Mark 11:1-11
I am an old nerd. I started playing computer games when they consisted of green text on a terminal screen. We’ve come a long way since then. I can play a gunslinger seeking redemption on my Xbox in full color with vast regions to explore and NPCs, non-player characters, who respond to my player character’s decisions.
Recently, I’ve been playing the console version of Baldur’s Gate 3, the newest digital iteration of the ancestor of all roleplaying games, Dungeons and Dragons. I started playing D&D before it was even published in book form, back when it was still a series of pamphlets produced on a mimeograph machine, and players gathered around a table with graph paper, dice in a variety of shapes and colors, and every conceivable form of snack food, Cheetos fingers on everything.
Folks still gather to play the old book and dice version, as I did before the pandemic, but the electronic version offers entertainment when you can’t manage a regular gathering of six to eight players. And at least in one way, Baldur’s Gate 3 reminds us that the game is meant to be analog, for when you have to check to see if you’ve succeeded in using a skill, the game rolls an on-screen version of a twenty-sided die, known as a D20. And just as in the paper and junk food version of the game, rolling a 20 on a D20 is a “critical success,” and rolling a 1 is a “critical failure,” the outcome exaggerated at both extremes. Rolling a one is swinging your sword, missing the monster completely, and tripping over your own bootlace in the process.
By D&D standards, old school or new school, the events of Holy Week, the next five days, are a critical failure, a 1 on a D20. Not only does Jesus end up dead, he ends up dead in a very public way, tortured and put on display as an example to others who might contemplate disrupting a system that was benefiting colonizer and collaborator.
Of course, we don’t see the events of Holy Week as a critical failure because we know how the story will end. But we also miss a tremendous amount of what is going on, miss the emotional, social, and even political context because we read Jesus through the lens of later Christology, as wholly unique and part of a divinely-scripted intervention in creation. And I’d like to ask you to park that this Holy Week and just let events unfold as they would have, in a time of unrest and violence, of resistance and rebellion.
The entry into Jerusalem is just one half of the story. The gospels do not mention the other half.
Tiberius Caesar’s governor in Judaea, Pontius Pilate, did not live in Jerusalem. The governor’s residence was in Caesaria Maritima, on the Mediterranean coast. He despised the locals and was in Jerusalem for one reason only. The region was historically unstable, the Jewish peasantry notoriously resistant to foreign rule, and Passover was a religious celebration of an ancient rebellion. If trouble was going to break out, if the oppressed Jewish peasants were going to rise up, it would all happen in Jerusalem at Passover. So the governor would travel to the city in the days before Passover began, arriving from the west at the head of a legion and mounted on a horse.
Jesus enters the city from the east, from Jericho, riding on a donkey, at the head of a rag-tag group, some fishermen, a former tax collector, some folks he had healed, people with nothing really to lose.
The Jewish Council, the Sanhedrin, is not happy he is in the city. We have no reason to doubt reports that they were plotting against him. Earlier prophets and reformers faced hostility as well. But by all accounts, the Palm Sunday Protest March was not really a threat. Sure some local residents got in the spirit of things, waving branches and chanting “Hosanna,” but not enough to matter, not enough to rise up and throw off the shackles of Roman rule, not enough to drive corruption and greed out of the Temple that served as the center of their religious tradition.
There is certainly something to be said for prophetic witness, for offering an alternative to Roman Empire, even to being a martyr if necessary, but can we talk a little about effectiveness?
Again, don’t read it backwards. Read it like we might have lived it.
Read it like those of us who watched as, the day before Palm Sunday six years ago, students and supporters gathered around the nation for a March for Our Lives, and yet today, there are more guns than ever, and a decidedly un-Supreme Court that seems hell-bent on turning our nation into an apocalyptic war zone somewhere between Mad Max and modern day Haiti.
Read it like it is real life, not a movie.
It is a little crazy to operate as if good can overcome evil. It is a little crazy to believe love and grace are bigger than judgment and vengeance. It is a little crazy to believe that the realm of God is a way of living, not some foreign place, and that victory is not a pile of gold, but a legacy of love, of co-creating with the first creator, as artist and parent and farmer.
It is a little crazy to believe that it is the game that counts, not the trophy, that we are called to give our all during this bright shiny moment we call life, and that life itself is meant to be the gift, though we must work together to cultivate joy.
It was a little crazy to believe that the false god of the priests was never really God, that God was not to be found in the gold and smoke and finery, not to be found in the holy places and religious manipulation, but could instead be found hoping someone could help him into the healing pool, hoping a child would stop having seizures. God could be found hanging on a cross, a roll of 1 on a D20 in every way.
It is a little crazy to sit in the middle of conflict and chaos and to believe still, to see still the goodness deep down things.
But we believe all sorts of crazy things every day. So why not choose the good ones? The ones that give you hope and grit and enough strength to get to the coffee pot.
Because there is a pack of goblins out there, and you’re going to need a little caffeine and a good roll of the D20 to hit’em with a fireball spell and save the day. May the dice be in your favor. Amen.