John 12:1-8
Isaiah 43:16-21
You probably had never heard the name Joe DePugh before this week, though you may, like me, have known him as a character.
DePugh, who recently died, was the inspiration behind Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 hit “Glory Days.” The song, which opens with a real life encounter, names the ways we live in the past, seek to recapture our glory days, like that fastball DePugh could throw in his youth.
As the first generations of Christians transformed a Jewish reformation movement into a trans-cultural religion, they wove into the story a modified form of glory days, of messianic expectation.
Let’s take a few minutes to parse that.
There was a significant kingdom in Canaan, or whatever name you call that region, now or at any given point in history. For about a century, that mighty-ish kingdom was made up of a collection of people who would eventually be identified as Jews. The city that became Jerusalem was captured and transformed into a capital, with a Temple built on a high point sometimes called Mount Moriah, Mount Zion, or simply the Temple Mount.
The most powerful of that short-lived nation’s three rulers was David. Though he was a usurper, a rapist, and a murderer, the nation torn apart by civil war during his last years on the throne, his reign would be romanticized in much the same way Shakespeare romanticized the Tudors.
David’s heirs would rule a declining remnant state called Judah for another four centuries. That house produced a significant amount of propaganda, including the claim that Yahweh made a covenant with King David, much as Yahweh had made a covenant with the house of Abraham and Sarah in the Torah. The Davidic Covenant asserted that a descendent of the king would sit on the throne forever.
In the real world, Jews lost control of the northern part of their kingdom early on, which was largely depopulated. The southern part of their kingdom would become a client state to other regional powers, before it too was destroyed, the Temple a burning ruin, the elite held captive in a foreign land.
Some texts in the Tanakh, the Hebrew language scripture, suggest a hero would come to liberate and restore the people to their former glory. The term used for this hero is Messiah, which refers to the individual being anointed with oil, something that is still done, was done behind a privacy screen during the recent coronation of King Charles III.
The Koine Greek word for the Anointed One is Christ, and oil is still traditionally used as part of christening. Christ and Messiah are the same word.
One “Messiah” is named in the Tanakh, the Jewish Testament. That messiah is King Cyrus of Persia. He defeats Babylon and frees the Jewish elite, who then return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple and the city’s walls as a Persian client-state.
Since the development of history as a discipline with scientific support, Christian historians have convinced themselves that during the time of Jesus, the pre-Rabbinic Jews of Judea and Galilee were expecting a Messiah to appear and save them. That is to say, scholars claim that during the time of Jesus, there was widespread Messianic expectation among the Jewish people. That view has been challenged in recent years.
This morning, we are less interested in that unknown, whether the average Jewish inhabitant of Judea in the early First Century longed for a messiah, and more interested in what is known, what the early Christians did with that idea.
And to put it bluntly, they flipped it on its head.
Christianity casts Jesus as the messiah, but as Paul notes in 1st Corinthians, this good news or gospel is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, for there is no army, no restoration of an earthly kingdom, only an innocent man, murdered by church and state, or in that historic context, the religious and economic elite of Jerusalem and the brutal occupation forces of Rome.
In today’s reading from the Gospel traditionally attributed to John, Jesus is anointed, by Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, not as a king, but as a “dead man walking.” The women at the tomb never get a chance to anoint his body. Christian tradition understands his death and resurrection as changing the universal human condition.
Whether or not Jesus changes the human condition, exactly how it is that Jesus saves, is an open question for many. What is absolutely indisputable is that Jesus and his followers changed the course of human history. And they did not do it by restoring an ancient kingdom with a Davidic heir on the throne. As much as early Christians wanted to see Jesus as being in continuity with the Jewish story, Jesus through the lens of Christianity was a whole new thing.
The unknown prophet in Deutero-Isaiah writes “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?”
In his fever-dream revelation, John of Patmos imagines the heavenly ruler saying “See, I am making all things new.”
Newness, creativity, innovation and adaptation, these things are holy, yet we, in our fearfulness and sin, look backwards, like Lot’s wife looking back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Genesis story. She turns into a pillar of salt and is left behind, no longer part of God’s story. Love moves out. Fear turns back.
If we have been blessed to have moments of peace, prosperity, or comfort in the past, we long to return to that time and space of privilege. But not everyone was experiencing the good times when we were, and Christianity is about what comes next, whether you are looking forward to the Second Coming of Christ, as some do, or simply the grace and justice of the in-breaking kingdom, God’s realm of love.
And here we are, in a time of crisis, when so many have been conned into a movement that seeks to restore the racism of the past, the misogyny of the past, the homophobia of the past, even worst, that wants to power past the gains of the Enlightenment and the age of democracy to an age of despots, creating a techno-feudal serfdom where we are disposable cogs in the machinery of a gig economy, a nation of rubes waiting to be conned.
So many on our side, people who should know better, who speak of progress, still cling to the idea that we can play politics the old way, that when this is all over, we can return to a system that isn’t fair to begin with, in which unearned income and the legal theft of speculation capitalism is creating a class of super-villains as evil as any in my vast library of comic books.
We’re never going back. Not to Andrew Jackson, the goal of the current would-be dictator. Not to Barack Obama, the goal of the failed leadership on the Center Left.
The internet killed bookstores and newspapers and democracy, and globalized capitalism gave us Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg and countless other megalomaniacs and sociopaths. We reward what economists call rent-seeking, manipulating the economic, social, and political systems to extract wealth without creating wealth.
How insane is it that we pay people to deny us necessary healthcare?
We are going to need new political and economic systems or this cycle is just going to repeat again and again. Yet few, not even those who were suffering in the last years of our American democracy, are willing to imagine what comes next. Even in progressive circles, anyone who dares to challenge shareholder primacy and finance capitalism is seen as a crackpot.
If we aren’t talking about what comes next, someone else will make decisions for us.
New and unfolding and in-breaking are hard-coded into our faith, yet even in our faith, we institutionalize and cling to the past. I’m just as guilty as anyone. I love every part of our Mainline Protestant tradition, the old familiar hymns and coffee hour refreshments, though blessedly churches are serving better quality coffee in recent years.
We at The Park Church are so lucky to be thriving in an age when churches continue to close, clergy continue to quit, and no one is in the pipeline to become the next generation of pastors and teachers.
We are thriving, and we are fulfilling our mission, focusing on practical Christianity, working for justice, welcoming and loving those at the margins, but we must continue to be open to trying new things, to following the Spirit, or our story will stop on Lynching Friday, never making it to the newness of Easter morning.
We must do scary things. And doing scary things is, well, scary.
We must be selfless enough to stop saying “I like” and “I don’t like” and “I’ll take my money away” and start saying “What must we do to pull people out of the river? What must we do to prevent them from being thrown into the river at all?”
Many, anesthetized by consumerism, have become lazy. Jesus is not gonna come fix things, and while the death riders of our latter-day apocalypse are in CyberTrucks, a new Jerusalem is not floating down from the sky.
It is up to us. Gathered at the table, over bread and wine or fair-trade coffee and danishes, may we be dreamers of dreams and doers of deeds. Amen.