9-04-06 - Palm Sunday


In November 1917, the army's 52 nd Lowland Division, made up of territorial volunteers, fought its way up through the hills towards the city of Jerusalem which was then in Turkish hands. They marched and skirmished by day, and at night, they held acts of worship. In the dark. Singing only well-known psalms and paraphrases by memory, for a light to see words on a hymn sheet would have brought down enemy fire. One final battle separated the Scots soldiers from Jerusalem , and when it took place, the Scots won.

 

Just over ten years later, on the side of a hill near where the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem sweeps past, a memorial to the Scots soldiers who died to liberate Jerusalem was dedicated: a church given the name of St Andrew, and beside it a hospice where travellers, pilgrims, visitors could stay.

 

If you go to St Andrew's Jerusalem today, and go in to the large lounge of the hospice, you will see on the far wall, much larger than life, a portrait of General Allenby who had led the campaign which culminated in the capture of Jerusalem . Two days after the city surrendered, General Allenby entered it. Twenty years earlier, the German Kaiser on horseback and surrounded by cavalry had entered the city in a startling procession of power. As he approached the gates of the city on horseback, General Allenby stopped, and got off his horse, and walked into the city, saying that he wouldn't enter on horseback a city which Jesus had entered on the back of a donkey.

 

Luke's account of Palm Sunday has two incidents which he adds to the basic story of Jesus entering the city on the back of a donkey, to shouts of Hosanna and the waving of palm branches. The first is something only Luke's Gospel describes: that moment when Jesus pauses, as pilgrims before him and ever since have paused, at the bend in the road when you come over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives and suddenly glimpse across the valley David's city, its walls and towers stretched over the sun-baked hills. Jesus pauses on his road to Jerusalem and he bursts into tears.

 

He would have been justified if his tears were caused by the knowledge of what lay ahead of him: what he was going to have to endure, the physical pain and the mental torment of the next five days.

 

He would have been justified if his tears were brought on by the knowledge that his closest friends were going to desert him and leave him to face the agony of his last hours alone.

 

He would have been justified if his tears had been tears of regret that so little of what he had taught in the past three years seemed to have got home, and so many false ideas about him were still around, all of them testimony to how futile it all had been.

 

Jesus would have been more than justified if his tears had been for himself, but they weren't. His tears were tears of compassion for the city he loved. Listen. “If only you had known, on this great day, the way that leads to peace.”.

 

Ten days ago, a friend of mine died. His name was Alec Cheyne and he taught church history to divinity students in Edinburgh . He wasn't just a fine teacher, he was a very good preacher, and the afternoon I was told that he had died, I turned to a sermon of his that was published in a book many years ago. And this is what Alec said in that sermon about the moment when Jesus paused on the Palm Sunday road: “The king, about to be rejected, wept not for himself but for his foes. Are you beginning to catch the secret of his kingship. It is the kingship of divine love. And still he mourns over the shouters and the scorners; over those whose fickle enthusiasm applauds but for an hour. They are missing the way. They are losing their peace. They are spurning their Lord – and he cares for them still. There is your king, in the compassion of his love; there on the Jerusalem road.”

 

The kingship of divine love expressed in the tears of the Son of God.

 

I once heard the great George Macleod preaching in St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh about the cross of Jesus and he said something like this – and he admitted that it wasn't the most elegant on the most polite way of putting it but for him it summed up the Gospel – he said “The cross tells us that we can kick God in the teeth and what God is worried about is whether we have stubbed our toe”.

 

Don't get the idea that to talk of God and his love makes all this faith and religion business too sentimental. There's nothing sentimental about the sort of love that gets hurt.

 

It is painful when those who are close become estranged or hurt. One of the saddest books in my study was written by a former teacher of mine, like Alec Cheyne a teacher of church history, and it tells how a group of young men, some of them from one family, the children of the great William Wilberforcce, inseparable at Oxford over a hundred and fifty years ago, became first distant from each other, and then suspicious, and then hostile – all because of religion. And the book is called, very sadly “The Parting of Friends”. It is painful when those who are close become estranged or hurt. But what is even more painful is when you are friend to those who have become estranged or hurt. Then you are torn. Which is how a great Scottish theologian called John Macleod Campbell described Jesus, literally torn, his arms outstretched on the cross, because he was able to love God and love his neighbour; and on the cross he felt the pain of the estrangement, the separation.

 

It was that pain which was caused by the world's estrangement from God, and Jesus' love for both the world and God which provoked those tears as he paused on the Mount of Olives , looking across at Jerusalem . “If only…..” he said…..”If only it had been different”.

 

A few weeks ago I was talking about how we can be inspired both by love and by anger. And if love is what marks one of the incidents in Luke's Gospel which is added to the story of the man on the donkey, anger is what inspires the other. When Luke describes Jesus going straight to the temple and drove out those “who were selling things there”.

 

We're used on Palm Sunday to remembering how the prophet Zechariah had promised that Jerusalem 's king would come, humble, and on the back of a donkey. But that prophecy of Zechariah's went on to predict that ”on that day, no trader would be found in the temple of the Lord.”

 

When you went to the temple you had to make a sacrifice, and you had to pay for it. But you could only pay for a sacrifice in the temple's own coinage, at a rate of exchange that allowed the temple authorities to make quite a profit. But the coinage the temple authorities demanded their payment in wasn't just their own currency. When you bought your sacrifice, you were buying into a religious system which relied on two things: fear and mystery.

 

First of all, fear. The religion of Jesus' day said that God needed to be placated. God needed to be bought – and the price was cheap. For the price of a lamb, or a couple of pigeons, to be sacrificed, you could buy your peace with God. But Jesus would have none of it because the God Jesus believed in was not to be bought: not at all, never mind for the pittance the temple authorities asked. The God Jesus believed in was a discontented God who would not be kept at arms' length by any attempt to buy him off.

 

So in Jesus' day they bought a lamb or a couple of pigeons. Will that stop you being angry, God?

 

In our day – well, we're too sophisticated: so I'll come to church every Sunday that I can: will that stop you being angry, God?

 

I'll do whatever you've said, keep your rules and obey your regulations: will that stop you being angry, God?

 

I'll disapprove of everything that's wrong, or that I think you've said is wrong, and I'll make sure that no-one is allowed to break the rules: will that stop you being angry, God?

 

And God says, quietly, and with a tear in his eyes: who says I'm angry? I'm, just hurt, that you don't see the point; that you won't let love override all that prattling talk about coming to church and abiding by the rules and so on. I'm only angry with the people who take you in, and make you believe that I am not like I am.

 

Fear: and mystery.

 

That temple to which Jesus went on Palm Sunday was laid out like this: at the entrance there was an area called ‘the court of the Gentiles', and anyone was allowed into that area of the temple. Then, beyond the court of the Gentiles there was ‘the court of the Jews' and unless you were a Jew you were forbidden to go there. Beyond the court of the Jews there was ‘the court of the Priests' and no one but a priest was allowed this far. And at the very heart of the temple there was the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest might enter and then only once in every year. Because in the Holy of Holies there was the Ark of the Covenant which was the symbol of God's presence.

 

It was an elaborate system, designed to say that at its centre, shrouded in mystery, there was God. But God so barricaded off that no one might have access to God.

 

Now don't get this wrong. Of course there is a mystery at the heart of God. Of course in our thinking and wondering about God we come face to face with a mystery that we can't begin either to describe or to fathom. There is nothing wrong, and everything right with recognising the mystery which surrounds God. But that's not what this religious system which Jesus encountered in the temple was all about. It was not saying that there is mystery at the heart of God and none of us can begin to understand. It was saying there is mystery at the heart of God and only those who are special understand. We're all faced with the mystery – said the temple. But if you belong to God's chosen people you know a bit about that mystery; and if you are professionally religious like a priest, you'll know a bit more. And if you hold all the religious power like the high Priest, you'll know even more.

 

And Jesus said: of course there is mystery but the mystery isn't all about what we don't know, but about what we do know.

 

The real mystery is how and that the God at the heart of this universe should be bothered about us.

 

The mystery isn't about a system which denies us access to God but a faith which opens up the heart of God to us and leaves us utterly mystified that he should thus bother with the likes of you and me.

 

And so you recall that at the moment when Jesus dies on the cross it is St Matthew who records that the veil of the temple was torn in two and that elaborate system designed to protect God from us crumbled. And in another famous sermon I heard George Macleod preach, he said: “At Calvary the real at-one-ment took place. That terrifying wind broke down and people saw the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. All the old stuff finished. No longer saved by what we do. People face to face with God.”

 

So let me go back to my friend Alec Cheyne and his sermon, and end with his words. “The sun is rising over the city which welcomed Jesus so tumultuously less than a week ago; there are few in it now who spare much thought for him. But as the nails are driven in, and the cross thuds down into its socket, and the last hours of torment begin, he thinks of the city. Listen. “Father, forgive them; they don't know what they are doing”. Of course he means the soldiers, now heartlessly casting lots for his poor clothes. But surely he means far more. With arms outstretched above the city, and eyes surveying its homes in one last comprehensive gaze of love, he seeks God's pardon for all who are in any way responsible – and none is not – for this, our culminating sin. He seeks forgiveness (and if he is, as the Gospel writers tell us, the Father's well-beloved Son, does he not obtain it?): forgiveness for Peter, for john, forb Thomas, for Paul, for you and for me. Forgiveness, the best of all his eroyal gifts.

 

Look, then, on your king: He reigns in the forgiveness of his love.”