his movement and in healing people and teaching people about the coming kingdom of God, but he has also had many conflicts with the leaders of organized religion. (For those people who don’t resonate with organized religion, Jesus didn’t either!)

His arguments and battles with the spiritual leaders happened because he was pronouncing the forgiveness of sins, he was associating with, eating with, outsiders and outcasts and known sinners, he was criticizing the hypocrisy of the clergy, he was welcoming the wrong kind of people. Even in the villages of the Galilee, some of those leaders had already started plotting to kill him.

He was on the way to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast—every good Jew was supposed to be there—but he also knew he was headed there for a final showdown.

On Sunday he gets on the donkey and rides into the city as people are waving palm branches and putting their coats on the road and greeting him with Hosannas. He enters the city from the East while a different procession is entering the city from the West: Pilate the Roman governor goes from his headquarters in Caesarea on the Mediterranean to be present for Passover week and help keep the peace because some 600,000 additional people are in the city for that holy festival.

When Jesus gets to the city he goes right to the temple and does something shocking: he overturns the tables of the animal sellers and money changers BECAUSE they represent the corruption that the temple leaders have let take over the place of worship. Jesus is attacking—even physically (in John’s gospel, with a whip)—the center of Jewish religion, and everyone knows that he has sealed his fate.

He goes with his disciples outside the city then to find a place to camp out at night, and other pilgrims are there as well because there is no room in the city for all these pilgrims, and there are caves and other camping spots on the Mount of Olives a mile away.

On Monday they come back into the temple courtyard and Jesus spends each day surrounded with crowds of people who want to hear him tell about God and about what it means to know God and life by the ways of God. He is confronted many times each day by the religious establishment and criticized and questioned harshly. In each confrontation he answers brilliantly.

They first ask him by what authority he is teaching the crowds. He answers them with a question about what authority John the Baptizer was doing his ministry. They know they have been trapped because any answer they give will incite the crowds against themselves, so they refuse.

That day Jesus is teaching and people are coming to the treasury box and dropping in their offerings and tithes. A poor widow drops in two small coins and Jesus stops, points to her and says she gave more than anyone else. His followers are astonished and wonder how, because they saw wealthy people giving large amounts. Jesus says it is because what she gave really cost her, it was sacrificial, and the others just gave from their leftovers, from what they had to spare. They would not miss it. He says, when we give to God, it is to be sacrificial.

The Pharisees try to trap him with a question about paying taxes to Rome and they know they have him: if he tells them to pay the hated taxes, he will lose the affection of the crowd. If he tells them not to pay the tax, he will be arrested for treason. Do you remember what he does?

He asks for a Roman coin and someone gives him one. It is illegal to have one in the temple courts because it had a graven image of Caesar. And then he tells them to give to Caesar what is Caesars and to give to God what belongs to God. And what belongs to God is us—and everything else! 

There are other bitter encounters and questions: what is the greatest commandment? And he tells them, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” He angrily chews out the Pharisees for their superficial religion and has his harshest words for these pious lay leaders. Sometimes we clergy encourage each other not to speak critically about other expressions of faith but Jesus had his angriest words for the legalistic leaders around him whom he said were like whitewashed tombs—nice looking on the outside but full of rot on the inside! (Matthew 23)

On Thursday he sent some friends to find the place where they would celebrate the Passover meal, the meal of remembrance from being set free from Egyptian slavery. The Passover was the last supper that the Jews had before they fled from Egypt toward the Promised Land.

Who was there, do you suppose? Did it look like Leonardo painted it—all men around a sixteenth century Italian table, or did it look like how we will portray it in four days— a more diverse group seated as first century Jews would be seated and reclining together?

Jesus turns the meal into a new remembrance—not only of God’s deliverance from bondage but a remembrance meal about his faithful obedience to God, his offering of his life and his body.

After they finish eating, they sing a hymn together and they go outside the city to a garden of olive trees called Gethsemane (the word in Hebrew means an olive press). Jesus, now in anguish, throws himself to the ground in prayer. Remember his very human prayer? “Father if it is possible, take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet it is not what I want but what you want that must be done.” We see the humanity of Jesus clearly there in the garden among the olive trees and when we go to Israel we can be there close to one tree that is 1800 years old and a descendant of the ones close to Jesus.

While he is praying in anguish all night his friends fall asleep on him. They are all awakened when the temple guards come to arrest him. They know where he is because Judas has given away their nighttime location. Jesus is brought to the high priest’s house for a trumped up trial. He is charged with religious blasphemy but that is not a charge that Pilate can kill him for, so they tell Pilate that Jesus claimed to be a king and THAT was a concern for the Roman governor because there could only be one king—Caesar.

Jesus was taken then by Roman guards, whipped, stripped, given the cross bar to carry through the streets and led to the hill outside the city where he was executed beside two others who were probably true insurrectionists—not robbers, because crucifixion was reserved for more major crimes against Rome. He died after a few hours, was buried in a borrowed tomb, and his dearest friends were crushed and grief stricken.

I urge you to follow Christ through this Holy Week by being present with us Friday night for the music and worship service, and to be here Thursday night for the Living Last Supper here on the platform with dramatists from our own congregation.

At the Supper which we celebrate now this morning, Jesus invites us to take these elements of his life into ourselves and to follow him, to imitate him, to become like him in his faithfulness and his obedience to God. Jesus never invites people to worship him or admire him, but to follow—to trust and obey as the old hymn says. 

I am reading a new history of the story of integration in Little Rock, Arkansas fifty years ago this fall. It is a sordid time in American history when hatred and bigotry ruled the day for far too long. It is so painful even to read about it again. One minister in looking back at the news articles about the hatred and racism asked this question, “Where were the white Christians???” (“Turn Away Thy Son” by Elizabeth Jacoway, p 6), where were the white church members who were supposed to represent the compassion and justice and love and acceptance of Jesus Christ? Where were they? They were certainly not living out the faith they professed on Sunday morning!

Christ invites to this table this morning all who love and all who want to FOLLOW him—all who intend to live by his teaching of compassion and welcome and justice for all.

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