“The End of the World”

Mark 11:1-11

Mark 15:21-46

A Sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

Palm Sunday

April 13, 2003

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            We are here on Palm Sunday, with all its pomp and circumstance, with all its families gathered together, with all the bells and the beautiful music.  It’s almost enough to make you forget what is going on in the world.

            What a difference a week can make.  A week ago, we were hearing from embedded reporters that the military was doing their jobs well.  Depending on who was telling the story, the crowds were either cheering or jeering.  And then we saw that statue topple down and a huge crater engulf possibly Saddam Hussein, his two sons and certainly hundreds of others, guilty or not.  Now, there is talk about people coming home, including those who never went to Iraq, like Lynn’s son Eric.

            The fact is that within one week, the whole world seemed to change.

            2000 years ago, the world changed in a week.  On Palm Sunday, teeming masses poured out into the streets to welcome whom they thought might be the conquering hero as he rode into Jerusalem.  And then a week later that conquering hero was strung up on a cross for all to see.  It was a gruesome sight.  It was supposed to be.  The Romans used crucifixion to scare people into submission.  You saw people hang on the cross for days if not weeks as they struggled in agony, eventually dying of asphyxiation from having their arms strung out like that for so long. 

            What scared people so much about Jesus?

            He was not to be defined by other’s views of righteousness.

            He was welcoming and affirming of the outcasts.

            He was not a person of violence.

            He did not tow the party line when it came to righteousness. 

            He was downright audacious, scandalous, charismatic, and radically earthy.

            He didn’t like fancy clothes and preferred to walk around in bare feet.

            He was constantly biting the hands that fed him.

            Not the way to make friends and influence people.

            To Mark, the cross is the great apocalyptic moment at which the powers are overthrown and their world comes to an end.  That’s what we mean by the end of the world.  When we venerate a cross, sure we remember Jesus’ death on it and the bloody, horrifying crucifixion, but we also remember that the cross marks the end of a brutal, barbaric way of looking at the world.  It marks the end of violence as a weapon that will work.  It marks the beginning of a new way of life.  Sadly, we have forgotten this about the cross.

Walter Wink puts it this way:  "When the Domination System catches the merest whiff of God's new order, by an automatic reflex it mobilizes all its might to suppress that order...The Powers are so immense, the opposition so weak, that every attempt at fundamental change seems doomed to failure.  The Powers are seldom content merely to win; they must win big, in order to demoralize opposition before it can gain momentum.  The tactics always include gratuitous violence, mocking derision, the intimidating brutality of the means of execution.  All of this is standard, unexceptional.  Jesus died just like all the others who challenged the powers that dominate the world."(Interpreting the Lessons of the Church Year,pp.10-11)

Jesus took the long walk to Golgotha.  Insurrectionists and others who were executed were given the humiliating walk of the cross as a warning to other would-be subversives.  You had better watch out.  Don’t say the wrong thing or this will be your fate, too.

            The chief priests joined the crowds in mocking Jesus, but not until he was on the cross.  I guess that was when it was safe.  Remember, they didn’t want to do anything to him earlier, because they feared the crowds.  Now, it seemed like there was nothing to lose and everything to gain.  Even the bandits strung up next to him joined the crowds in taunting Jesus. But with Jesus, they did not know that their mocking and their ridiculing and their brutality would get recorded and echo throughout history.

Wink continues by saying, "What killed Jesus was not irreligion, but religion itself; not lawlessness, but precisely the law; not anarchy but the upholders of order.  It was not the bestial but those considered best who crucified the one in whom the divine Wisdom was visibly incarnate.  And because he was not only innocent, but the very embodiment of true religion, true law, and true order, this victim exposed their violence for what it was: not the defense of society but an attack against God."(p.11)

            In Mark’s Jesus, there is none of the piety of the cross that we see in the other gospels.  Jesus doesn’t spout profundities from the cross.  He wonders why God has abandoned him and then he cries out with a loud voice.  He is fully human to the end.  At that point, the curtain that separated the holy of holies in the temple, the place reserved for the priests who alone were permitted to see God, was torn in two.  There is now unhindered access to God.  The strong man’s house was ransacked. 

            It is then that the Centurion, the Roman guard says this is God’s son.  He refuses to use the words of either of his accusers.  He doesn’t declare him the Messiah, as the chief priests accuse him of or king of the Jews as Pilate calls him.  He is truly God’s son and that is the only label that really matters after all.

            Now what does this have to do with us, you may ask?

            Just this: Jesus’ ugly, brutal crucifixion, like the rest of the gospel is a wake-up call to all of us. 

It shows us that the way of discipleship is not for the weak hearted. 

It is not for the timid. 

It is not for the convenience Christian. 

The way of Jesus is a hard way that will necessarily bring us up against opposition. 

            They will laugh at you, fight against you, torture you, maybe even kill you.  But you can’t lose.  Gandhi said “they can torture me even kill me and then they will have my dead body, not my obedience.”

            He also said in novniolence parlance that when you enter into nonviolence, they will first laugh at you, then they will fight against you, and then you win.

            The cross is voluntary redemptive suffering.  It is nonviolence showing that the violence of the world is not only morally bankrupt but largely ineffective as a tool of social control or of meaningful change.

For as Easter shows us, in God’s time the crucifixion is never the last word for the Christian.  It is the last, desperate pathetic attempt of the world to exercise its authority, but it is not redemption.  That only happens on Easter.  It is redemption for all those who follow the one who was strung up as a scapegoat.

            So as you remember these palms that you have in your hands and that you pick up from the floor.  Remember that they were waved by the crowds because they saw Jesus as a revolutionary.  And he was one, indeed.  But his revolution was not a violent one.  It was a revolution of the heart and the mind.  It was a higher revolution.  And it was ultimately a more effective revolution. 

So as you take these palms, remember that they are signs that you are part of a revolutionary movement.  It is a movement of minds and hearts.  And it will ultimately change the world.

            And as we transform these palms into crosses, we might very well see that these crosses do not represent the end of our world.  But the beginning of a new way of looking at the world.  And it starts with each and every one of us. 

The cross is the end of the old way of the world.  

It’s the end of the old rules. 

It’s the end of might makes right. 

It’s the end of business as usual. 

And it’s the start of the most effective and transforming power the world has ever known.  And it is right in your hands.  How is God going to use you in the coming season?