Mark 11:1-11
April 5, 2009: Palm Sunday
(A special thank you to Daniel Migliore for his thoughts in the book, "Faith Seeking Understanding". His writing about the life and death of Jesus served as a jumping off point for me. However, I'm sure he would want it to be clear that this sermon does not reflect his own beliefs.)
Over the last five weeks, I have been talking a lot about what Jesus’ death means – or rather what it didn’t mean. I have said that Jesus was not sent by God in order to die for our sins. I have rejected this notion because I do not believe God would demand violence in any form in order to save us. To claim that God intended for Jesus to be tortured and killed for our sakes is to concede that sometimes violence is necessary in service of a greater good. To me, this sounds too much like the way large, powerful empires think…we know what is best, and we will use all our strength and military might to protect what we believe in. Democracy, capitalism, free trade, even peace are all used as greater goods to justify violent means. We have killed others to avoid being killed. We have tortured others to gain information that will ultimately protect us. We have justified all manner of violent behavior in the name of preserving our way of life and our values.
This is how we do things. I do not believe it is how God works – and I believe this because we know God best in the life of Jesus, and he refused to use violence to accomplish anything – including our salvation.
Today is Palm Sunday. Today we turn our eyes to the cross and we confront the fact that while it might be easy to celebrate and walk with Jesus while he heals, liberates, feeds and forgives, when we realize the cost of doing that in a world that violently suppresses the way of God’s love, we are hesitant to follow Jesus to the cross.
Certainly we are not going to follow Jesus all the way to the cross unless we believe there is value in meaning in the life and death of Jesus.
So today, this week, we contemplate what we think Jesus’ death was all about and why it matters to us. We walk this holy week with the disciples and friends of Jesus. Today we stand with them as Jesus prepares to enter
So if we are going to stay the course, follow Jesus all the way, we must ask ourselves; “Who is Jesus and how does his life and death help us?” These are the questions that have traditionally been discussed in theology under the headings “Christology” and “soteriology”. Christology is the study of the person of Jesus Christ and soteriology is the study of how he saves us.
In answering these questions, we have to deal with some challenges we face in doing so. First is the problem that there is a remarkable variety of pictures of Jesus in the New Testament. Asking “Who is Jesus?”, then turning to the bible for answers teaches us that the truth about who Jesus was and is is somehow imbedded in a mosaic of pictures of his life and the meaning of his life. Paul and the gospel writers all have a particular slant on who Jesus was and how his life affects ours.
And it’s not just that they emphasize different things – like Mark not having a birth narrative or Paul ignoring most historical aspects of Jesus’ life altogether. They also have divergent understandings of how we are saved through Jesus. Mark focuses on salvation coming through discipleship – following Jesus to the bitter end. John believes we are saved because Jesus died in our place as the ultimate sacrificial lamb. Paul believes we are saved through the resurrection, an event of God’s limitless grace. Matthew believes Jesus is the messiah predicted by the Hebrew Scriptures and triumphant in death. Add to these multiple scriptural understandings of who Jesus was the practically limitless interpretations of Jesus in the history of Christian theology and in Western culture in general.
This is a challenge, but it is not ultimately a problem. We realize that the diversity in interpretations today and throughout history is not something to be feared, since it has its basis in the New Testament witness itself. We realize that every situation calls for new confessions of Christ. Each moment in history demands an examination of what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus says in that particular context, and the diversity of contexts throughout history leads to immense diversity in what God in Jesus has to say to the human condition.
In fact, we are always engaged in such interpretation, whether we know it or not. Often, however, the interpretation we make of Jesus’ life is handed to us from times past, and we accept it unexamined as universal truth. Doing this, sadly, makes the message of Jesus lose its relevance, and leaves many of us with a thin faith that fails to speak to the very real, very difficult issues of our day. I thought it might be helpful, then, to look at a couple of interpretations we have inherited from the past and look at why they are ultimately inadequate for us today.
Arguably the most influential understanding of what Jesus’ death means was articulated best by Anselm, a theologian living in the 11th century. His understanding was related to the societal realities in which he lived. In his interpretation, God and humans are related like feudal lords and their surfs. An act of disobedience by a surf dishonors the lord, and when that happens, satisfaction must be given; a debt of honor is accrued and that debt must be repaid. Further, Anselm believed the satisfaction that is due to God beacuse of human sin is infinite – unsatifiable. And while humanity must provide this satisfaction, only God can provide it. Therefore God has become human in Christ. In his perfect obedience even to the point of death, the debt is paid, justice is done, and God’s honor is restored. As a result, our sins are forgiven; we are saved.
The problem with this theory for us today is that it seems to set God in contradiction to God’s self. It makes the act of forgiveness something of a problem for God. Grace is made conditional on repayment of a debt. And not only is grace conditional on this repayment, but it is violence that accomplishes this repayment. God’s grace demands violent death. That doesn’t reflect what we know of God in Jesus.
Another common understanding of how Jesus accomplishes our salvation is called the moral influence theory. Christ reconciles humanity not through some kind of legal transaction but by showing God’s love to us in such a compelling way that we are constrained to respond in wonder and gratitude – we can do nothing other than follow Jesus. God is revealed in Jesus’ compassionate life, not in his violent death. And God does not need our response to restore God’s honor – God yearns for our response because God loves us.
The problem with this theory – while it avoids any notion that God demanded the violence of Jesus death – is that it ignores the importance of Jesus death and what that death says to us and our world today. While I question the idea that God needed Jesus to die, I also believe the death is extremely important and does help us understand what it means to be faithful in our world. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, as much as we might like to skip from Palm Sunday to Easter. Jesus was violently killed on the cross.
Both of these past interpretations of the death of Jesus can help us, but they both fall short in their ability to speak to our context today. We are still left with the question: What can we say in our time and place about the meaning of Jesus’ death?
Ours is a world of violence. Wives are battered and parents abuse their children. In the social and economic spheres competition is glorified even if it means advancing one’s own fortune at the expense of others. Wars are fought believing they are holy or at least necessary. In other words, violence is a structural element of our social and domestic life. And we are situated in that world as citizens of the
This is our context. When we understand our context and then return to the biblical witnesses to Jesus’ life and death, we can affirm that God in Jesus enters a world saturated with violence, a world in which people are victimized again and again – the poor neglected, women beaten and raped, children abused, the earth plundered, prophets murdered and people tortured. That is the order of our society and we do everything thing we can so that our world order may not be disturbed. When Jesus does disturb that order – by announcing God’s forgiveness of sinners, promising the future to the poor, welcoming outcasts and strangers, calling all to repentance and a new way of life characterized by love of God, neighbor and enemy – when Jesus does this in a world built from its foundation upon violence, then the truth is Jesus must suffer – not because God demands it to set the moral ledger right, but because the boundless love of God inevitably clashes with a world built on hostility and violence.
Affirming this, we can now ask, how that inevitable death helps us. Let me suggest three ways in which the death of Jesus has meaning for us today: First, Jesus died in order to expose our world of violence. When we consider the role of violence in our faith, we have to understand that we are the Empire – in our context we are like
Second, in his death Jesus enters into solidarity with all victims of violence, and in the resurrection, there is ultimate forgiveness for all perpetrators of violence. And in reality, each of us is likely both victim and perpetrator to some extent. When Jesus dies on the cross as God, we can rest assured that God knows the suffering of all victims – feels it as if it were God’s own suffering. When any of us feels deeply the suffering of another person, we are moved to alleviate that suffering out of great compassion. God, then, out of great compassion wants nothing more than an end to suffering. At the same time, when it is we who are responsible for the suffering of others, we can see in Jesus’ death the injustice of our own action and in the very next breath we see in the resurrection that God always urges us to start again; to repent and be forgiven and freed to a new way.
Finally, by choosing nonviolence- even to the point of death – Jesus opens a new future for a new humanity in the midst of our violent world. Jesus shows us that it is more important to live with integrity to the laws of God’s realm than to protect our earthly lives. And Jesus’ way gives us the hope we need to believe a new world is possible and the courage to live lives that become the seeds of that new world in our time and place – even when that might demand of us great sacrifice.
Jesus’ death was not required by God for our salvation – yet in the way Jesus both lived and died, we find a path to follow that can bring about a new world order.
Jesus died because he chose a certain way of living – and it is a way we are meant to follow. And today, Palm Sunday, we place ourselves in the story as we stand with that path before us. As Jesus mounts this colt, he is announcing to both his friends and enemies that he is the new ruler and that his kingdom is the
This is not a choice we can make lightly, and as imperfect human beings, we really can’t make it once and for all. But knowing how Holy Week ends – looking toward the truth of the resurrection, we can at times follow Jesus even to the cross.
God raised the crucified Jesus and made him the chief cornerstone of a new humanity that no longer espouses the way of violence, that no longer needs scapegoats, that no longer wills to live at the expense of victims, that no longer imagines or worships a bloodthirsty God, that is no longer interested in legitimations of violence. This new humanity is the Realm of God here on earth. Praise be to God and praise God for sending Jesus to show us the way. Amen.
