A Sermon by Fr. Davenport, March 16, 2008, Year A

Palm Sunday

Matthew 21:1-11
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 27:1-54

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

IN 2006, at the start of the school year, a black student asked the white principal at Jena High School in Louisiana if he could sit under a large oak tree, “an oasis of shade known as the ‘white tree,’ because only Caucasian students congregated there.”1  The principal told him that he could sit anywhere.  The student and some other African-American students walked went over and stood or sat under the tree.  The next morning two nooses were hanging from the tree’s branches.  This provoked the conflict that has become known as the Jena Six.  

About a week after the nooses were found hanging in the tree, the local D.A. came to the school and threatened some students.  Tensions increased.  Later in the autumn, a group of black students were turned away from a private party, and a fight between them and some whites erupted.  About a week or so later, an African-American student cold-cocked a white student, Justin Barker, knocking him briefly unconscious, and then other African-American students kicked and stomped on him.  Barker spent a few hours at the hospital being treated for cuts and bruises.

The police arrested six African-American students for beating Barker, and the local D.A. charged them with attempted murder, but just before the trial he reduced the charges.  Still when an all-white jury convicted one of the six, Mychal Bell, a juvenile, of crimes, he faced up to 22 years in prison.  This provoked a large demonstration and much media coverage.  Eventually Bell, “whose convictions had been thrown out, was released on bail, after ten months in jail.”

What’s this story really about?  What’s it a symptom of? Some have understood this story as indicating Jim Crow is more alive than we’d care to notice.  Some have understood this story as highlighting “the mass incarceration” of African-American males.  A nation that imprisons one in a hundred of its adult men and one in nine of its adult African-American men age 20-34 has a serious problem.2  We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world.  Some have understood it as evidence of the crisis of unstable relations between men and women.3  There have been many interpretations of what’s really the matter.  The town fathers of Jena, however, did not identify an underlying problem in their community.  They decided that this “their problem was not themselves but their tree: they cut down the offending oak and hauled it away.”

Before we smirk and feel all superior, I know that it’s hard not to, we might recognize our own propensity for avoiding issues.  We all resort to thinking, “The problem’s out there, not in me.”  It’s much easier and less disruptive to have a scapegoat than to accept responsibility and to try to go to the heart of a problem and adjust our ways.  It’s easier for the people of Jena to blame a tree down than to look at themselves and change their behavior and attitudes.

Judaism understood our compulsion to avoid adapting, to externalize our problems, and to blame someone else.  Jewish worship didn’t let them forget this feature of human nature.  Every year at the Day of Atonement, the high priest presented two goats.  He sacrificed one of the goats as a sin offering to the Lord to atone for the sins of the people.  He laid his hands on the other goat and confessed all the sins of Israel and then sent the goat out into the wilderness, never to be seen again.  This, the scapegoat, would bear the sins of the people. 

We make trees and animals and even inanimate objects scapegoats, but we especially like to make authorities scapegoats.  When we’re highly dependent upon authority figures, when we insist upon getting precise directions and clarity and order from them, we find that our authority figures let us down.  Ambiguity and insecurity are unavoidable in life, and we often react to them by blaming our authority figures.  Eventually authority figures can’t measure up to our expectations, and so while we build them up and rely upon them, we also mistrust them.  The more we rely upon authority, the more it disappoints us.4

On Palm Sunday, the crowd joyously greets Jesus as he enters Jerusalem.  The people of Jerusalem feel brutally oppressed and frustrated by their worldly circumstances.  They see the answer to all of their problems coming to them.  Each person in the crowd is not looking to himself as the answer, but is passing that responsibility onto Jesus.  Sure, they all seem to be submitting to Jesus and celebrating him as Messiah, but each person wants salvation on his own terms.

The humility of Jesus’ triumphal entry should have told the crowd that things wouldn’t work out the way they expected.  Over the next few days, Jesus didn’t change his message, but people may have finally started hearing it.  He first cleansed the Temple, thereby questioning their tradition, threatening their understanding of God, challenging them to develop a whole new relationship with God.  Then Jesus told a parable saying that tax collectors – we might better think of them as traitors – and harlots would enter the Kingdom of God before respectable and conventionally religious people, even before their esteemed religious officials.  He told another parable saying that the Kingdom of God will be taken away from them and shared with Gentiles, with their oppressors.  He told three parables that offended the three major religious parties.  He proclaimed seven woes against the scribes and Pharisees.  He disappointed and annoyed just about everyone. 

In the week after Jesus entered Jerusalem, it became clear to the crowd that he wasn’t going to deliver on their fantasies.  The disappointed crowd probably didn’t think for a second that the fault was in themselves and not in their stars.  They didn’t like the message.  It required self-reflection.  It raised troubling questions.  It provoked instability.  It was disruptive.  So they turned their attention from the message to the messenger.  They had a scapegoat. 

Pontius Pilate also had an instinct for avoiding responsibility.  He offered the crowd a choice.  He would release Barabbas or Jesus.  Barabbas had been jailed for insurrection and murder.  He had sought to restore a golden era of the past, the Davidic Kingdom of a thousand years before.  His hope was in the idealized past – not the possible future.  He had fought violently to establish a new government, different personnel but doing things essentially the same way as before, simply a new class of elites still lording it over the poor.  

Jesus is far more radical.  He offered far greater change.  Choosing him changes everything.  He challenges us to change our hearts and minds, to alter our attitudes and behavior, to endure the loss of the familiar, to accept responsibility for ourselves, to live with greater uncertainty and be at odds with the world.  Just as upsetting, Jesus began to institute this change with a far more powerful force: he choose not violence, not coercion, and not self-assertion, but rather acted in peace, gentleness, and humility.

Barabbas or Jesus.  The decision Pilate presented to the crowd, to you and me, is: the way of the world or the way of God.  All of Lent we’ve reflected on how our own reality falls short of our values.  We’ve confessed our sins, acknowledging that too frequently we’ve chosen our way, not God’s way.  We know all too well how the crowd chooses Barabbas.  More often than we’d like, we make the same choice.  The story of the crowd is our story.  The result is the same: Jesus hangs on a tree.  And the good news is that even while he hangs there, he’s thinking of us.  He pleads on our behalf, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34)

The good news is that Jesus changed everything.  He showed that violence and brute force are not the rulers of history, that the elites are not the only ones that matter, that we can break free of dependence, take responsibility, and shape our future. 

Barabbas was trying to make something for himself, but he didn’t offer real change.  As the song says, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”  It’s an endless cycle of violence, injustice, misery, and frustration as one master replaces the other like beasts in the jungle.  If Barabbas had been hung on that tree, the cross would mean nothing more than violent hostility and oppression.

JESUS changed the meaning of the cross from hostility to reconciliation.  He brought with him the horror of our sin and suffering and transformed it.  The cross became the gateway to the light and joy and hope of resurrection.  In this world, not every story ends happily.  There’s much sadness, but because of what happens this week now we have the hope of a joyous future together with God and with one another.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

© 2008 Lane John Davenport