At The Parade
Rev. Mark Porizky
04/09/06
Mark 11:1-11
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!”
Then he entered
Everyone knows that when you go to a parade, you go to see
the floats and bands and assorted collections of costumed people who will march
and prance and dance along the street. A parade is entertainment, glitz and
glamour, hype and hoopla, pride and propaganda all rolled into one magnificent
display. A good parade demands millions of roses, or billions of bits of
tickertape, or hundreds of horse-drawn wagons, or, at the very least, a
bonafide hero or two. The parade that saw Jesus ride into town was not so very
different from most other parades. There was a hero, and palm branches, and shouting
crowds, and the excitement and tension derived from the fact that this was the
high season of Passover.
But, for the moment, let's shift our
attention from the parade itself to the bystanders, the people who have lined
the streets to watch. Who were the people who came to see Jesus that day? If
you will allow me the luxury of a bit of educated guessing and sanctified
imagination, think we can discover a great deal about the men and women and
children who, in the biblical texts, are simply anonymous bit-part-players in
the pageant of Palm Sunday.
One man who came was a middle-aged
businessman, a member of a respectable family, a man involved in community
affairs. Life for him is stable and for the most part, satisfying, but it has
its pressure points. He worries about the government. Palestine is occupied by a
foreign country, a situation made worse by the fact that some of his fellow
Jews are cooperating with the occupation, taxes are going up, government
officials increasingly seem to be corrupt, and the whole system is plagued with
political tensions that could explode at any moment. The whole country appears
to be going down the tubes, and there isn't much he can do to prevent it. He
worries about his family, especially his parents, who are at an age where they
need a great deal of care. They don't think as clearly as they used to, so he
has to take care of their limited financial resources, and of course it's
painful to see them slipping physically. They won't live much longer, and the
thought of their deaths leaves him with a sense of sadness that won't go away.
A young woman in the crowd was
married about a year ago, but her husband isn't with her today. In fact, her
coming was just an excuse to get away from him. He seemed nice enough when they
married, but as it turns out, he doesn't have the self-discipline to hold a
steady job, he hasn't quit fooling around with other women, and on those
occasions when he is home, he beats her. She has thought of leaving him, but
that is hardly possible, given the cultural pressure against divorce, and
besides, he is the only man who ever gave her any attention at all, even if it
was mostly negative attention. Once, she found herself almost wishing that he
would kill her so she could escape the embarrassment and the shame of having
such a wreck of a marriage.
A young man is standing on the fringes of the crowd. He is
with a group of friends. They have been involved in some minor escapades
outside the law, mostly petty theft, but they are talking about moving up to
more serious crimes, and they want him to join them. He wouldn't give it much
thought, but he feels his parents don't care what he does as along as he stays
out of their way, and so what difference would it make if he padded his pockets
a little? These guys are the only ones who seem to want his companionship, so
he'll probably do whatever it takes to stay part of the gang.
An older woman, who is having a hard time seeing over the
people in front of her, thinks to herself that she is used to being shoved out
of the way. Her husband is dead. Her only child, a son, is at sea most of the
time, and the extended family in town tolerates her, but that's all. Perhaps
she shouldn't have come to the parade at all, being that it's so hard for her
to walk ever since she fell and broke her hip last fall. She does have some
close friends, thank God, but she knows that her productive years have passed,
and most days she wonders if her life has meant much to anyone, including
herself.
The man standing in front of this woman, standing in a prime
spot to see everything, is feeling quite happy with himself. He has just
concluded a great deal on some choice land in a growing area of Jerusalem. He
has a beautiful wife, two charming children, a nice home that his parents left
to him, and he knows most of the important people in town on a personal basis.
From the looks of things, he will be able to triple the estate he inherited,
and maybe in another ten or fifteen years, he can let his son run the family
business so he and his wife can travel a bit. The only fly in the ointment of
his life recently was that episode last week when a sudden pain in his chest
left him dizzy and weak for a few hours. Whatever it was, he's sure it won't
happen again.
Another woman just barely made it to the parade on time.
Back when she was single, she always had plenty of time for herself, time that
she spent worrying about whether or not she would ever have a family and a
husband who loved her. Now, she had all that, but along with it came a new crop
of worries. Some days, the kids acted like they had been born on another planet.
How could she ever teach them to be normal human beings, especially with the
Romans bringing so many changes to the old, established ways? Other days, with
the housecleaning, laundry, cooking, and the thousands of other chores to do
before sunset, she wondered if there was more to life than work. The parade was
a treat, a chance to break out of the routine, but it also meant that a lot
wasn't getting done that needed to get done.
(Pause)
These are the people of whom Mark writes: "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!'"
What do the people mean? What are
they saying with their shouts? Some believe that the people were simply
greeting Jesus, giving him a hero's welcome, so to speak. But others point out
that there was more to the people's words than just cheering and praise. The
people are reciting words that have long been familiar to them as part of the
liturgy used in the celebration of the Passover, the remembrance of when God
forced the Egyptian Pharaoh to release the captive Hebrew people by killing the
first-born sons of the Egyptian households, and how God had passed over the
homes of the Jews, which were marked by the blood of lambs smeared over the
doorways to their homes. The people are reciting from Psalm 118, which says,
"Save us, we beseech you, O Lord! O Lord, we beseech you, give us success!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. We bless you from the
house of the Lord."
Here is the key to the whole event: The Hebrew word that is
translated into English as "save us" is the word "hosanna."
"Hosanna" means "save us!" The people who have come to the
parade that day are welcoming Jesus with a prayer, a request, a plea:
"Save us , Jesus!" The people at the parade that day are ordinary,
common people. Their lives are filled with the stuff of human life from every
age and every place, that crazy mixture of problems and possibilities that give
us so much joy and so much grief. They are people who are looking into their
religious past and remembering that God has always been the source of their
deliverance from the agony of living. And in Jesus, they believe God is
present, God is available, God is coming, once again to bring them salvation.
The New Testament uses many images to describe Jesus. One of
the most powerful of these is that of the Savior, the one who brings salvation.
But what is salvation all about, really? In church circles, the term is one of
those that is loaded with meaning, and also, loaded with history and associated
meanings and styles of being Christians, so much so that perhaps we don't truly
understand it anymore.
In scripture, salvation has many
shades of meaning, but all of them relate to a single, basic concept, the
concept of being rescued from something. Salvation can mean rescue from some
type of danger. It can mean preservation in the midst of threat. It can refer
to healing from sickness, escape from death, rescue from the effects of sin, or
the privilege of becoming part of the kingdom of God. A savior, therefore, is
the one who makes these things possible, who causes them to happen.
The people at the parade that day were asking Jesus to
rescue them, to be their savior, but we should remember that they could have
asked someone else, they could have looked elsewhere for salvation. In the
centuries surrounding the time of Jesus, all sorts of people claimed the title
of "savior," mostly political leaders. The world then was filled with
those who promised salvation from poverty, salvation from anarchy, salvation
from fear, even salvation from death. The world then, as the world now, had no shortage
of those who offered rescue, those politicians and preachers and doctors and
bankers and astrologers and counselors whose products could solve the problems
of life. Eat this, read that, buy this, sell that, do this, don't do that, and
whatever your problems is, we can take care of it. With enough money, with
enough muscle tone, with enough intelligence, with enough self-reliance, with
enough fiber in your diet, you can conquer all. But you and I know, deep
inside, that all of everything is not enough to save us from all that life
brings with it.
Salvation is promised by many, delivered by few. The people
at the parade that day turned to Jesus for salvation. Perhaps some of them,
later that week, turned against him. But in the end, Mark says, and we believe,
Jesus is the only true source of salvation, the only true Savior. But why is
Jesus the Savior, and not someone else? What kind of saving does Jesus do, as
opposed to someone else's kind of saving?
We believe Jesus is the Savior because God raised him from
death, giving him power over death, and giving to us eternal life. We believe
Jesus is the Savior because, through his words and actions in this life, we
caught a glimpse of God's power and God's way of living in the world. It is the
witness of those who knew Jesus during his bodily life on earth, and it is the
witness of those who continue to know Jesus through the presence of the Holy
Spirit, that Jesus rescues us from that which threatens us. Jesus saves us from
death, by offering us life after this life is over. Jesus saves us from
meaninglessness by giving us his love and friendship, assuring us that we are
important to God. Jesus saves us from problems in our relationships in many,
ways, by teaching us how to love, teaching us that we are worthy of being loved
because God loves us, teaching us how to forgive.
Jesus saves us from loneliness, by giving us the church as
an extended family, and by promising us that he will never desert us. Jesus
saves us from the grief we bring on ourselves through moral error, by teaching
us how to live according to the righteousness of God. Jesus saves us from
political corruption and anarchy by showing us how to challenge the
governmental systems of human creation with truth and justice. Jesus saves us
from ourselves, from our own pride and self-satisfaction that lulls us into
thinking we are invincible, but only if we will look honestly at ourselves in
comparison to his sinless and perfect life, realizing that even the very best
of us is far short of who he is. And finally, when we realize that in this life
we are never completely saved from all that confronts us, Jesus saves us from
our sin, and promises us life in heaven, life redeemed and purified and
glorified.
I believe it is safe to say that the people who went to see
Jesus in the parade that day were people much like you and me. They were people
with all sorts of problems, from which they needed deliverance, rescue,
salvation. And they asked Jesus for it, because they knew they could not find
it on their own. The only question that remains is this: Do you want Jesus to
be your Savior? Will you admit that you need someone outside yourself to help
you? Will you live the way Jesus lived, and in that righteous style of life
find the solution to many of your problems? Will you trust the way Jesus
trusted, so that, when life has done its worst to you, you will still conquer
and live again? Jesus is the Savior sent by God to rescue us from all that
threatens us, but he will be your Savior only if you allow him to be.
Hosanna, Jesus. Save
us.
Will you pray with me now?