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“Holy Week’s Three Questions”
Palm
There are three questions that the events of Holy Week raises.
Palm Sunday raises the first question: Which parade do you pick? God’s Friday raises the other two questions: Which savior do you pick? And “My God, my God, why?”
Let’s start with the first question, which Beth identified in the Call to Worship: Which parade do you pick?
In the first lesson this morning, the day could have as
resplendent and fair and full of spring’s promises as today. On just such a day
in the year 33, two parades entered
At the head of the other parade, there was the cavalry on
horses with armor, foot soldiers following behind with banners flying and
golden eagles mounted on poles glistening with the sun; sounds of clinking bridles
and the beating of drums. All designed to bully into submission and surrender
those whom the
And along the sides of both parades, the Pharisees and their minions stared sullenly, on the one hand, at the peasant they consider a heretic and rabble-rouser and, on the other hand, at the governor whose military power they envied and whose oppressions they resented.
On just such a Sunday as this in the year 33, there were two parades: one of power, one of peace. So the first question of this sermon is, “Which parade do you pick today?”
But this first question is merely Sunday’s opening question. So let’s move to the second question—one Friday raises: Which savior—literally which “Jesus”—do you pick?
This is the very pointed and sharp question the governor Pilate presents to the largely Jewish crowd then and to our largely Christian crowd this morning. And you know how important this second question is because Matthew reports this question to the crowd not just once, but twice: “Whom do you want me to release for you, Jesus-Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah….Which of the two do you want me to release for you?” (Mt. 27.17, 21)” In short, which Jesus, which savior do you pick?
The very name, Jesus, you know, means savior. (Remember Joseph’s dream at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel: “You shall his name Jesus because he will save his people….”) These people were faced with the choice between two—not one, but two—saviors. And the question, you see, is not whether they shall choose Jesus, but rather “Which Jesus will they choose?” For the people in Matthew’s Gospel, the choice is not between a criminal on the one hand and a savior on the other. Rather it’s the choice of what kind of savior they look to and trust.
And both Matthew and Jesus seem determined that people make their choice, their decision in just these terms.
There is, first of all, Jesus (that is, Savior) Barabbas. While we do not know a whole lot about this savior, he was probably a rather popular figure—the son of a prominent member of the community, a member of a party of Zealots who sought to throw off the Roman yoke by force through violent revolution. For the Romans, needless to say, this Jesus Barabbas was, in their deck of “most wanted” cards, a high-up spade. A “notorious prisoner” Matthew calls him. Yet from a certain point of view, in the eyes of the people he was a terrorist of the sort that members of the French underground became during the Nazi occupation. In other words, he had committed the sort of violence—murder even--that could end up making you a hero. So, the significance of his name—Jesus Barabbas--would not have been lost on the crowds, a savior whose violence was packaged in a cause and then wrapped in a flag. After all, he only killed Romans and their hirelings—a rather classic case, don’t you think, of a good end justifying violent means?
And then, alongside Jesus Barabbas was Jesus called the Messiah. When Pilate asks him about his kingship of the Jews, Jesus Messiah equivocates. He’s evasive. He says neither “yes” nor “no”. When his accusers lay false charges against him, Jesus Messiah cannot be made to speak in his own defense. He is apparently content to let the actions of his life speak for themselves. As a matter of fact, one of the most characteristic things about this Jesus Messiah was that he would never make other people’s decisions for them—especially decisions about him. Rather consistently, he simply presented himself openly, lovingly, peacefully, meekly to men and women—and then let them decide. And that’s what he did here—where, as at no time before, had the choice been so patently clear.
This is the second question of Holy Week: Which Jesus do you choose? Jesus Barabbas or Jesus called the Messiah?
And of the choice people make—you and I make, others make, the nations make, the world makes—there is no need to moralize that people have apparently changed so little between then and now. Only to agonize for what the choice of Jesus Barabbas inevitably means for Jesus Christ and his world. For whenever persons choose Jesus Barabbas, the question which Pilate put still remains: “What then shall I do with Jesus who is called the Christ?” For once a person or a people have chosen violence as a way of life, the presence of Jesus called the Messiah becomes a contradiction in terms. And those persons and that world which serves a Jesus Barabbas can no longer tolerate a Jesus Christ and must get rid of him, crucify and kill him.
And I say agonize, for the agony is real. And not just the physical agony, but the spiritual agony. All through Friday—through his inquisition before Pilate and before the crowds-- Jesus the Messiah was silent. He said nothing. He spoke not a single word until….
Until Jesus the Messiah himself raised the third question of Holy Week as he was hanging on the cross, just before he died: “My God, my God,” he cried, “why?”
It is a question so painfully human that only Mark and (following Mark) Matthew raise it. Luke shows us a Jesus on the cross who is calm, composed, and commending his soul to God. John pictures a Jesus who, even on the cross, is pretty much in charge of things—just as he has been all along—and who, when he is ready to die, declares, “It is finished.” But not so, Mark and Matthew. Here Jesus is NOT in control. Nor is he all that calm and confident. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And then, just moments later, with a loud, uncontrollable, unintelligible, and agonizing cry, he dies. Talk about death as a physical crisis. Just think of what a spiritual crisis it must have: because, within this Jesus, everything about his dying must have called everything else into question as well—including God.
For this agonizing mystery of Jesus’ cry from his cross ambushes our lives as well. We, too, have our own personal, most often private struggles with the excruciating knowledge that in some strange, inexplicable way the same God by whom alone we can be sustained and renewed and saved is also at work in and through our sufferings and sacrifices and deaths—if, indeed, God chooses in those moments to show us God’s face at all.
But…yet…and this is a huge but…and a huge yet. We cry out the question of God, “My God, my God…why?” We address this question by faith to “My God, my God…”
The Jewish scholar, playwright, and theologian Elie Wiesel recalls from his boyhood in Nazi Germany. “Inside the kingdom of night I witnessed a strange trial. Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one winter evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred.” An awesome conclave—particularly in view of the fact that it was held in a concentration camp. But what happened next is to me even more awesome still. After the trial—at which God was found guilty as charged—one of the rabbis looked at the watch he had somehow been able to preserve in the kingdom of night, and said, “Oy! It’s time for prayers!” and the three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—bowed their heads and prayed.
And yet, in such dark nights of doubt and despair, of abandonment and loneliness, there are hints that we can, in fact, understand, something of what Jesus Christ must have felt during the crucifixion and an opportunity for us to identify with how desperately this world—and we who live and work and have our beings in it--need to be saved. For in the end, in the deep places where we go it all alone with ourselves in this journey called human life—in the end it is not a King or a Judge we need, but a savior.
But this is not the end, is it? This is today. This is this week. So, for today…for this week, we live into the questions the Gospel story of Holy Week raises:
Today, which parade do you pick?
And come Friday, which Jesus will you pick?
And “My God, my God, why?”
And into the answers to these questions we give. Ah, it is time for prayer, isn’t it?
This sermon is indebted, in part, to Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The Last Week.