“When the Cheering Stops”

Mark 11:1-11 (Palms)

April 9, 2006

St. Paul United Methodist Church, Little Rock

Rev. John A. Fleming, Pastor

I have become a fan of Phillip Yancey and his writings. You may know some of them, titles like What’s So Amazing About Grace? or The Jesus I Never Knew or his even more famous book, Disappointment with God. When he was editor of the Christian Century, Phillip Yancey wrote that growing up in his home church, his church didn’t observe the major events of Holy Week. He says that as a child and as a young adult, he never took communion on Maundy Thursday evening or heard the story of what happened in that Upper Room. He tells that during those years, he never attended a Good Friday worship service and heard the scriptures tell the story of the last hours of the life of Jesus. He writes that his home church even shied away from pictures of Jesus on the cross. There were crosses in the church, but on none of them would you find Jesus. Writing about it, Phillip Yancey penned these words, “The church I grew up in skipped past the events of Holy Week in a rush to hear the cymbal and celebration sounds of Easter.”

Who could blame them? Our Holy Week worship services will happen this week, on two consecutive evenings, and they will be attended. But I’d hesitate to say that they will be well attended, small in comparison to the Easter morning crowd. It is much easier to skip through Holy Week. After all, Jesus on the cross means death and Jesus on Easter means life. If you had to choose, would you rather have a sanctuary stripped on Thursday evening of all of our favorite things like Bibles and crosses. If you had to choose would you pick Good Friday that tells the hard lesson of Jesus’ life. Many would say, given the choice, give me the Sanctuary decked with white banners, flowers on the altar, light guiding the way, and the smell of Easter lilies in the air!

After all, who doesn’t want to skip the hard part. Think about it for just a moment. Given a smidgen of a chance, when it comes to our own lives, we would much rather skip the hard things and the hard times.

Let me show you what I have discovered. I have discovered that when it comes to the Bible, the events of Holy week don’t cause us to speed up, rushing past them. No, instead they make the world slow down, almost at a snail’s pace. What the church wants to get through quickly, the Bible takes very slow. As one commentator that I read this week put it, “The stories of the gospels are only introductions to the real story, the tale of the last days of Jesus’ life.” I don’t think that I can go that far, but for us Christians, we are defined in part, by Jesus’ last week.

So what’s a preacher to do on this Sunday where the lectionary gives the story of Palm Sunday and the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, or the story of the passion?

Somewhere, sometime the option of one or the other, palm or passion became a possibility. I don’t think that it was that way during my growing up years at the First United Methodist Church in my hometown in Tennessee. In the worship services, on that day, we heard about Jesus entering Jerusalem amid the cheering crowds. We processed down the aisle, waving palm branches and singing, “All glory laud and honor to thee Almighty King.” And we all went home with a pretty good feeling, because, taken by itself, the Palm Sunday story comes across as an upbeat, even triumphant story. In fact, in my mind’s eye, I can still see the Sunday School leaflets that were passed out on those Sundays. On the cover was Jesus on a donkey, children waving branches, and the words under the picture, “Jesus’ Triumphal Entry.”

Now I don’t know when it happened, but some time between then and now instead of calling today Palm Sunday, it is now labeled palm/passion Sunday and instead of reading the pleasant eleven versed account of a parade, the lectionary suggests that we should also read the one hundred and thirty or so verses that painfully take us through the crucifixion.

So what’s a preacher to do? Here’s what I think. I think that it is impossible to preach on this Palm Sunday story without recognizing that the crucifixion story is there, too. The story almost seems to be hiding behind one of the trees that Jesus passed on his way into the city. And we cannot watch this parade without being aware that the shadow of the cross is cast by every palm branch that is lowered toward the road. No one in that first Palm Sunday scene could have seen this coming. No one, that is, except Jesus. The crowds certainly didn’t see it as they called out, as they shouted out, “Hosanna: Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!” They did not know. They were blissfully unaware of what would happen. Even Jesus’ own disciples were deceived and caught up in the moment. They had heard what Jesus had said about being arrested and killed, but now things seemed to be going their way and not the way that Jesus had spoken of.

But Jesus, of course, knew otherwise. He knew where he was headed and though he may not have known the details of his final week, he fully understood that there was some kind of a Good Friday experience waiting for him at the end of it. Now, that is a troubling thought for many of us. Being a pastor now for twelve years, I have taught my share of classes, mostly Bible studies. In those studies, when the subject of the cross came up, almost always, without fail, someone would ask, “Why did Jesus have to die?” There was even that determined soul, who seemed to take every study I offered, who asked time and time again, “How? How does Jesus dying on the cross save me?” It’s a hard question to answer. In fact, I do not think that I ever answered it to her satisfaction. There is faith involved in such an answer. Someone else asked, “How could God do such a thing? How could God write such a ghastly script and then cast his own son as the main character?” “What kind of a God would do such a thing?” Still another asked, “Was the cross necessary?” Those are tough questions. But whether or not you believe that the cross was necessary or not (by the way, I do believe that it was necessary!) you have to admit that it was inevitable.

So what’s a preacher to do on this Sunday? I will tell you what one preacher did, perhaps not on this Sunday, but on a Sunday several years ago. The story is told that in San Francisco, a pastor said from the pulpit, “The cross has been a symbol of suffering and shame for long enough. and we are tired of it. We are not going to be a part of this anymore!” And with that, he got a ladder, went up the cross on the wall behind him, and pulled it down. Then he said, “For us, no more weakness, no more suffering.” I don’t believe that I will do that this morning.

Some years ago, there was a novel written whose title was The Last Temptation of Christ. That last temptation, you might remember, was for Jesus to step away from the cross and not to go towards it. The book became a movie, you will remember, and was banned in many cities. The author basically said that when Jesus got into Jerusalem and the noose was tightening around his neck and there was no way out, and his death was in front of him, he thought, “I could go back to Nazareth. I could marry and have a family and taken up carpentry again and get out of this. No one seems to care anyway.” You can see why there was trouble around this movie.

If Jesus had done that, if he had slipped out of town in the middle of the night, left his disciples there, and his fate there. If he had married and had children and live like everyone else, where would we be today?

Jesus knew who he was and was faithful; his faithfulness moved him closer to God and deeper in the heart of things that matter. Faithfulness is costly, there is no doubt about that. The Christian life says that you get involved, sometimes at a great risk to your name and your reputation and your money and your job. You get involved because it is your business to do so. Faithfulness requires something of us. We can expect certain things to happen when we are faithful. There may be scars, there may be penalties, there may be sacrifices, things like that.

And when Jesus, riding on a borrowed donkey with the cheering all around him turns back and looks at you and asks, “Want to come with me?” What will you answer be. If you get caught up in the parade like atmosphere, you answer will surely be yes. But if you knew what was going to happen by the end of the week, would you raise your hand?

If you believe in God, then that is sometimes when the trouble begins. One day Jesus said to his disciples, “Get into the boat and go to the other side.” They only did what they told him to do and that is when they encountered a storm. Some television preachers would have you believe that if you just believe in God, everything will be peaceful and serene and beautiful and the winds at the end of the day will move your ship into a beautiful sunset. That’s just not true. Believing in God sometimes means putting yourself in a situation that will make you ask, “Why did I do that?” Because of faith, some have put their heads in the mouths of lions, been resurrected from the dead and had every kind of triumph that there is. Others have suffered and been hurt and been placed in prison. And faith says, “I take this up as my way of life!”

Why do we have to go to the cross every spring? Why did Jesus go there? Here’s what I think. I think he went there as a sign and as a way of saying that this is how God is. He identifies with our hurts. God comes to us and suffers with us and that suffering is extra ordinarily powerful!

I want to close with a story. It’s one that I have told before. It’s a powerful one so I guess that that is all right. It is the one about the little girl who lived long ago at a orphanage. That ought to tell you how long ago. She wasn’t really a trouble maker, but those who worked there saw her that way. They looked for ways to catch her doing things that she should not be doing; they did that from time to time. To be honest with you, they found satisfaction in that.

Their rules were strict and one evening, after it was dark and everyone was supposed to be in their rooms for the night, this little girl snuck out of her first floor room. She opened her window, climbed down, ran across the large front lawn of the orphanage towards the brick wall that separated it from the outside world. She climbed it. While she did, administrators from the orphanage watched. Their first thought was that she was trying to escape. She wasn’t trying to do that. Instead she climbed the wall, stood on her toes, and placed an envelope on one of the branches that hung into the real world. I guess that the note was intended for her parents, if they ever came that way. The girl climbed back down, ran back to her room, climbed into her window and shut it.

The administrators ran to the brick wall. One of them scaled the wall, reached for the envelope, opened the letter inside of it and read it to the other. The note simply read, “Whoever finds this, I love you.”

Beloved, hanging on another tree for us all to notice and to go by it this holy week is the same message. Whoever finds this, I love you. So Jesus rode on, step by step, past Palm Sunday into Good Friday and he invites us to follow him, to observe and to learn and to understand his cross.