PALM/PASSION SUNDAY 2007 | Luke 19:28-40

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite books was Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. It’s the story of two thirteen-year-old best friends, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, who are mesmerized when Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a carnival, comes to town. There’s an ominous quality to all carnivals, but Will’s father Charles senses something particularly nefarious about Cooger and Dark. And indeed, he is right. A librarian, he does some research and discovered that indeed, these are not your typical carnies. They are, he finds, the October people, who feed on the despair and death of others, and everyone they touch is stricken by tragedy.

The Dust Witch comes after Charles once he has clued into them, intent upon stopping his already feeble heart. But in a moment of inspiration, Will’s father is able to repel her and save his own life. How? By laughing. He laughs, a great belly laugh that builds almost into hysteria, and the Dust Witch flees, leaving Charles in possession of the ultimate weapon with which to save his son and Jim.

When he finds the boys, they are fast in Mr. Dark’s clutches. Jim is intent upon riding the carosel that can make you older or younger depending on which direction it spins, and he wants to blow through his teenage years and be a man. The ride nearly kills Jim, but Charles tells Will what to do. They sing and dance and laugh and play, and their genuine cheer in the face of despair and destruction destroys the power of Mr. Dark and brings Jim back from the brink of death.

I have always loved that book, not just because it captured the authentic experience of being a thirteen-year-old-boy, but also because Will’s father’s intuition was true wisdom that I resonated with even as a boy. Evil has only as much power as we give it, and despair is destined to wither in the presence of humor and hope.

Our readings today make this point in a particularly poignant way. The lectionary gives churches a choice as to whether to celebrate today as either Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday—partly because of the decreasing attendance at Good Friday services. As you have no doubt gathered from our marathon-length reading this morning, the clergy decided that this year we would do both. The advantage of this is that it provides for us a diptych, twin stories that throw Jesus’ final week into the sharp—but related—contrast of comedy and tragedy.

Unfortunately, we are a little too close to these stories to see them clearly. We are so familiar with Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem that we do not see it as the comedy and high camp that it is. But just consider: Jesus strongly suspects that if he goes to Jerusalem for the Passover, he will be murdered. But he knows he must go, he must complete what he has begun, and the scripture tells us he spent a few depressed days struggling with this. I think he was struggling with how to retain his humanity in the face of such tragedy, and that in the Triumphal Entry, we see how he accomplishes this.

He does it by staging a farce. He knows that the people are waiting for a coming king who will ride into Jerusalem on a war horse, will claim the crown over Israel, declare war on the Roman empire, and lead the Jewish people to an impossible but miraculous victory, freeing them from their foreign oppressors, and creating a theocratic state governed by the Torah.

So he conspires with his disciples to stage a bit of performance art. Instead of a war horse, he gets the foal of a donkey. Instead of wearing the armor of a king arrayed for battle, he sports a pauper’s tunic. And on cue, his disciples create a makeshift red carpet by throwing down their coats and palm branches, and begin shouting, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Now, notice, if you will, just how surreal this is. This is NOT a serious event. This is the first-century equivalent of a Monty Python skit. This is a scene that could have been transferred wholesale into THE LIFE OF BRIAN and not seemed the slightest bit out of place.

But wait! There’s more: the religious authorities are incensed at the obvious mocking and blasphemy of the event, and they rebuke Jesus, saying, “Rabbi, tell your disciples to stop this!” What does Jesus do? He makes a joke, one of the funniest in all scripture. Unfortunately, we have so suffused this event in the soporific haze of piety that we gloss right over the joke—we have gassed the humor right out of it. When the Pharisees insist that Jesus tell his disciples to cease and desist, he replies, “Hey, if I tell them to shut up, the rocks and stones would start shouting! So what’s the use?”

For centuries Christians have taken this literally, and wondered what rocks sound like crying out without the aid of lungs or larynxes, which only goes to show how clueless we have always been about this passage. For Christsakes, Christian-people-throughout-the-ages, it’s a joke!

But to what end? People have scratched their heads over the Triumphal Entry since the beginning of the church. My opinion is that this is Jesus whistling in the dark. It is how he kept himself sane as he walked willingly into the jaws of death. He made jokes in the face of death in order to alleviate the stress, and more importantly, to preserve his own humanity.

It is as true for us as it was for him. I remember hearing that a person very close to me had died. Even though I was surrounded by sympathetic people, I fought with the magnitude of emotions that raged through me. And despite my attempts to stop it, the emotional pressure was alleviated by a storm of giggles that I do not understand to this day. It seemed wildly inappropriate at the time, and they eventually gave way to tears, but I know that my experience is neither callous nor unusual. Humor is how we deal, and if Jesus’ story is any indication, it may also be a clue to how we may conquer despair and death.

On the morning before her ordination with ChI last week, my friend Vicky Joy had a dream. She dreamt about Jesus hanging on the cross, wracked with agony, his head bowed by the magnitude of his suffering. It was a scene just like any crucifix any of us have ever seen, except that in his right hand, Jesus held a square of bubble wrap. And as he hung on the cross he entertained himself by working his way around the square, snapping all the little bubbles. It’s a marvelous image, and it reminds me of the Gnostic gospels that depict Jesus hanging on the cross and laughing.

This dream and the Gnostic gospels needn’t be historically accurate to be correct in their depiction of human nature. For what the laughing Jesus says to us is profound: as long as we can laugh, pain cannot completely consume us, cannot steal from us our humanity, or our hope—no matter what evils are inflicted upon us.

And that is why we whistle in the dark, that is why we enjoy gallows humor and black comedies, that is why we do irrational rituals when in the throws of grieving and despair—because the irrational and the silly remind us that there is more to life, and more to being alive, than the inevitability of death and despair. It is in our nature to hope, to affirm life even in the face of destruction, to retrieve our humanity even when pain and circumstances conspire to wrest it from us.

And like Will and Charles singing, dancing, and laughing Jim Nightshade back to life in the climax of SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, the myth of the resurrection adds a third panel, making this a triptych. It says to us that so long as we retain our humor, so long as we hold fast to our humanity, it is we, not death, that will get the last laugh.

Let us pray…

Jesus, I believe you were just as scared as any of us would have been
as you made your way—step by dread-filled step—towards Jerusalem.
It would have been so easy to succumb to the inevitability of your fate,
to be paralyzed by fear and depression, to let despair win out,
and to hand over to those who hated you your most precious possession:
your dignity, your humanity. Instead, you surprised everyone
—which, as I’m sure you’re aware, you’re pretty good at—
by meeting your own dread with a farcical pageant,
a joke, and at the last supper, an irrational ritual.
Help us to be likewise loath to surrender our dignity
in the face of the tragedies we endure,
meeting them with courage and humor,
so that we may—like you—emerge from the other side
with our humanness—and our hope—intact. Amen.