Matthew 21:1-11
Just in case you may have dozed off for the first twenty minutes of the service, let’s be sure we are all on the same page here: today is Palm Sunday. It’s worth reminding ourselves of that because, believe it or not, there is quite a bit of controversy over how Christians should observe this day. For many of us this is simply Palm Sunday, no more, no less. It is a day of celebration after a long Lenten season when we focused on sin and repentance. It is a time to remember that the crowds who got it right -- at least for a moment -- as they proclaimed Hosanna to the Son of David, the one who came to save us.
But there has been some concern among ministers and church leaders that by making Palm Sunday so celebratory, we have caused people to miss out on Holy Week, since most people will not attend services on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, missing out then, on the darker side of Holy Week, the stories of Jesus’ betrayal, crucifixion, and death. It is this concern that has led many churches to brand this day “Passion Sunday” and focus not on Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem but rather on the events of what we call the Passion -- Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion. Some churches even try to cram everything into one service, creating a Palm-slash-Passion Sunday experience.
This debate in the church reflects a larger issue in our culture, one that a researcher named Brene Brown highlighted in a recent lecture. She started by describing the opening scene of a movie a family is in a car, traveling on a windy road. A light snow is falling and the radio is tuned to a station playing holiday songs. “Jingle Bells” comes on the radio and everyone starts singing along. Brown then asks her audience to predict what happens next.
What do you think is going to happen?
Well, if you believe that what will happen next is a car crash, then you stand with the majority. Sixty percent of people say that the next thing that happens is a car crash. Another 10-15% have equally fatalistic answers, only more creative: the camera cuts to the oncologist and the terminal diagnosis he’ll reveal to this family the day after Christmas; or the family arrives at grandma’s house and finds everyone there dead.
Our expectation that anything that looks this good will necessarily be followed by tragedy parallels our own experience. Brown goes on to say that in her research, most of the people she interviews describe experiences that verge on bliss -- looking at their sleeping children, spending quality time with aging parents -- only, in the next moment, to imagine something horrible happening to the ones they love. (1)
As proven by the Palm-versus-Passion-Sunday debate, people approah Holy Week differently. Some of you would be perfectly happy to skip over the celebrations of Palm Sunday and get to Thursday and Friday -- after all, you know the worst is coming and you’d rather just get it over with. Or maybe pain and suffering is your reality right now and you take comfort it Christ’s suffering, knowing that because of it, he understands yours. Others don’t want to face the pain and suffering of this week at all, you’ll take the celebrations of Palm Sunday and the joy of Easter and forget all about what comes in between.
But the truth is that we can’t pick and choose which events of this week we want to dwell on. We can’t pick and choose because if we do, we will miss the point of what -- and, more importantly, who -- this week this about.
Palm Sunday is a celebration of who Jesus is. Matthew is determined for us to focus on this question; his account of this story ends with the whole city in turmoil and people asking: “who is this?” This is the question Matthew wants us to ponder. And one of the most important answers to this question is that Jesus is king. But, as Matthew goes to great pains to point out, Jesus is not your typical king, one who rules his subjects using fear and violence, as so many kings of the past did and so many dictators of the present do.
Jesus is a king who sets an example of humble obedience to God, an obedience described so beautifully in the reading today from Philippians. This passage reminds us that Jesus’ story is not a rags to riches story, but rather a riches to rags story. “...though [Jesus] was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross.” As our king, Jesus calls us to follow him on this path of humble obedience to God, obedience which calls us to serve others even as he served us.
When we ask ourselves the question of this day: “who is this man Jesus?” we discover once again that in our faith the answer lies in the tension between two opposites. As New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner puts it, “Jesus must be defined in two ways: he is the crucified Messiah (16:13-21), the modest King, the lowly Lord, the human God...deny either Jesus’ true deity or his true humanity and the spell of the gospel is broken.” (2) This story of Jesus’ entry into the holy city of Jerusalem reminds us that Jesus is God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, ruler of all creation. And Jesus is a human being, riding on a humble donkey, struggling, just as we do, to obey God in the face of his own anger, confusion, and fear over what’s to come.
This week there was an article in the New York Times which begins a bit like the scene Brene Brown describes in her lecture: Nathan and Elisa Bond are “about as ordinary a 30-something couple as you could find in Brooklyn.” He is a 38 year-old artist and teacher; she is a 36 year-old who works for a real estate broker; their daughter, Sadie, turned one last fall...okay, so right about now you’re thinking something bad is coming, right?
In this case, you’re right. After months of gastrointestinal problems, Nathan finally got a colonoscopy and learned that he has stage 3 colon cancer. Awful, right? Heartbreaking, even. But probably not enough to get your story in the New York Times. What happened next is what makes this story unusual. Just nine days after Nathan’s diagnosis, Elisa went for what was supposed to be a routine mammogram after having felt a lump in her breast a few months earlier. She assumed it was just another cyst like the ones she’d had before. But this time, the lump was cancer. And it had spread...to her liver, pelvic bones, and spine. Stage 4. (3)
In her blog, Elisa writes about their dual cancer diagnosis, and in a post a couple of weeks ago, she reflected on what happened when their story went “viral,” as they say, and people around the world -- friends and strangers -- heard about them and rallied around them. Here’s what she wrote:
Nathan and I are deeply, deeply grateful for and in awe of the global outpouring of love, support and inspiration. I mean literally GLOBAL. Who could ever have seen this coming? I guess it's happened before. ... It's just that you never imagine it's going to be you, or rather, we never imagined it would be us. None of it. We never imagined one of us having cancer. We never imagined both of us having cancer. We never imagined both of us having cancer at the same time. We never imagined our family and friends rallying to our side with one goal in mind, a happy ending. We never imagined that that goal would be shared with people all over the world. And we never imagined we would feel so blessed for all of it. That's the thing about [awful] situations. They can give you more blessings than the burden itself. They can teach you more than you wanted to know. They can heal you beyond your pain.
Don't get me wrong. If I had the choice for Nathan and I NOT to have cancer, I would take it. In a heartbeat, I would take it for Sadie's sake, for our parents and for all those people who love us and worry about us. We didn't choose our diagnoses, but we do choose to be in a state of gratitude. There is too much love and healing coming our way not to feel blessed. (4)
In this incredibly difficult time in their lives, Elisa and Nathan have discovered a truth that Brene Brown’s research has also uncovered: when we numb ourselves to the difficult emotions in life -- pain, fear, anxiety, sadness -- we also numb ourselves to the good emotions -- joy, contentment, serenity, bliss. Much as we might try, we cannot selectively choose which emotions to experience. We can either receive them all or block them all. If Elisa and Nathan weren’t able to fully experience the fear and despair of their current situation, they also would not be able to find the blessing in it.
What is true of Jesus’ story is also true of ours: sometimes, the days that fill us with joy will end in tragedy and sometimes the days that fill us with dread will surprise us with a blessing.
Today is Palm Sunday. It is a day of celebration as we gather to acknowledge with joy and thanksgiving that Jesus is our King, the Son of God, who came down to earth, who became fully and completely human, so that for you and me and Nathan and Elisa and Sadie, and all of God’s children, death will not have the last word. But that is next week’s story -- Easter’s story. Today is Palm Sunday and Jesus is King.
Endnotes:
1. See Brown’s lecture online here.
2. Frederick Dale Bruener, Matthew A Commentary, Volume 2:The Churchbook Matthew 13-28. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990, p. 353.
3. Tara Parker-Pope, “A Couple’s Knot, Tied Tighter by Dual Diagnosis,” April 11, 2011. Online here.
4. http://familybondingtime.blogspot.com/2011/03/good-bad-and-chemo.html
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