Comments for Jim

Sunday, March 28, 1999

Rev. James A.Todhunter

DAY OF CRISIS

PSALM 118:1-2, 19-29 MATTHEW 21:1-17

Today is Palm Sunday. It is a day that ushers in Holy Week. Palm Sunday is generally experienced as a day of joy and jubilation, a day in which all Jerusalem is stirred in adoration of Jesus, the Messiah, and the Son of David. Christian celebration of Palm Sunday usually begins and ends with Jesus' triumphal entry amid cries of "Hosanna."

But look more closely. Much more happens. It is a day in which Jesus brings everything to a head. It is a day of crisis for him and for Israel. The Jesus of Palm Sunday emerges as a person full of intention and clarity. He is proactive. He seems to know exactly what he is doing. It is almost as if he is orchestrating events. From outside of town he instructs the disciples to obtain the donkey. He rides into Jerusalem in a carefully choreographed procession which was bound to evoke the days of David, King of yore, and comfortably lets that mantle of greatness and humility settle on his shoulders.

But Palm Sunday doesn't conclude there. Immediately Jesus goes to the temple and provokes a confrontation. The concession stands and souvenir salesmen of the day are thrown out. Everybody was trying to make a buck out of Passover. People who had carved out a little piece of the action are labeled by Jesus as thieves, along with those in authority who wink at it.

Then immediately following his vigilante purification of the temple, the blind and the lame come to him and they are healed. Then he returns to Bethany for the night. All in all, a very full, highly charged day.

And, more than any other day yet in Jesus' ministry, it was a day of crisis. What is a crisis? A crisis is simply a moment in which everything becomes clear. A crisis is a moment of truth in which reality becomes unavoidable to everyone. And conflict is the crucible in which clarity comes. Matthew expresses this in words that ought to chill us to the bone. Following Jesus' time of healing in the temple, Matthew says:

These men who were emblematic of the goodness of God in this world, were offended by the presence of God and God's healing love before their very eyes. Jesus has provoked a confrontation which has exposed them. Thereafter, Holy Week unfolds as a series of such confrontations, in which the truth is continually laid bare: Jesus' betrayal by Judas, Jesus' abandonment by his disciples, Jesus' scourging and trial, his confrontation with Pilate - one after another, events that make it perfectly clear that the one who was unmistakably the Messiah of God, is totally rejected by this world - religious establishment, government, crowds, his own devoted followers. The only ones who stand by him are those who, by definition, are powerless, the women and children. Holy Week is a series of crises which make the truth clear - the world has forsaken God. Jesus is the "stone that the builders rejected." And it began with Palm Sunday, a day of crisis.

I think it is sometimes hard for us to grasp the provocative nature of God’s goodness. We too often see righteousness as not doing, rather than doing. We see goodness as avoiding sin, being good by virtue of not being bad; staying out of trouble, as it were. In its most common form, we are good by being inoffensive. Goodness equals being "nice" and not upsetting anyone. But the Christian life is about speaking up and taking action. On Palm Sunday Jesus went out of his way to find trouble. Martin Luther King, Jr. becomes a modern model for us. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Selma, were examples of non-violent actions. They were proactive. Not surprisingly, King and those who marched with him were immediately labeled as troublemakers, disturbers of the status quo. But they were not troublemakers as much as evil exposers. The fire hoses and police dogs represented the violent force of evil that had lain there quietly, almost invisibly. It was not exposed until actions drew evil out into the open. Like Jesus on Palm Sunday.

How to teach the meaning of Easter, especially to children, is always a challenge. It must be done thoughtfully and carefully. I am told that in the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, there is a fable used to explain the meaning of the crucifixion. It goes like this: God is a great and good fisherman. In the ocean swims a monstrous evil fish or serpent that is threatening to devour and destroy all of creation. This monster is crafty and elusive and rarely seen (like the Loch Ness monster?). But its evil effects are felt repeatedly in the darkness of night. God must do something to lure out the creature in order to destroy it. So like any smart fisherman he uses the most appealing and appetizing bait he can find. And that is Jesus. The monster desires to devour goodness. So what more attractive lure than Jesus, the embodiment, the incarnation of goodness? The hook is baited and the monster takes it all - hook, line and sinker. And is captured, pulled up out of the water and exposed to the light of day, the light which destroys evil. But as the sea monster is captured, evil and death are captured as well. And when death dies, through the death of Jesus, life lives. And Jesus lives, too. For there is now no death.

Perhaps that story offends you as being a little crude. But I think it tells us a lot. We are called to resist the powers of evil, but we are also called to recognize that we must go after evil. And as we do so, we must expect that the evil head of the beast will rear even more dramatically and visibly and dangerously. The ghastly events in the former Yugoslavia are a sobering reminder that evil fights back. When you fight evil with force (as you must sometimes do), evil will lash out all the more fiercely.

How are we called to be proactive agents of justice and reconciliation? Just in our daily lives. Last week I was waiting in line at CVS to purchase some razor blades and after-shave lotion. It was a long line and only one cash register was open. I was somewhere about halfway back. You know the situation. Then suddenly two clerks appeared and two more registers were opened and someone said "Next in line please." So this one line instantly disperses into three shorter lines. As usual I don't move quickly enough and I am left standing there looking at these three lines. I then queue up behind the nearest one. Whereupon a young man with a baseball cap marches up to the clerk at the center register and declares in a loud voice. "I was next in line!" The clerk, who had started to ring up the purchase of the woman who had stepped up, looked horrified. She looked at the man and then looked pleadingly at the woman. "I was next in line!" he repeated. People muttered to one another in annoyance. "The nerve of that man!" After a very uncomfortable moment, the clerk said, "I really should take him first." And I thought to myself, good for you, man. There is justice!

A silly example, perhaps. But on a very modest scale that was a crisis - a moment in which someone acted and the truth was revealed. The truth was that "Next in line" either means that or it doesn't. And if it does, then why did most people act otherwise? If you seek to avoid a crisis, you seek to have it both ways. Most of us will seek to avoid a crisis because we want to avoid a conflict. Being nice keeps things moving along. But the price of avoiding conflict may be the price of denying the truth.

Are there not many examples? No matter how you cut it, is it not true that the Olympic movement has been corrupted to its very core by money? Has not its very spirit been soiled? This is not just a matter of fixing this or that, or demanding the resignation of this or that person. The truth is that money is power and power corrupts. And as long as everything is running smoothly and everybody gets their piece of the action, what is the problem? The problem is that everybody is living a lie.

What Jesus shows us is that truth is meaningless unless you act upon it. Truth is not an abstraction in some philosophical sense. Either you act in accordance with the truth, either you do truth or you don't. And a crisis makes that clear.

Jesus knew how to choose his crises. That took courage. But, more often than not, our crises choose us. Tragedy, illness, suffering, loss - become the crucibles that both test us and reveal the truth about ourselves, for better or worse. I spent several more days last week with my mother in Ohio, as she grieves the loss of her partner of 38 years. Now she must face major changes in her life at the age of 82. I know she feels overwhelmed. But one of the things that became unmistakably clear was the determination of all of us in the family to work together carefully and supportively - both of her and each other - to make the right decisions. It shouldn’t have really been a surprise, but yet it was a truth that felt very good. Sometimes a crisis exposes painful truths about families, hurts and sorrows swept under the rug for too many years. But what a blessing it can be when the truth really is caring and respect and love.

And, of course, we see that happen all the time in our own Christian community, when the support for one another is there in times of crisis. In a way, we are all at our most real at such times.

The Holy Week journey is about becoming real. It is about exposing and experiencing the truth; about becoming authentic to one another and to God. And at that week’s journey’s end the abiding truth awaits: God is God. Death is dead. Life is triumphant. AMEN.

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