Sermon Palm & Passion Sunday March 20, 2016 HPMF Luke 23:13-25; 32-46 Sermon Title: In the end is our beginning Luke 23:13-25 13 Pilate then called together the chief priests, the leaders, and the people, 14 and said to them, You brought me this man as one who was perverting the people; and here I have examined him in your presence and have not found this man guilty of any of your charges against him. 15 Neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us. Indeed, he has done nothing to deserve death. 16 I will therefore have him flogged and release him. 18 Then they all shouted out together, Away with this fellow! Release Barabbas for us! 19 (This was a man who had been put in prison for an insurrection that had taken place in the city, and for murder.) 20 Pilate, wanting to release Jesus, addressed them again; 21 but they kept shouting, Crucify, crucify him! 22 A third time he said to them, Why, what evil has he done? I have found in him no ground for the sentence of death; I will therefore have him flogged and then release him. 23 But they kept urgently demanding with loud shouts that he should be crucified; and their voices prevailed. 24 So Pilate gave his verdict that their demand should be granted. 25 He released the man they asked for, the one who had been put in prison for insurrection and murder, and he handed Jesus over as they wished. *I owe most of the ideas and concepts in this sermon to Barbara Brown Taylor, Gardner C. Taylor, John Howard Yoder, and Walter Wink.
A lot happening in one service, to move from the celebration of Palm Sunday to thinking about the crucifixion, all in just over one hour s time. It might seem like an odd thing to do, trying to move from the shouts of praise as Jesus rode into Jerusalem to the angry cries for his death in just a matter of moments. But we know, even as we reenact the Triumphal Entry each year, we know that a dark cloud hangs over that processional we know that the people will soon change their tune, that they will soon abandon Jesus radical love for the calm of the status quo. We know their Hosannas will turn into Crucify Him before the week is even up. And so, it might not be so odd after all to smash these together into one story, as they are, in many ways inseparable. It does leave one with the question, however, of how that happened. How did those hopeful and triumphant cries outside of Jerusalem so quickly become calls for his death? Where did all of those people go that hailed him as one sent from the Lord? Was it the same people, who just changed their mind? Or, was it a completely different group of people who answered Pilate with chants to crucify him? We don t know if it was the same people or not, either way the outcome was the same, fear overcame hope keeping things calm and orderly became the primary importance of that moment. So we are left to wonder, what caused this sudden change in so many people? Many believe that it was simply the will of God. According to the historical (traditional) faith of the church, it happened because God wanted it to. He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.
This is how the Book of Common Prayer puts it in one communion prayer. We call it the atonement the satisfaction the idea being that Christ paid for our sins. We were so bad, it seems, and our crimes against God were so great, that justice demanded the sacrifice of life. The only way God could honor that demand and still preserve our lives was to find someone else to be sacrificed in our place. Jesus is who God sent for such a task. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel struggles with this view. Wiesel, recounting the story of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, says that the main different between Judaism and Christianity is that on Mount Moriah, the father did not kill his son, while on Golgotha, he did. And for that reason, Wiesel says, he is eternally grateful that God made him a Jew. God sent an angel to stop Abraham from killing his son, but there was no intervention for Jesus no angel, not even a voice from heaven saying, stop it! God remained silent. Maybe that is why we call it the will of God, simply because it happened. If God had not willed it, we usually think, then it would not have happened. Only that assumes a universe in which there are no other powers operating besides the power of God, and I am not so sure about that. From the very beginning, God has shared power with us, giving us power to name, to create, to choose, to act. We have done wonderful things with that privilege amazing and beautiful things. We have also done terrible and ugly things. The dark side of our power is our power to resist God to say no to God s yes and to thwart God s will, to thwart God s hopes for us. God allows us the temporary illusion of power, we tell ourselves, but God is really in charge, and when things get bad enough God will come back down and set everything right. Only what if that is not how things work? What if God has settled for limited power in order to be in partnership with us and we really can mess things up? What if God lets us? These
are pictures of two different worlds. In one, everything that happens, happens by the will of an all-powerful God. In this one, God s power is limited by our power to resist. What happens, happens in a world of clashing wills, so that even God is sometimes surprised. A novelist I knew in San Francisco told me something that opened me up to a different view of God than I had ever considered before. He had just returned from a few months of writing up on the Oregon coast, he said it was an amazing time of writing. He told me that as he was writing, in the middle of his novel, my characters did something I never expected! How can that be, I thought, they are your characters, they are your creation they came from your mind? They took on a life of their own he said, they surprised me. That changed my view of God. I have thought about that many times, him telling me, And then, my characters did something I never expected! And so perhaps, that it how it is with God even God is surprised by us sometimes. This casts a different light on the cross. It is entirely possible that what God wanted for Jesus was long life and success, and that his early death was not the fulfillment of God s will but the frustration of it the world s no to God s yes a divine defeat. In this light, Jesus did not die to pay our bills. He died because he would not stop being who he was and who he was, was very upsetting to those in power to those who liked civility and order. He turned everything around and upside down. He allied himself with the wrong people and insulted the right ones. He did not play politics or church to stay in power. He did not engage in political or say, this is not the right political climate to do such a bold thing. He disobeyed the law. He challenged the
authorities, who warned him to stop. To stop or else. The religious leaders warned him to stop. To stop or else. And when he would not stop being who he was when he would not stop living his mission in the world they killed him for it. They killed him because he would not stop being who he was. The charge against Jesus, writes Gardner C. Taylor, changed according to where his charges were being made and before whom they were being made. His enemies were clever in their political abilities in this way. When the hearing against him was in the Jewish court, the Sanhedrin, the charge was a religious one, blasphemy. Are you the Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah? In the religious court it was his claim to be divine that made them believe he must be put to death. This is well and good for a religious court, but the Romans, who were really in charge, could not care less about all of religious arguments and disputes. They certainly did not care if people claimed to be divine, most of the emperors of Rome claimed to be divine. So, when the accusers got to the Roman court, they changed the charge from blasphemy to treason, from a religious charge to a political one. He claims to be king they said, he tells us to not pay taxes to the emperor. Not paying taxes, now that will get the attention of the government. But there was more to it. Perhaps the most important in Rome s eyes, He stirs up the people. This fellow upsets the order of things, he causes restlessness with how things are. He is a troublemaker! And on that charge, I am glad to say, they were right. Jesus Christ was, and continues to be, a troublemaker. He challenged the assumptions of his world. He looked at the political system and said, it does not have to be this way. He looked at those who were on the
bottom of the social order and said, these people are not to be forgotten and discarded they should be at the top. He looked at the economic realities and said that this is not what God intended, it does not have to be this way. He looked at the religious ways of doing things that helped to maintain all of this injustice and said, it must not be this way. He stirred things up. He was a troublemaker. At any point along the way, he could have avoided the cross. I really believe that, that he could have stopped and avoided the cross. He could have stopped operating in the open and gone underground instead. He could have stopped being such an activist and started writing books or become a consultant instead. He could have softened his message, just a bit softened his mission and his love, just enough to stay alive. Some would argue that this would have been more effective, to stay around longer even if the message is a bit watered down. He could have stopped doing all these things, stopped pressing so hard, but that would have meant that he would have had to stop being who he was. He would have had to stop living the way of God s kingdom. He would have had to stop being who he was intended to be. He could have stopped being himself and saved his own life. But he did not. When the soldiers showed up in the garden to arrest him, he did not disappear into the dark. He stepped into the light of their torches and asked them whom they were looking for. Jesus of Nazareth, they answered him, and he said, I am he. Barbara Brown Taylor says that this is God s name in a different key. It is the same name God gave Moses in the burning bush. I am who I am. I will be who I will be. I am he. It was no the only
possible answer. For Jesus, maybe, but not for everyone. A little later, after Jesus had been taken to the high priest for interrogation, Simon Peter lingered in the courtyard while his teacher was being questioned. Twice someone recognized him and asked him who he was. You are not also one of this man s disciples, are you? I am not, Peter said, not once but three times. So Jesus died and Peter lived. That is the difference between I am and I am not. If Jesus had denied himself the way Peter did, he might have saved his life, but it is pretty clear he would have lost it too. Luckily for us, that is not how it happened. He had what it took. He gave all he had, opening himself up to all his life brought him. If the cross was in any sense the defeat of God s will, then it was also the perfection of it, as one beloved human being chose to bear the consequences of being who he was and died with the same integrity and love by which he had lived. Insofar as it was the will of God that he live like that, then God s will included the possibility, maybe even the probably of his execution. Not as something God desired or required, but as something God suffered as well. Christianity is the only world religion that confesses a God that suffers. It is not all that popular an idea, a God who suffers, even among Christians. We prefer a God who prevents suffering, only that is not the God we have got. What the cross teaches us is that God s power is not the power to force human choices and end human pain. It is, instead, the power to pick up the shattered pieces and make something holy out of them not from a distance but right up close. By entering into the experience of the cross, God took the human-made wreckage of the world inside himself and labored with it a long labor, almost three days and God did not let
go of it until he could transform it and return it to us as life. That is the power of a suffering God, not to prevent pain but to redeem it, by going through it with us (Barbara Brown Taylor). This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ. This is the God of the cross the God who does not prevent pain, but works through it and with it who can redeem it by going through it with us. Thanks be to God! Amen.