Text: Luke 19:28-40

When I was a boy in Boise, we had several family traditions, including the waffles my father usually made for Saturday night dinner, followed by the weekly episode of “Gunsmoke.” My father would occasionally joke that he watched “Gunsmoke” to get material for his sermons. I don’t recall that he ever quoted Marshal Dillon, Chester, Doc Adams or Miss Kitty on a Sunday morning, but it was part of the tradition. When we were younger, we would have a family night on Fridays and we would eat popcorn and play games. On my twelfth birthday I received a board game which became fairly popular with our family. The game was called “Going to Jerusalem.” It involved each player having a set of plastic figures in the stylized shape of first century apostles with long robes, long hair and long beards. The goal of the game was to be the first to get your apostles to Jerusalem. Figures were moved forward on the board by answering questions about the Bible. Now I’m pretty sure this was not a dazzling sensation as games go. I doubt it was played in millions of homes around the world along with “Clue” and “Monopoly,” but “Going to Jerusalem” was fun and provided many hours of entertainment for our preacher’s family.

However, going to Jerusalem was hardly fun for Jesus and his disciples in that fateful spring of 30 CE. Jesus had come from God, proclaiming and living out the coming culture of God on earth. For three years he had wandered the countryside, from Galilee to Jerusalem and back, preaching and teaching, healing and feeding, offering compassion and hope to a people in desperate need of such attention. The culmination of his life and ministry was manifest in his growing understanding of his role as the Messiah of God, God’s promised redeemer of God’s chosen people.

We have considered how, in anticipation of this particular Passover festival, Jesus set his face steadfastly toward Jerusalem, beginning a journey that will lead to glory or death. Along the way, he tries to warn his followers that this journey of faith may very likely lead to his demise. They don’t hear, they don’t get it, or at least they don’t want to hear or understand what lies ahead for him and, potentially, for them.

For much of my early life and I imagine for most of yours, even as Baptists, we made some acknowledgement of Holy Week. We did not move so quickly or easily from the glory of Palm Sunday to the glory of Easter. We usually had a Maundy Thursday service, complete with Communion and the choir singing “Go to dark Gethsemane, ye who feel the tempter’s pow’r, your Redeemer’s conflict see, watch with him one bitter hour…” In those days, Good Friday, or at least Friday afternoon, was a public holiday and services were common with different preachers preaching on the “Seven Last Words from the Cross.” Since so much of that tradition has been lost, current practice in the church has been to call the Sunday before Easter Palm/Passion Sunday in an attempt at least to acknowledge the events of Christ’s passion in passing as we move to Easter. What is lost in this practice is a depth of understanding of the significance of the events of that week, a significance which makes the experience of Easter all the more meaningful.

Theodore Wardlaw says of the women waiting at the cross that it is often those people “…who from the distance of being marginalized [are] able to believe what the disciples had trouble believing. Luke challenges us to stand next to these people standing there on the edge of things, and to take in, with them, all the events of this story, each in turn, as the powers and principalities deliver the worst they can summon on the cross of Jesus Christ. The challenge is to stand far enough away from the canvas to overcome the numbing familiarity that attends our knowing this story backward and forward. The challenge is to see it – in both its terror and redemption – as if for the first time…” (“At a Distance, Christian Century, March 20, 2007, p.18.)

This morning’s text tells the tale of the crucial beginning of this fateful week, the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. As we have noted, Jesus has been moving patiently and inexorably toward this moment. He tells his disciples, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day will rise again.’ But,” Luke goes on, “they understood nothing about all these things…they did not grasp what he had said” (Luke 18:31-34.)

Going to Jerusalem they pass through Jericho, where Jesus heals a blind beggar, brings about the redemption of the tax collector, Zaccheus, and his household, and tells them the parable of the talents. Then he moves on. According to Tom Wright, the journey from Jericho to Jerusalem is a memorable one. “You wind up through the sandy hills,” he says, “from Jericho, the lowest point on the face of the earth, through the Judaean desert, climbing all the way. Halfway up, you reach sea level. You’ve already climbed a long way from the Jordan valley, and you still have to ascend a fair-sized mountain. It is almost always hot; since it seldom if ever rains, it’s almost always dusty as well.” I love this graphic description of the road Jesus travels.

This “fair-sized mountain,” is the Mount of Olives, which must be climbed in order to reach the city of Jerusalem. Again, hear Tom Wright describe the setting: “Even when you drive, rather than walk, from Jericho to the top of the Mount of Olives, the sense of relief and excitement when you reach the summit is intense. At last you exchange barren, dusty desert for lush green growth, particularly at Passover time, at the height of spring. At last you stop climbing, you crest the summit, and there before you, glistening in the sun, is the holy city, Jerusalem itself, on its own slightly smaller hill across a narrow but deep valley. Bethany and Bethphage nestle on the Jericho side of the Mount of Olives” (Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone, pp. 228-229.)

Though some scholars dispute this, it seems as if this fateful week is carefully thought out, that Jesus knows exactly what he is doing throughout all the events of the week. The donkey on which he will ride into the city seems prearranged; the activities that follow all carefully calculated in his last push to bring the kingdom of God on earth. The days of confrontation are at hand.

In an article in Christian Century entitled “Collision Course,” drawn from their book The Last Week: A Day by Day Account of Jesus’ Final Week, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan challenge the traditional notion of substitutionary atonement, the idea that God sent Jesus as a sacrifice to atone for our sins. They argue that Jesus death is a political execution that is an inevitable consequence of his very public confrontation of the Romans and their Jewish collaborators; his insistence on pitting God’s way against the way of all flesh. From their view, Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem is like guerilla theater, timed to coincide with the annual arrival of the Roman governor to the holy city.

Passover, in particular, was a time when Jerusalem was crowded with people from all over the world. “Two processions entered Jerusalem,” Borg and Crossan say, “at the beginning of the week of Passover, a tinderbox time in the city…Pilate…rode up to the city from the imperial capital of Caesarea…at the head of a cohort of imperial cavalry and troops to reinforce the garrison in Jerusalem as a deterrent against and preparation for any possible trouble.” Pilate and his retinue would have entered the city from the west, with all the pomp and circumstance necessary to assure the people of Rome’s glory, power and absolute control.

Meanwhile, from the east, mounted on a donkey, Jesus, set out for the city, wending his way from Bethany, down though the steep and narrow valley of Kidron, his disciples and the growing crowds lining his way with their cloaks and shouting praise to God. A counterprocession, a deliberate design on the part of Jesus to highlight the differences between the rule of Rome and the rule of God. “The contrast is clear,” say Borg and Crossan, “Jesus versus Pilate, the nonviolence of the kingdom of God versus the violence of the empire. Two arrivals, two entrances, two processions – and our Christian Lent is about repentance for being in the wrong one and preparation to abandon it for its alternative.”

In the beginning, Jesus’ procession is largely his disciples acclaiming him as the Messiah, but their rag tag procession snowballs as they roll along, picking up people and volume as they move into the city shouting, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven.” It is a grand, ecstatic celebration, especially for those who have known the pain and hunger of poverty, who have felt the sting of oppression, who have experienced the wounds of being outcast and marginalized; a joyful extravagance, not unlike Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet that we considered last week.

Here again we hear the cautious voice of reason challenging the ecstasy of the moment. Presumably the Pharisees in this crowd, like Nicodemus, are attracted to Jesus’ message and prone to believe he is the Messiah. But they are also frightened of upsetting the status quo. Even if what the disciples and others are shouting is true, it will be considered as sedition by the Romans and the religious authorities. It can only lead to trouble. But the time has come, God’s time is now, this is the day. Jesus responds, “I tell you if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” God’s Messiah is to be revealed, God’s Word proclaimed, God’s way made public here and now. The process, both terrible and redemptive, has been set in motion and must continue through to its inevitable conclusion.

The week will see Jesus’ very public cleansing of the temple, with his proclamation directly against the religious authorities, “My house shall be a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of robbers” (Luke 19:46.) He will position himself very publicly in the temple courtyard to teach and tell good news. Luke says “The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.” The people are on his side and the authorities dare not risk the wrath of the people.

Finally, after an intimate dinner with the disciples, one of his own will turn him over to the authorities as he prays alone in a garden at midnight. The trial is a mockery of justice; a small group of those who have cast their fate with Rome will stand in Pilate’s courtyard and call for his crucifixion. As he hangs on the cross, dying an agonizingly slow and ignominious death, he will speak words of forgiveness, the sky will darken, the earth shake and the veil to the holiest reaches of the temple be torn in two. Pierced in the side to hasten his death, he will be laid in a donated tomb, the mouth of which is sealed and we are left to wait. Will death and a cold stone tomb be the final consequence of going to Jerusalem?