Sermon for Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008

JESUS THE SUFFERING SERVANT

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

JESUS THE SUFFERING SERVANT

Scripture: Mark 11:1-10

¹ When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples ² and said to them, "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. ³ If anyone says to you, "Why are you doing this?' just say this, "The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.' " ⁴ They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, ⁵ some of the bystanders said to them, "What are you doing, untying the colt?" ⁶ They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. ⁷ Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. ⁸ Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. ⁹ Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! ¹⁰ Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!"

The procession into Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives marks the beginning of the most intense week of Jesus’ life and it ends, of course, with him being executed like the worst sort of criminal-hanged on a cross in a public place near the town’s garbage dump while his enemies mocked him and while his friends and family stood by horrified and devastated.

We will rehearse some of this story so that we all have the same information and memory. This story of Holy Week was a highly important memory for the original Christians since one third of the gospel of Mark is devoted to the events of this one week and two thirds devoted to the three years before this week.

Jesus and his closest friends have been traveling to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the commemoration of the Jews being set free from slavery in Egypt. Every faithful Jew from across the Mediterranean world was in Jerusalem that week so the city was jam packed with about 500,000 additional people that week. Pontius Pilate, the roman governor of Judea, has come from his residence in Caesarea to be in Jerusalem with his troops to keep the peace and be sure that any disturbances don’t get out of hand because the Jews are liable to cause turmoil and unrest as they chafe under the oppressive system of Roman rule.

When Jesus gets to Jerusalem on that Palm Sunday—called that because the people are hailing him as a hero by waving huge palm branches in his path—he goes right to the temple, takes in the crowded scene, and then leaves with his friends to go back out of town to the Mount of Olives where they will spend the night. Do you know why they are staying out of town? Two reasons: it is easier than trying to find a place within the city walls because of the enormous crowds, and secondly, if they camp outside the town, perhaps sleeping in a cave—there were many caves there on the hillside populated with thousands of other Jewish pilgrims—it would be hard for the authorities to find him.

He knew there would be two groups who wanted to find him and do away with him. In the first group were the guards responsible to the Jewish high priest. Remember it was the religious leaders who had first been so threatened by Jesus many chapters earlier in Mark’s gospel that they had started to plot his execution. He was undermining their teaching and their authority, and teaching in the name of God—even pronouncing forgiveness of sin. The second group that would be looking for him would be the Roman soldiers—if he did anything to disturb the fragile peace in Jerusalem, the peace that Pilate had traveled there to insure was kept during the most volatile time of year with these “bothersome Jews”.

On Monday morning Jesus went back into the city, into the gates of the magnificent and beautiful temple, the holiest place for all the Jews in the world, and he began to disturb the peace. What did he do?  He went to the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals and physically drove them out of the temple courts, overturning their tables and according to one gospel, taking a whip to send them away!! This is not “gentle Jesus meek and mild.” He did this because those merchants were making an obscene profit from the poor pilgrims who had come there and who had to use this monopoly, and because these sellers were the agents of the corrupt religious leaders whom he believed had forgotten their purpose of worship and had turned a holy place of prayer into a den of robbers and thieves. The religious bureaucrats saw this scene and Mark tells us, they were looking for a way to immediately kill him and they were afraid of him! Why? Because the huge crowds of people in the courtyards of the temple were surrounding him and hanging on his every word, listening intently to his teaching about God and how to find the best life possible.

There are some famous encounters that occurred each day as Jesus taught there in the temple—stories of how the leaders tried to trap him and undermine him with the crowds. These chapters are a very manageable read this week and I encourage you to look at them again before you come back to church this week. They asked him about John the Baptizer and Jesus responded with his own question about John that would embarrass the bureaucrats, however, they chose to answer. Another time they asked about what it would be like after death to stir up an argument between the two major parties, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and Jesus avoided that trap as well, convincing and persuading the crowds even more of his authority. 

Another time when he was teaching them about God with parables and stories, there were many people coming forward and dropping their money into the temple treasury box. One poor widow came there and put into the treasury box two small coins—the smallest coins available—and Jesus stopped, pointed to her, and said to the crowds, she gave more than anyone else. They were very skeptical and told him that they had seen wealthy people put in much more money than her small pennies. He said yes, but those people gave to God out of their leftovers and she gave sacrificially, she was really going to miss what she had given and the others would not, and it is her example of sacrificial giving that shows the rightful place of God in our lives.

There were other teaching moments. Do you remember any of them? The bureaucrats asked Jesus if they should pay taxes to Rome or not? They knew he would step into their trap. If he told them to pay their taxes—[50-60% of their income] people hated those multitudes of taxes to their oppressors—he would lose the crowds and be hated by them. On the other hand, if he told them not to pay, he would be arrested on the spot by the nearby soldiers and charged with treason. Do you remember what he did?

He asked if anyone had a roman coin that he could see. Someone did. That in itself was illegal in Jewish law because they were not to bring any coins with graven images into the holy courts of the temple. That was the purpose of the money changers—to give the pilgrims other money for their Roman coins so that the holy place would not be sullied by an idol of the emperor. The emperor’s face and the words on that coin declared that the emperor was divine and was to be worshiped of course.

Someone gave Jesus a coin. He held it up and asked the crowd a question. Whose face is on this coin? Caesar’s. Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar AND give to God what belongs to God! What does belong to God? Our lives, our hearts, all of us! The gospel writer says the crowds were “utterly amazed”.

There were other teaching moments and other questions such as the one about the greatest commandment of all the 612 rules and commandments the Jews tried to live by. Jesus answers with the one we know well. Each evening after being in the temple all day, he went out of the city with his friends to camp out hidden among the thousands of other pilgrims on the Mount of Olives so that he would be safe and unknown, because he knew that the authorities would try and arrest him at night when there were no crowds around him to stop them.

Thursday of that week was the Passover meal celebration and Jesus had arranged for all of them to eat the meal in an upper room of a house in the city and you know how that unfolds because we tell that story every time we celebrate the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper. They are at the table, and it probably looked like the picture we have right in our entry way—on purpose. They were reclining around the table and there were not just men but women and probably children there as well—similar to the picture we have in our entry way. Jesus took the unleavened bread and prayed and gave it to his friends and told them something earthshaking—that this was his body broken for them and that the cup of wine as a new covenant sealed with his blood and somehow his death would bring them even closer to God. I imagine the table was very quiet and sober especially after he told them that one of them would give him away to be killed.

They sang a hymn and went back outside the city to the Mount of Olives where he prayed all night. What was his prayer? He said that he did not want to have to die this way, that if it was possible, that this cup of suffering and pain would be taken away from him. But that if this is what was necessary, that then what God needed and not what he himself wanted was most important. He was in anguish, and his three best, closest friends could not even stay awake and pray with him on this loneliest night of his life. If your image of Jesus does not include this very human, very humble story of the Garden of Gethsemane, you have ignored one of the most important pieces of Jesus the man, the human prophet who wrestled with his mission and purpose in life just as you and I do.

The high priests guards find them in the garden, and Judas identifies Jesus with a kiss. He is arrested and taken back into the city for an illegal trial. Judas betrays their location probably because Judas has completely misunderstood all these three years what kind of messiah and savior Jesus is—he believed Jesus would finally begin the violent military revolution if Judas forced his hand, and would turn into the warrior that King David was—slaughtering these Romans, cutting their throats and restore Israel to its military greatness that was last after the rule of that warrior king, King David a thousand years before. Peter, you may remember, tried to cut the throat of one of the soldiers, aiming at his throat but only cutting off his ear!

Jesus is brought to the high priest, accused of blasphemy and speaking for God, and then, because the Jewish leaders had no power to execute him, they took him to Pilate and accused him of saying that he was a king, a political ruler in competition with Caesar. That got Pilate’s attention because he thought this was a man about to start a revolution and Pilate only wanted to keep the peace among these troublesome Jews until the Passover finished and they all could leave town. He did not see any danger from Jesus so he wanted to set him free after a sound beating, but the crowd chose to have a real zealot set free—Barabbas instead of Jesus—so Jesus was executed by crucifixion, the most horrible and humiliating way of death available to Rome. Of all the ways they had available to kill people, this was the worst, and it was done to teach a lesson to the other people. So the savior of the world ended his earthly life nailed to a cross. After he had died, he was taken down and laid in a borrowed grave because in his earthly life he himself had owned very little.

We began our service with some words from the prophet Isaiah about a servant of God who suffers a humiliating death and that through that servant’s death, people are reconciled with God. When Isaiah wrote those words, I believe that the servant he saw was the whole nation of Israel who had been suffering in exile in Babylon. I also believe that Jesus knew that passage and saw himself in that servant role and that somehow through his suffering we are brought closer to God and to the better angels of ourselves. 

The problem of suffering is an age old question when we think about God. How can a loving God allow innocent people to suffer? How can there be pain and illness and tragedy in our world if God cares for us and if God is fair? That dilemma has caused some people to abandon God, reject any ideas of God including some thoughtful people like Bart Ehrman who spoke here a few days ago. His new book on suffering rehashes the arguments in the Bible about pain and evil and rejects all of them except for the one in Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books in the Bible.

There are no easy answers to suffering and pain and evil. One Biblical answer is to look at this story of Jesus we have just rehearsed and to say that the cross is one answer. Even this innocent man, this charismatic prophet and teacher whom we believe now to be the Messiah because of what happened after his humiliating death, even this man experienced the evil and suffering all of us experience as well. AND, that God was able to bring even out of this awful pain and suffering, something new and hopeful and lifegiving.

There are two kinds of crosses most in use in churches across the world: one is the crucifix that is favored by orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. It is a good reminder of the story of holy week and of Good Friday. The other is the empty cross that tells us Jesus is risen and is alive and at work in our world today bringing hope and new life!

We will celebrate that part of the story next week. But in the meantime, don’t fail to be with us on Thursday night and Friday night to experience the valley of the shadow of death so that our Easter worship can mean the most to us in our need for hope and new life!!

Sermon Library