Mark 11:1-11 | Palm Sunday 1999

Recently I was commiserating with a friend about the state of religious politics. We had both watched the fundamentalist takeover of The Southern Baptist Convention over the last decade, and been incredulous when just last year the Convention decided to boycott Disney for supporting the gay agenda. At the same time Conservative Christians had infiltrated every level of the Republican party and transformed it beyond the recognition of even the most diehard GOP's, hoping for a "Christian takeover" of America. As we were speaking the Christian Coalition was gearing up for one last strike at putting conservative Christians into local and school board positions of power in the latest elections.

Now, I say we were commiserating, because, of course, my own religious leanings inspire me to actions which are the direct opposite of the stated goals and intentions of the Christian Coalition, and for that matter the Southern Baptist Convention. In their desperate grab for power, the politics were turning nasty, which is not surprising, but it somehow seemed to us that, well, with religious people it should somehow be different.

"Religion and politics are two different things" my friend said bitterly. "People shouldn't mix them."

Now I am quite a believe in the separation of church and state, but still something in my friends' remark struck me as a little off; for you see, I don't think it is possible for us to separate politics and religion. Perhaps that is one reason that both subjects are taboo at so many Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter family gatherings. They certainly are at mine.

Our politics are almost always driven, to one degree or another, by our faith. For instance, it is impossible for me to read the Old Testament prophets laying down the law about the care of orphans and widows, and not have a concern for our welfare system. It is impossible for me to read Jesus' words about taking the log out of one's own eye before seeking to remove a speck from my brothers' when I am contemplating U.S. foreign policy. And for many people, the simple commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is enough to decide the abortion debate.

No, as long as we are both religious AND political animals, we will never be able to keep the two separated, especially in our own heads. Any attempt to do this can only end up ringing false.

The New Testament writers, when editing our current gospels, certainly ring false when they try to do the same. Most scholars, when approaching the texts regarding Jesus' trial and crucifixion, agree that the original layer of the gospel narrative puts the blame for Jesus' death squarely with the Romans. But when the church was vying for acceptance a couple of centuries later, these texts were edited to put the blame on the Jews, which might have appeased Rome, and in fact, allowed the church to survive and even flourish, but at what cost? Nearly 2,000 years of extreme anti-Semitism. One might even go so far as to say that if these texts had not been altered, if the precedent for anti-Jewish feeling had not been set so early in the Christian consciousness, the holocaust may not have occurred. We will never know. But there is little doubt in the scholarly community that the blame for Jesus' death should reside with the Romans, not the Jews.

The events surrounding Jesus' trial and execution, including today's account of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem all support this reading of the events. To begin with, the title that is so often used to describe Jesus by his followers is "Son of God." Now, today, after so many years of tradition, when we hear this title, we think "the Son of God is God." But that is not the way that the people of Jesus' time would have understood those words. In the Old Testament, those words are ONLY used to describe one person: the king. The king, in passage after passage, is described as "the Son of God." This title was not for Jesus' followers a theological admission, but a political one. Jesus was their hope for a new King of Israel. A king who will defeat the Romans and restore independence to Israel. It was not an exclusive claim to divinity as it is often thought of today, but instead a claim to political power.

The King is also called "the anointed one." You will remember that all the kings -Saul, David, and others - were pronounced to be king by prophets who anointed them with oil. This is the meaning of the Hebrew word "Messiah" and the Greek work "Christ": "Anointed One." It was only after Jesus' death and resurrection that Jesus began being spoken of as some special kind of "Christ" or "Anointed One." Previous to that, it was only the King, and the coming king promised by the prophets who were "Christened" or "Christed" or "anointed."

So these were not meaningless terms at the time, they just meant something very different for Jesus' contemporaries than they do for us, and we can see how thoroughly the editors did their jobs of removing the political realities of the time from the text, or at least from our immediate view. For the Romans, anyone going around drawing hordes of people to his rallies, being called by royal titles is going to be the cause of some irritation. And in the explosive political situation that Roman-occupied Israel found itself in, the threat that this Jesus guy posed was intolerable.

It is telling that when Jesus was crucified, Pilate himself has a sign attached to the cross saying what? "Here is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews." If the Romans did not conceive of Jesus as a threat, this incident makes not sense. Furthermore, crucifixion is a Roman method of execution reserved for political criminals, not religious ones. If the Jews had had Jesus put to death, it would most likely have been by stoning, as proscribed in Mosaic law.

But it was not the Jews who had Jesus executed. Most scholars agree that the scene where Barabass is offered in Jesus' place by Pilate is a fabrication intended to shift the blame from the Romans to the Jews. There is certainly no corroborating records of the event in ancient histories. The image of Pilate washing his hands of the whole affair is an especially vivid insertion into the story, and must have been very effective in absolving Rome in the eyes of the early Christians.

So Jesus is hailed as a political leader. Jesus is killed as a political agitator. And the blame is shifted to the Jews for political purposes. Doesn't sound like we're going to be able to get away from mixing religion and politics, does it?

What was Jesus' take on all of this? Certainly he was not ignorant of the political realities involved. He knew that going to Jerusalem was probably going to mean his life. But he did it anyway. You might say that Jesus was foolhardy in his own way, after all he invited a zealot to be one of his disciples. Zealots, as you will recall, were the great political agitators in Israel, looking for someone with the charisma to rally Israel against the Romans. The zealots certainly saw Jesus as someone who could fill that role, and one of them followed him, perhaps hoping to persuade him to follow that route, to fill those shoes.

But while Jesus himself made no bones about doing things which were politically volatile, such as talking to women, and breaking all manner of other social taboos, against Rome we hear nary a word. And when he comes to enter Jerusalem in today's reading we see quite a curious spectacle. For the triumphal entry into Jerusalem is quite self-consciously a people's welcome to their king. The image of the mighty ruler entering the city gates on a huge war stallion, surrounded by his entourage, with the people lining the streets, laying their coats and palm branches on the road for him to tread upon is precisely what is depicted. But look at what Jesus does. He is aware that some such welcome is in order, but he does not give a lecture rebuking them, he does not sneak into the city by another route. Instead, he uses the occasion to present a piece of performance art.

For Jesus rides through the city gates perched not on a proud horse of war, but upon a humble beast of burden, a donkey. He turns the people's exultant reception into satire, mocking both their expectations and at the same time, Rome's paranoia.

For I honestly don't believe that Jesus had any personal pretensions to political power, regardless of what well-meaning religious folk at the time intended. Jesus was a rabbi in the Pharisaical tradition. He was a religious teacher, and although he taught a lot of very political messages, questing for power was not part of his agenda. He did not think that the goal of an Israeli state was a reasonable, or even necessarily, a desirable one. He was much more interested in how people actually treated each other on a person-to-person basis. Jesus was interested in people, not bureaucracies.

These days a lot of religious folks seem to be forgetting this about Jesus. The Christian right puts out pamphlets and broadcasts on thousands of stations daily that America is destined by God to be a Christian nation, and the Christian Reconstructionist movement is working hard to make their dream of a Christian theocratic state in America a reality. But just as Jesus had no pretensions to political power in the first century, I do not believe he has changed his mind in the twentieth, regardless of what well-meaning religious folk of our own time intend. In our time, as in his, Jesus is chiefly interested in how we treat the people we meet every day: the boss we don't particularly get along; with the daughter-in-law that doesn't see eye-to-eye with us; the homeless person cluttering up our sidewalk; the welfare mother down the street trying to feed her family.

And don't get me wrong, folks, these are POLITICAL concerns. Do we pass legislation making it illegal to be without a home? Do we cut off the impoverished mother trying to feed her family? How will it affect the rest of the family if I tell my daughter-in-law what I really think of her? These are all political realities. And the gospel insists we act on them as such. It is HOW we act on them that reveals whether we are truly the inheritors of Jesus' spirit.

For unlike the Christian Coalition, making a power-grab for control of an entire political party, it was not Jesus' way to wrest governmental control. Unlike the fundamentalists who ousted each and every moderate from power in the Southern Baptist Convention, it was Jesus' way to make a place at the table for those with whom he disagreed. Jesus did not come to us with an iron scepter, but with an outstretched hand of greeting. Jesus does not seek to rule us, but to befriend us. Jesus does not ask us to divorce ourselves from politics, but only from the lust for power. For God has not called us, my friends, to be a Christian nation - far from it. God calls us to be Christians in whatever country or situation we find ourselves in, and to act accordingly.

Let us pray.

Holy God of love and power,
We are frightened by our own smallness,
And often try to build up what power we can for ourselves,
To protect our children, to protect our way of life.
Help us to see, O God, that the very machinations
by which we contrive to provide security
Serve only to enslave us further,
To make us over into that which we hate;
Until, telling ourselves we are doing your will,
We wreck unspeakable tragedies upon our neighbors.
Save us now from the tyranny of our own understanding,
And help us to live out the gospel in ways which have integrity,
For our sake, and for the sake of the Gospel.
For we ask this in the name of the one
who did not think power was something to be grasped,
but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant;
even Jesus Christ. Amen.