The Landscape of Lent: Palms

April 13, 2014 -- Palm Sunday

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Matthew 21:1-11

21 When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” 4 This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,

5 “Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; 7 they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!
    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

10 When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” 11 The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Matthew 26:14-16

14 Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests 15 and said, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver. 16 And from that moment he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.

Sermon: “The Landscape of Lent: Palms”

Prophecy is a funny business.  These days, if someone prophesies the end of the world as, say, next Tuesday, they’re generally seen as few ice cubes short of a glass of sweet tea.  If I were to, while shaking your hand as you leave today, tell you that you should really avoid that seafood supper this week because it won’t end well, you’d look at me like I was insane.  And then you’d probably avoid Bay Breeze for a week, just in case.  Prophecy is not an integral part of our society.

Not so in Jesus’ day.  Much of his life and ministry happened in a very precise way, fulfilling ancient prophecies about the Messiah.  Both texts from Matthew we read this morning –  Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem with palm branches waving and Judas’ betrayal of Jesus with palms full of coins – were actually prophesied by the same prophet: Zechariah.

Zechariah was a prophet around 520 BCE, over 500 years before the birth of Jesus.  He was the son of Berechiah, son of Iddo (what a name).  The people of Judah who were exiled returned to Jerusalem and were given special permission to rebuild the Temple, but they faced pressure from the Persian Empire.  So, Zechariah spoke over and over again about one thing: the restoration of the people of God, linked with the restoration of the Temple.

Now, if you think I’m about to skip ahead to present day and tell you this is speaking about what we know as the current state of Israel needing to rebuilt the temple before the Messiah comes back, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.  I don’t believe that the biblical people of Israel are the equivalent of what we know as the nation of Israel today, because those Jewish people were scattered throughout the world in the diaspora. And I don’t think this text translates quite that directly to current day.  But it does translate very clearly to our Matthew readings.  So let’s look at those parallels.

At the beginning of the triumphant entry story, Jesus begins his procession on the Mount of Olives.  Zephaniah said the Messiah would appear there.  Jesus rides in on a colt, he “borrowed” from someone in the village, saying “the Lord needs this.”  (I’m not sure “The Lord needs this” will work if we try to take someone’s new golf clubs or laptop!)  But it worked for Jesus, and he rode in on a colt, because Zephaniah said he would. 

Palm branches were waved, coats strewn upon that dusty road and the crowd shouted with one voice “Hosanna to the Son of David!  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”  Okay that’s actually the prophet Isaiah quoted there, not Zechariah.  Even as many praised Jesus as the Messiah, others asked “Who is this?”  The answer they were given: a prophet from Nazareth.  Prophecy mattered.

And then we switch gears, to Judas, perhaps the most hated and relatable character in all of scripture.  I love Frederick Buechner’s take on him:

Nobody can be sure, of course, why Judas sold Jesus out…he already had a reputation for dipping into the poor box from time to time so the cash may have been part of it.  If, like the other disciples, he was perennially worried about where he stood in the pecking order, he may also have been reacting to some imagined slight.  Maybe he thought his job as treasurer to the outfit was beneath him.  Another possibility is that he had gotten fed up with waiting for Jesus to take the world by storm and hoped that betraying him might force him to show his hand at last.  Or maybe, because nothing human is ever uncomplicated, something of all of these was involved.

Whatever his motivations, Judas did betray Jesus, for 30 pieces of silver.  Why 30 pieces?  That’s quite specific, isn’t it?  Well, 30 pieces of silver was the cost a slave owner would receive if their slave was gored by an ox (really, that in Exodus).  But that amount of money pops up elsewhere in the Old Testament, too.  Can you guess where?  Zechariah. 

Zechariah speaks of himself, saying, “on behalf of the sheep herders, I became the shepherd of the flock doomed to slaughter.”  He asked the sheep merchants for his wages, 30 pieces of silver.  And then he threw them into the treasury in the house of the Lord – literally meaning the ‘potter’, an act symbolizing God’s displeasure with these people.

When Judas receives his 30 pieces of silver – the worth of a killed slave – he later regrets this.  Well, that’s a bit of an understatement.  When he finds out Jesus has been condemned, he rushes into the house of the Lord and throws down his 30 pieces of silver, begging the religious leaders to reverse the decision.  They refuse, call the money what it is, “blood money” and use it to buy a field.  More specifically, they use it to buy the potter’s field, as a place for foreigners to be buried.  The prophetic connections of Judas’ betrayal with Zechariah trying to bring restoration to a sinful people are powerful, and obvious.

So what does all of this prophecy mean?  What does it matter than Jesus started his parade at the Mount of Olives, or that his parade ‘float’ was a colt, or that Judas would be paid 30 silver pieces to betray him, and throw that money down in the house of the Lord, or that this money would later be used to buy a potter’s field?

The temptation is to say that this shows God had a simple plan from the beginning and Jesus and Judas dutifully played their roles like toy trains chugging down pre-laid tracks by some divine Railroad Engineer.  That is the easy way to understand these prophetic connections, and maybe we’d prefer it. 

But prophesy, you see, is never easy.  That’s where we get it all wrong these days.  Prophets of old tore their clothes, married people who were impossible to love, shattered pottery into pieces, bought and sold fields, planted and ate crops, all in a dramatic effort to reveal the demanding covenant love of God, often giving their lives to get that message across. 

Those who call themselves prophets today often aren’t.  They’re not suffering for their message, they’re profiting from it.  They’re not speaking of the covenant love of God, they’re speaking of the bitter hatred of God, not on them, but on those they disagree with.  If you call yourself a prophet, you probably aren’t one. 

If you are willing to die to get the message of God’s love for all across, like Oscar Romero or Martin Luther King, Jr., or the assistant principal at Franklin Regional Senior High School this week who threw himself over a student stabbing other students to stop him, you probably are.  True prophets are rare these days.

I don’t actually think many of us can really be like the prophets of old or the prophets of today.  But we can learn from them.  Maybe Jesus’ big triumphant entrance was as preordained as his horrific exit a week later.  Maybe the lure of money and the familiar made Judas’ betrayal of his Messiah inevitable.  We do not have the answers to those questions, because prophets never really seek to answer questions.

Instead, they guide us to ask deeper ones, questions I hope we will each allow to stir in our hearts and souls this Holy Week:

·      Are we waving palms of praise or are we too preoccupied filling our palms with money that will prove worthless in the end?

·      Do we still wait for a Messiah who comes to take the world by storm, and miss the ways he is already entering the world again and again, not by force, but by grace?

·      Will we leave this space of worship and find ourselves forgetting the Savior we met here in a day or two as the mob mentality of worshipping busyness takes hold?

·      Do we believe that God still speaks through prophets, true prophets, showing us – not telling us – about the covenant love of God?  Will we listen to them?

·      Do we believe this week is about more than preparing for family meals and the Easter bunny, that Jesus’ death and resurrection actually did something – and still does something in a world where death seems so powerful?

·      Are we willing to enter into that story once more, the horror of the cross and the hope of the empty tomb, to discover why sacrifice and resurrection matter, not just over 2000 years ago, but today?

Thanks be to the God whose plans for redemption always come to pass, to the Messiah who walked that path not as a puppet, but willingly and selflessly, and to the Spirit who speaks through prophets of old and those rare prophets of today.  Amen.