Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Mark 11:1-10

Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008

When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’” They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

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Today, we begin what we call Holy Week with the celebration of Palm Sunday. We tell the story, once again, of the beginning of the end of Jesus’ life on earth. That story, as you know, moves through his riding into Jerusalem amid the cheering crowds, his “cleansing” of the temple and his last supper with the disciples, to his betrayal, arrest trial and crucifixion, followed, three days later, by his resurrection and our celebration of Easter. It’s a beautiful, powerful, painful and glorious story that we tell every year as a way of remembering who Jesus was and is, and who we are in relation to him. But despite the familiarity of the story, Jesus has always been an enigmatic, a mysterious person that, all these years later, we still struggle to understand.

In the early days of the church, it took quite a long time for people to begin to get a handle on who Jesus was. You probably remember the story about Jesus asking his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” Their answers ran the gamut of current popular opinion. Some said he was the reincarnation of John the Baptist, or the second coming of Elijah, Moses or one of the other prophets. It was Peter who came up with the right answer. Jesus was, “the Messiah, the son of the Living God,” but even though that turned out to be the answer Jesus was looking for, I very much doubt Peter, or any of the others, really knew what it meant.

And, calling Jesus “Messiah” it didn’t settle the matter either. People continued to argue about and fight over the nature of Jesus, literally, for centuries. Actually, we’re still doing it more than 2000 years later. But, as far as the Roman church was concerned, they thought they had the matter settled at the council of Nicaea in 325. It took more than three hundred years for the church to come up with a official statement of who Jesus was. What they came up with was called, “The Nicene Creed.” Have you ever heard it? I’m sure some of you have, somewhere along the way, but let me just share a bit of it with you so you can get the flavor. About Jesus, the creed says:

“We believe … in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father [the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God], Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made [both in heaven and on earth]….” There’s more, but you get the idea. This was not, by the way, simply poetic language. It was understood to be the definitive statement of the literal nature of Jesus. And if that wasn’t enough, in a sort of addendum to the creed at the end, we find this additional statement aimed at all those who don’t believe the right things. “Those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ or ‘He was not before he was made;’ or ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’ — they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.” According to the early church, it was literally get it right or go to hell.

Now, I’m not trying to make fun of anybody’s beliefs. I certainly don’t expect you to follow all that. I’ve got a Masters in Divinity and I can hardly follow it myself. The only reason I bring it up is that there is such a radical disconnect for me between, on the one hand, Peter saying that Jesus was the Messiah, and on the other, all this theological mumbo jumbo about substance and essence and very God of very God. Just for a moment, just to get our feet back on the ground, try to picture Jesus asking Peter who he thought he was, and Peter answering with this complicated paragraph out of the Nicene Creed. Can you visualize that? The picture I get is Jesus with a confused look on his face wondering what the heck Peter was talking about. “Get behind me you medieval theologian.”

Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that Jesus is? You know, for a Christian, that is probably the one essential question. Who do you say that Jesus is? It’s essential because, whatever answer you come up with, that answer is going to determine who you think Jesus wants you to be. Let me give you a couple of examples. If your answer is that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, you’re going to believe Jesus wants you to pay attention to prophesy, and if possible be prophetic yourself. Think about the churches that are all wrapped up in the end of the world, the second coming, the last days of tribulation. There are lots of churches that are filled with people who believe that prophesy was the most important thing about Jesus. There’ve been a lot of books sold lately by people who think of Jesus this way, or at least believe that acting like they think of Jesus that way is a good way to sell books.

Or maybe your answer is that Jesus is the one and only true path to God, and that those who don’t find Jesus are going to be condemned. If that’s what you believe, you’re likely to do everything in your power to convince people to become Christian, which may include being a good demonstration of a loving person, but historically has also included crusades, witch burnings and the inquisition, all justified by the belief that it was better to destroy the body if it meant that the soul went to heaven. If Jesus is the only true path to God, how can we not end up condemning those who don’t follow him?

Maybe, your answer to “Who do you say I am?” is “miracle worker.” Jesus is the one who is going to answer all your prayers, move all your mountains, shower on you all the blessings of God’s riches. There are lots of ministers preaching that message, “Jesus wants you to be rich. Just send in your tithe, put your name on the bottom of this list, and before long all kinds of good things are going to flow back to you. And oh, by the way, if you don’t want to go to hell, don’t break the chain.” Some of us call this, “The Prosperity Gospel,” and in times when prosperity is hard to come by, it’s a very popular message.

Who do you say that I am? What is the nature of the Jesus you are following? Lots of people who come to church think that our job, my job, is simply to tell you who Jesus was. The truth is, there are lots of different ways of thinking about Jesus. To me, being your pastor doesn’t give me the right to answer that question for you. I know not all ministers feel that way. But I believe we all have to answer it for ourselves. Who is it we think Jesus is, and what does it mean to be one of his followers.

I’m not going to answer that question for you. What I can do though is share my own answer with you. Jesus, for me, was the one who told us that we should love God first, foremost and always, and that we should love our neighbors in much the same way that healthy people love themselves. I’ve never been able to see how to get around this idea, or why we would even want to try. It just seems like a no-brainer to me that Jesus would want us to center our own lives and ministry around what he called the two greatest commandments. Especially because, he wasn’t just issuing commandments from on high. He was saying that this was how he lived his own life. These two commandments were the center of everything he believed. And when we look at Jesus that way, suddenly his whole life, what we know if it anyway, comes to look like a demonstration of what it meant to live by these two commandments. If you want to be faithful to my vision, I hear him saying, love God, your neighbor and yourself, and if you don’t know what that means, just do the kinds of things you see me doing. Simple, clear, beautiful.

There are dozens of examples we could point to, but since this happens to be Palm Sunday, let’s just take today’s story and work with that. This is the day for what the church has called, the “Triumphal Entry.” Triumph, makes it sound like Jesus has somehow managed to kick the Romans out of Palestine or sent King Herod packing. But on the surface, all that really happens is that Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey surrounded by a crowd of his temporarily adoring fans. You know the story. Some of these same people would turn on him later in the week. At this end of the story though, it is the part we usually don’t focus on that is actually the most interesting. Jesus instructs two disciples to go into town and bring back a donkey, and if the owner wonders what they’re doing, they are simply to say, “the Lord has need of it.”

Now, if someone showed up at your house and began to hotwire your car and told you “the Lord needs it,” you’d call the police, right? Of course you would. Back then, a donkey was a pretty expensive means of transportation, and I doubt many people would have sat still while strangers simply walked off with it. I suppose we are meant to assume that the owner of the donkey knew who “the Lord” was, but typically, the Bible doesn’t explain so were left to wonder. What I find most interesting though is that line, “the Lord has need of it.” On the face of it, this doesn’t sound like much. But do a little digging, what we discover is that this is the one and only place in the Bible that Jesus is said to “need” anything. If you search through the entire New Testament looking to build a list of all the things Jesus needed, the only thing on that list would be a Donkey.

Why might that be? Well, one possibility is that we know the gospels were written in the range of some thirty to eighty years after Jesus. We know that by that time, the church had already come to think of him as God incarnate. I’m not convinced that Jesus thought of himself that way, but the early church did. So maybe, when Matthew, Mark, Luke and John sat down to write about Jesus, it just didn’t seem right to talk about him having needs. After all, if Jesus was God, what needs could he possibly have? But, he needed a donkey. Why did he need a donkey? Clearly, it wasn’t because he needed a ride. The man had already walked all over the Holy Land. He never needed a donkey before.

No, the reason he needed a donkey seems to be that he intended to make a statement. He meant to tell everybody who he was, and he planned to do it in a wonderfully creative way. He knew, like most everybody else back then would have known, that the prophet Zechariah had once said that when the true king came to the city, it would be an act of peace. “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey…” (Zechariah 9:9) When Jesus rode into the city the way he did, with all the crowd cheering and waving palms, it was the act of a peaceful king. It was brilliant. Without saying a word, he proclaimed for all the world to see that the kingdom he meant to establish was to be about peace and humility, love and compassion, not war and conquest. Who do people say that I am? The triumphal entry was one of the ways he answered that question. This is who I am: a conqueror of hearts and minds, not empires; a lover of God and all God’s people, not a stick to beat one another over the head with.

Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? That was Jesus’ question. It was a question he answered with every word he spoke, every broken heart he mended, every body he healed. It was a question he answered when he allowed himself to be crucified, rather than calling down armies of angels. It was a question he answered when he rolled away the stone and transcended death itself. It was a question he answered when he commended to our care his ministry of love, compassion and humility. Yet still, in each succeeding generation of people who call themselves by his name, the question remains. Who do you say Jesus is? However you answer that question, it will determine how you live your life, it will shape the nature of your ministry.

Amen.