Matthew 21:1-11
Depeche Mode has a new album. Some of you are asking “Depeche who?,” while others are thinking “Wait, didn’t one of those guys die recently?”
The answer to the second question is yes. Andy Fletcher, one of the founding members on the band’s first album in 1981, died of natural causes last May. But the two remaining members are still making music.
As to the first and probably more common response, “Depeche Who?,” you might remember them for their first big hit, “People Are People,” or for their controversial 1989 hit, “Personal Jesus,” though it was mostly controversial with people who just like controversy.
And it is this last song that comes back to me again and again with its thumping beat, for while the song is not really about the bizarre consumerist theology of personal salvation, it is an absolute fact that people create a version of Jesus that fits their own preconceptions and needs.
Though I’m sure some of our megachurch pastors and billionaire business owners would prefer Concierge Jesus.
Today is one of those days in the church year when Jesus becomes exactly this sort of screen onto which we project our own desires. For those who desperately need the world to fit into neat little cognitive boxes, who require easy answers, today is part in a divine script, a melodrama where humans are puppets or props as Yahweh acts out a ritual of slaughter and salvation through the second person of the Trinity. This is the Jesus where Fluffy and Grandpa meet us at the Pearly Gates, comforting, though at the cost of turning God into a monster.
Those with power and privilege want today to be about Jesus as a king, hoping that they might borrow a little of that luster, divine right or exceptionalism or earned grace, but that’s just old news, for the privileged and powerful have always claimed divine sanction, just as they were doing in Jerusalem as the rabbi from Galilee rode into town.
Folks like me, who see Jesus as a religious reformer or revolutionary, highlight the ways this entry into Jerusalem provided a contrast bordering on parody of the Roman prefect’s annual entry into Jerusalem for Passover, a time of year when religious and nationalist fervor meant rebellion was a real possibility.
Roman brutality was ultimately about greed, with a heavy backbeat of nationalist exceptionalism, so it is not at all surprising that America’s white nationalist right idolizes the culture that killed Christ. Though much of Roman culture was borrowed from others, especially the Greeks. Still, they believed that they were superior and were entitled to exploit the regions they conquered.
Pontius Pilate, the prefect who plays such a key role in our story, had utter disdain for the Judean people and their culture. The mob entering Jerusalem with Jesus was a threat to the authority and superiority of Rome.
Of course, there is the nerdy part of me that wants to point out that the authors of this gospel are trying to weave in some many elements from Hebrew prophecy that they have Jesus riding into Jerusalem “on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey,” which always leaves me picturing Jesus as a circus performer standing with one foot on the back of each donkey, which might just be a little sacrilegious.
No matter what we project onto the text, we have the simple and historic fact that Jesus and his followers entered Jerusalem just before Passover in what seems to have been what we now know as the Year 30 of the Common Era. The crowd anticipated drama. Be careful what you wish for.
Jesus is greeted with shouts, the waving of branches, cloaks spread on the road. It is part royal arrival, part Roman triumph, part protest march.
The authors of Matthew do not tell us if the large crowd is made up exclusively of the followers who have traveled with him from Galilee, which might have seemed especially threatening to the authorities, or included followers from Jerusalem and the surrounding Judean towns. Maybe there were some folks who were just in the neighborhood and got carried away by the joy and spirit of the event. Who doesn’t love a parade?
Here is this crowd, and the palms and the “hosannas” and then there is that other crowd, on Friday, chanting “Crucify him.”
As always, with these ancient barebones texts, we make assumptions that say more about us than they do about history. We don’t know if anyone in that Friday crowd was also in the Sunday crowd, if they had changed teams. “Burn it all down” can work both ways, as we’ve learned in our own politics. In the corrupt system that was Galilee and Judea under Roman occupation, there were plenty who wanted to “burn it all down,” Roman rule, Temple authority, and an exploitative economy where the rich were becoming richer and the poor poorer.
Same people in both crowds? Maybe. Maybe there was a little false flag action going on. There was a lot at stake, and as Depeche Mode famously sang, “people are people.”
The Jesus Barabbas the crowd demands be released on Friday is not some random well-known prisoner. He is an insurrectionist. His vision was violence.
The bandits who are crucified with Jesus are probably not run-of-the-mill criminals who knocked off the 7-11. Sure, banditry was an act of economic desperation, but it was also an act of rebellion.
There were constant flare-ups of disorder, the reason the prefect had to travel from his comfortable villa on the coast inland to dusty Jerusalem annually for the Passover.
It would all finally boil over in 66 C.E., with full-scale war, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., and the siege at Masada a year later. There were two more rebellions in the next century, with equally awful consequences for the Judean people.
This is the context of Palm Sunday and the crowd scene on Good Friday, a powder keg of religious fervor, desperation and disdain, and an absolute acceptance of brutality, of violence as hard-coded into all of the systems in play, the exploitative economic system of empire, the anticipatory Day of the Lord theology of Jewish renewal movements like the one surrounding John the Baptizer and this crowd following Jesus, even the bureaucratic system of the Second Temple, where the ritual slaughter of animals fed the priests and their families and informed Paul’s theology of the Cross.
The crowd on Palm Sunday is carried away, shouting “Hosanna.” But so is the crowd on Good Friday, carried away and shouting “Crucify him!”
Transcendence is not in and of itself enough. Being part of something bigger than yourself is not enough. It matters whether that thing you are a part of, that social movement or mob, is good or evil. And while we don’t like to talk about it, sometimes don’t even want to admit it, there really is such a thing as evil. It just isn’t a little boy playing with a Barbie doll or a professor trying to teach history.
There is evil in the world. We look at the woman taken in adultery, the challenge that Jesus issues that the one without sin should cast the first stone, and we want to bend it into understatement, but it is not understatement, for as he draws in the dust, he is stating clearly to those men acting out their violent misogyny that their hypocrisy is evil.
The scapegoating of the LGBTQI+ community is evil. The violence against the bodily autonomy of women is evil.
Assault weapons are a right but essential healthcare is a privilege? Evil.
I don’t know that I always have the right answer. Some things are complicated, require nuance, may require adjusting. But the humility of an open mind need not be stupidity.
Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord:
…who has 90 days clean and sober,
…who has a toothache but doesn’t have a car to go 65 miles to see a dentist who takes Medicaid,
…who is listening to gunshots down the street through a hole where a window should be.
Blessed, not in the way of the privileged walking out of Hobby Lobby with some faux Christian plaque manufactured in China, but in the way of those who need to know that a new world is possible, that for every Good Friday there is an even better Sunday. The folks who need to hear a gospel not of some future reunion with Sparky and Grandma, but of rolling up our sleeves and rolling into the seats of power, singing songs of justice and doing that justice, demanding that justice.
Be a part of something, something good, something hopeful, even if it seems a little crazy. Don’t just get carried away. Get carried away with creativity. Get carried away with life. Get carried away with love. Amen.