Powers and Principalities

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
March 28, 2010; Palm/Passion Sunday, Year C
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 19:28-40) -- the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday

(Luke 23:1-49) -- the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke

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A couple of weeks ago while we were exploring beneath the south wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, Suzanne came across a palm branch that had been left behind by someone.  It was lying on the ground next to our passageway.  She picked it up and began to wave it, like what we might imagine happened at Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on that original Palm Sunday.  The palm branch was huge – around ten or twelve feet high.  It made our little slivers that we use in church look a bit timid.  It had a long central stem, with fronds extending up to three feet in either direction.  It took a good bit of energy to wave it, and the movement was visible from a great distance.  It's important to know that the palm is an ancient symbol of the nation of Israel and of its hopes for freedom.

I looked back, across the Kidron Valley and up near the top of the Mount of Olives to the place where we had started a day before, the village of Bethphage – the village Jesus walked from.  I looked across the Temple Mount to the minaret that now stands at the place of the Roman Fortress that Herod had built and named for his friend Mark Antony, the Antonia Fortress.  It was obvious.  The Romans saw the whole thing – this procession with giant waving palm branches and clothes strewn and revolutionary rhetoric: "Blessed is the King who comes in the Name of the Lord."

No wonder the Pharisees told them to be quiet.  This is the kind of demonstration that could only bring a punishing response from the Romans.  This was a planned demonstration.  Jesus knew what he was doing, and the evidence tells us he was very intentional about it.  You see, you don't find palm trees in Jerusalem.  These large branches had probably been carried all the way from Jericho, the oasis city in the desert, 850 feet below sea level. 

As Jesus' group neared Bethphage, a climb of more than 3500 feet from Jericho, Jesus made arrangements for a donkey, the traditional mount for the Kings of Israel.  When King David was dying, while his elder son Adonijah was feasting, having claimed the throne of his father, the prophet Nathan anointed the younger brother Solomon as king and placed him on David's donkey as a sign of his authority.  Solomon's claim to the throne prevailed.  He rode the king's donkey.

Among the treasured verses of Jewish Messianic expectation are the words of the prophet Zechariah: 
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!  Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!  Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (9:9)  On that day, (the Lord's) feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which lies before Jerusalem on the east. (14:4a)

So when Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey from the Mount of Olives, it is an act of profound symbolic speech.  He is announcing that the Messiah is returning to the Holy City.

If he wasn't already on the radar of the Roman Legion in Jerusalem, they immediately went to work to investigate who this was who stirred up potential political unrest.  The Sadducees and other Jewish collaborators with Rome recognized the volatile potential of this entrance, and they must have begun their strategies to nip this imposter in the bud before he incited an uprising that could provoke a violent, even catastrophic response from Rome.  Soon thereafter, when Jesus entered the Temple and disrupted their commercial interests, it was an obvious necessity for them that he be quashed.  For the Sadducees, the only question was "how?" 

But there were others who might have greeted the entrance of this potential Messiah.  The Zealots were Jewish nationalists, intent on driving the hated Roman occupiers out of their land.  But their hopes that Jesus might be the catalyst for a new independence movement were dashed when Jesus answered wrongly the question about taxes, "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."  He wasn't the kind of militaristic Messiah they were looking for.

Most of Jesus' support had probably come from among the ranks of the party of the Pharisees – good, observant Jews, who promoted the practice of the Torah by everyone, not just the professional religious.  But standing on the "teaching steps" on the south side of the Temple, within earshot of the Jerusalem headquarters of the Pharisees, Jesus railed against them, calling them hypocrites, as inwardly unclean as the whitewashed tombs of the decaying bodies in the crypts of the cemetery visible across the valley.

Within days of his entrance, Jesus had alienated himself from every structure and institution of his day, offending what Paul calls the "powers and principalities" – the institutions of government, religion, business, military and society – the institutions that give structure to our corporate life.  We need those structures.  We can't live without them.  They are foundational to the ordering that is necessary for community to exist. 

But those institutions are fallen.  And they tend to magnify their self-interests.  Ultimately, they are idolatrous.  Eventually they all demand our highest allegiance.  And in the conflict between Love Incarnate, the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and the self-interest of law, government, religion, business, military and society, the powers and principalities can't handle pure love.  They always crucify God.  We always crucify God. 

It is common for Christian preachers to interpret the cross of Jesus as God's embrace of our personal sin, an embrace that absorbs our violence and evil, returning only love and forgiveness, overcoming death with life.  What happens in Jesus' passion is more than personal, it is also systemic.  In the cross of Jesus, God also embraces our corporate sin, our fallen and broken structures of society and religion, the powers and principalities that give order to our common life, but which also create violence and evil.  Jesus absorbs the worst they can do, and returns only love and forgiveness. 

Today we see him, a victim of their injustice.  Condemned for sedition, blasphemy, and for "perverting our nation," Jesus is legally tried, convicted, sentenced to capital punishment, and executed by people and systems believing they are acting in the best interests of all.  "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." 

We walk the way of the cross this Holy Week to see what God will do when we and our institutions do our worst.