Palm Sunday A
Text: Matthew 21:1-11
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
April 5, 2020

A Hell of a Holy Week

Wednesday of this past week, already into the third week of the shut-down, in the governor’s daily press conference, Illinois public health director Dr. Ngozi Ezike pleaded one more time with churches and other faith communities to stop worship and close their doors. That’s strange she would be saying that, I thought; haven’t we all done that already?

But on the news the next day I saw why the plea is still necessary. There was the pastor of a church in Naperville, still gathering for worship, because why? Because it’s an essential service when people need solace, he says.

Solace?, I thought. Solace? How can anybody read the gospels and think that following Jesus, that Christian faith, is a matter of seeking solace?

In the gospel lesson this morning Jesus enters Jerusalem and he is not seeking solace. Actually what he’s doing is poking the bear.

Because Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is a piece of performance art; it’s political theater. You see, it wasn’t the first of the parades into Jerusalem during that Passover week; the first one was staged by Roman military forces entering the city from the west, to keep the peace, the imperial peace, among the restive, rebellious people of Jerusalem when they were gathered for the Passover. At the head of the procession was the Roman military governor, a guy you may have heard of named Pontius Pilate, riding a giant war-horse and leading a parade of military force. You’ve seen parades like this, haven’t you? Kim Jong-Un in North Korea is really good at this kind of thing, with missiles and tanks. White supremacist groups in the US try their hand at it too, to show off their helmets and guns.

But then comes this other parade. This Jesus parade enters Jerusalem – from Bethphage, Matthew is careful to tell us – which is to say from the east, which means in the first place this is a parade with a different direction entirely, and in the second place that this parade is moving toward a head-on collision with that first one.

And it’s not just a matter of direction; in other ways, too, the Jesus parade is the exact opposite of Roman imperialism. Romans got armed soldiers? All Jesus got is workers, peasants, and slaves, and a coupla tax collectors and sex workers, for good measure. This Jesus bunch follows the Son of Man as he is mounted on, not a war-horse, but a donkey – how’s that for the political theater part? The donkey is satire. The donkey is a way of saying that somebody around here is a horse’s ass. The donkey means it ain’t the military force of the Roman Empire; instead it’s the Kingdom of heaven that’s come near.

Jesus’ procession is not a death march of soldiers; it’s a parade the people can walk in; it is indeed a march for our lives. The people of Jerusalem get it, for they are Jews, after all, God’s own people, and Jesus is counting on them to remember words of the prophet Zechariah, words they’ve heard in worship over and over again through the years: “Say unto 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.”

So Jesus leads his people on the road into Jerusalem, on the road to engage with what the powers of this world have to give. He’s not seeking solace, not by a long shot; he’s engaging with the world and its hard truths. Read the gospels and none of this will surprise you, for Jesus again and again “sets his face” on Jerusalem, the gospels say, and he tells the disciples again and again exactly where he’s going: the Son of Man must suffer, and even die. Not a whole lot of solace about that.

And for those of us who follow Jesus, what does this mean, about where we’re going? I submit to you that, like the apostle Thomas in last week’s gospel lesson we look at each other, we shrug our shoulders, and we say, “All right, then. Let’s go with him.”

We are in the parade, following him, bent on engaging with the worst that the world has to offer. All week I’ve been on the phone with people losing incomes, losing jobs, losing livelihoods. Both of my sons. So many of our church people. Unemployment graphs that seemingly can’t be scaled high enough, to catch all that’s happening to people in our nation and the world. The sacrifices we are making, are staggering.

And we are making those sacrifices, for the sake of life. For the sake of life. Can there be anything more, like unto the way of Jesus into Jerusalem? Like him, we will engage the worst that the world has to offer, and we will live, we say.

For those of us who follow Jesus, where are we going? All right, we say; let’s follow him. At the medical center where my wife works, one floor after another is being converted over to COVID care. She’s the chief of internal medicine there, so as each new floor is opened she asks her doctors, who will go? And one after another they volunteer – volunteer! – to be shifted over to COVID care. Thank God, they are not seeking solace; for those of us who are Christian, we call that joining the Jesus parade. It’s the Thomas the apostle shrug of the shoulders and defiant response: “All right, then; let’s go.” Let’s walk toward the danger, where our parade will hit the enemy head-on, and we will engage. It is God who leads and inspires this fight.

Where is all this taking us? The first place it’s taking us is through one hell of a Holy Week. That’s what it was for Jesus, of course: one hell of a Holy Week. And so it will be for us, too; the inexorable numbers show us the attack of the disease will peak in Chicago this week and next. A hell of a Holy Week.

But never forget, people of God, why it was that the ancient people of God – those peasants, workers, sinners and tax collectors – were willing to join that Jesus parade in the first place, in the first century. As dangerous and self-sacrificing as it was to face down the powers of this world, yet did they know that the way of Jesus was the one and only certain way of life, for them. The sacrifice, then, was for something so much bigger! It wasn’t masochism that motivated them, you know, or some creepy kind of self-victimization. He died, so that we may live. The sacrifices we make, too, this Holy Week, are so that we may live.

So see, the message of Holy Week is not solace; the message of Holy Week is that in the end, Jesus is making something Godly out of this mess. Heck, we know that, even now, even here, still in the middle of it. We know that
• with the sacrifices we make for the sake of one another,
• and care for one another as we live through it,
• in the simple valor of such as delivery people and grocery workers – the kind of people in Jesus’ parade, right? –
• in the renewed unity of social purpose that we have come to know through this …
we know already that Jesus is making something Godly out of this mess. To
• keep on walking in the Jesus parade;
• to remain committed;
• to engage the evil and the tragic in every way and every moment;
• and to not ever, ever despair and never give up –
there can be no more ringing and radiant proclamation of the Christian faith than to say it: “Our Lord Jesus? He’s on his way to the cross. Let’s go follow him.”