Palm Sunday

Mark, 11:1-11
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Mark 14:32 - 15:46

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

“In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” So begins George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant.” In the 1920s Orwell served as a police officer in Burma, part of Britain’s Indian Empire. He hated the job bitterly.

 In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.

Orwell sympathized with the Burmese, despite their intense antipathy toward him and other Europeans. While appalled by the fierce British tyranny, he also “thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism.”

Early one morning, he got a call from a Burmese police officer at the other end of town. An elephant was ravaging the bazaar. The Burmese officer wanted Orwell to come and do something, as the Burmese police did not have weapons, only the white men. The elephant was tame, but had an attack of musth, a periodic hormonal surge accompanied by highly aggressive behavior. The elephant had been chained, but in the fury of the musth he had broken them.

Orwell went to where the elephant had last been seen, “a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf, winding all over a steep hillside.” Here he discovered a dead man trampled by the elephant, the grinning corpse having “an expression of unendurable agony.” Immediately upon seeing the fresh, mangled, grotesque corpse, Orwell sent an orderly to get an elephant rifle.

Report came that the elephant had gone down the hill to the paddy fields a few hundred yards away, and once he had the rifle, Orwell started in that direction with practically the whole population of the quarter following him. The people expected the elephant to be shot, but Orwell did not expect to shoot it.

I had no intention of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels.

The elephant stood about eight yards off the road and ignored the approaching crowd while it peacefully ate grasses. “As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him.” The attack of musth was passing. “The elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow.” Orwell decided to wait and watch him for a bit and then go home, that is until he glanced around at the enormous and growing crowd.

They were watching me as they would watch a conjuror about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realised that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. ...I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.

The universal irony is that tyrant destroys not only the freedom of the oppressed, but also his own. That is a hard and fast rule. The oppressor, always becomes a “hollow, posing dummy,” trying to impress the “natives,” to appear resolute, a tough guy, and this gets him into binds where he can’t act on his own mind. He may not even know his own mind.

For Orwell knew that if did what he knew to be the right thing, the crowd would laugh at him, and nothing would be more intolerable. Orwell says that his whole life as a police officer was one long struggle not be laughed at. There’s no freedom in that kind of life. Orwell had to do what the natives expected. He was in chains.

“It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him.” And yet, he reasoned that “there was only one alternative. I shoved cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from unnumerable throats.” When he pulled the trigger, he heard a “devilish roar of glee.” Orwell concludes, “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

Do you think Orwell knew how Pontius Pilate felt? In Matthew, John, and possibly Mark, Pilate does not want to kill Jesus. Mark tells us that Pilate, wishing to please the crowd, delivered Jesus to be crucified. Can you identify with Pilate, struggling between what you believe and what other people want? It’s a decision we make all of the time, usually not a conscious decision, and we sometimes choose the same way Pilate did, seeing only one alternative.

On Palm Sunday, we either identify with Pilate or, more likely, the crowd. Jesus enters Jerusalem, and the crowd is full of expectation. They assume that the Messiah has come to fulfill their dreams. They expect him to deliver. They’ve fantasies about ending Roman occupation and establishing a powerful Jewish kingdom; they probably also desire prosperity, status, and maybe even entertainment; they want to be valued and validated. The crowd cries to Jesus “Hosanna” – “Save us,” but they mean to be saved on their own terms. We are the crowd.

Within days, of course, Jesus would let the crowd down. He didn’t measure up to their expectations. He wouldn’t be manipulated by them. In retrospect, it’s easy to say, “Shouldn’t the crowd have known?” Jesus had stirred up controversy and hostility his whole ministry. When he preached in his hometown, he so annoyed the people he’d grown up with that they tried to kill him. He questioned their sense of themselves, that they were somehow special. Jesus suggested that God doesn’t confine his mercies and favor to any one group. Jesus didn’t shun anyone – not prostitutes or lepers, not treacherous tax collectors or Roman collaborators, not the deranged or possessed.

We assume to recognize God in worldly blessings, to identify him with power, wealth, wisdom, in what is admirable, impressive, successful, but Jesus undermined our assumptions, and not only on the cross, but in all of his ministry. He pronounced woe on the rich, on the sated, on the popular, and he blessed the poor, the unattractive, the meek. He annoyed the wealthy and powerful by questioning whether property rights should be enforced and observing our divided loyalties between God and money. (Lk 12:15, 16:13) He attacked the religious authorities, detailing their hypocrisy, calling them blind fools, frauds, white-washed tombs – beautiful on the outside, but rotten on the inside. (Mt 23) He defied religious customs: the sabbath, kosher laws, Temple sacrifice – the things people thought marked them as special. He scandalized everyone in telling us to love our foes, to help those who hate us, to praise those who curse us, and to pray for those who abuse us. (Lk 6:27)

Again and again and again, he challenged our identity, our beliefs, our behaviors. He spoke truth to power. Unlike Orwell, and you, and me, he was fiercely true to himself, always acting out of principle, acting freely, not aiming to satisfy people, not catering to human wishes, not reacting to the whims and fears of others, and yet accepting us and loving us deeply, fully, truly.

Orwell wondered whether people understood that he shot the elephant to avoid looking like a fool. I doubt that the crowd thought him a fool, but we can be pretty sure that Orwell knew that he had been a fool, a man in chains, a frightened, small, self-interested man unable to separate himself from the violence and insanity of the crowd.

To the crowd in Jerusalem, Jesus –abandoned, mocked, crucified – appeared to be a fool, this man who didn’t sway in the face of violence and insanity. It’s the gospel lived, and that doesn’t come naturally or easily to us. It’s the work of a life time. That’s why we come to church, why we’re part of a parish community, why we make commitments, why we assume responsibility. We get tired of coming to church constantly to be challenged, to be stretched, to be annoyed, to re-think and re-shape our attitudes and habits and customs and values, to confront the gap between our reality and our ideals. But that is our work together. Like the crowd, we’d prefer to be consoled, affirmed, coddled, indulged, to get our way. The good news is that we don’t get what we want, but rather we get what we need. We have the opportunity to grow beyond ourselves and to be freed from our fear.

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