Regime Change: Religion and Politics in the Ministry of Jesus (Luke 19:28-44; Palm Sunday C; March 24, 2013)

Regime Change: Religion and Politics in the Ministry of Jesus

Luke 19:28-44
Palm Sunday C
March 24, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Something very strange is going on in the gospel reading, the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem that is the story behind Palm Sunday.  I know this story.  I’ve read or heard this story in its various versions at least fifty times.  I’ve led and followed in Palm Sunday processionals.  I know this story.  So do you.  It still seems strange to me.

It seems strange because all the signs seem to say that Jesus’ purpose in going into Jerusalem was to stage a coup d’état.  Jesus goes to Jerusalem to topple the powers that be and overthrow the government.  The Jesus of this story is militant, political.

Here are the things that point me in that direction.  First, there is the matter of arranging for the use of a donkey, the colt.  The way the story unfolds makes it clear that Jesus has arranged for this.  There is some sort of conspiracy that doesn’t involve the usual inner circle of Jesus’ disciples.  The donkey itself points us toward Zechariah and its description of the Messiah: 

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

The crowd picked up on all this and gave Jesus a hero’s welcome.  They spread their cloaks and tree branches on the ground for his donkey to walk on.  They shouted “Hosanna,” a word from Psalm 118, a processional psalm that celebrates the unexpected victory of God and the crowd that makes its way to the Temple with branches.

Jesus has surrounded himself with political images drawn from the Jewish memory of independence and the rule of David the king.  This flies in the face of the political reality that Jerusalem is living under the boot heel of its Roman conquerors with the help of their local Jewish collaborators, mostly of noble and priestly families.  Some of the Pharisees, who otherwise might well have sympathized with the crowd’s longing for liberation, try to get Jesus to put a lid on the celebration, but Jesus will not do that.  The Jesus of this story is militant, and thoroughly political. 

Is this Jesus crazy, foolish, reckless, or all three?  After all, it’s not as if staging a coup is rocket science.  If you’re going to overthrow the government there are several things that need to be done.  The government is always better equipped and better organized.  Therefore the element of surprise is absolutely essential—the coup must be so rapid that it’s over before the government realizes it’s begun.  The government leaders have to be captured and its armed forces and police either rendered helpless or brought over to your side.  These things must be done at the same time.

One very important rule for a successful coup is that you must wait until you have things under at least some control before you have your inaugural parade.  And this Jesus failed to do.  But Jesus, by styling himself a king and by entering into Jerusalem in triumph, had declared independence from the power arrangements in Jerusalem and in Roman Palestine in general.  He had spit in the faces of the powers that be.  If he didn’t intend a coup, then he should count on an immediate and violent response.  If he was not prepared to counter that response, then what was he doing?

You see, no one understood violence better than the Romans.  They knew how to use it ruthlessly and effectively.  More than that, they were cunning enough to know how to avoid using violence.  They brought the local elites over to their side with lavish rewards for cooperation.  The elites in their turn spun wide webs of patronage so that the common people who depended on them were reluctant to openly oppose them. 

But within this velvet glove there was the legendary iron fist of Roman military might.  In a matter of days after any unrest, the Romans could put a legion of boots on the ground anywhere in the empire, in a month three legions, in three months another three.  A violent rebellion against Rome was doomed from the start.  Using violence against the Romans was useless, worse than useless.  The only way to beat the Romans at their game was to be more cunning and more violent and more ruthless than they were.

Even if that were possible for Jesus and his followers, it wouldn’t have changed anything.  Overthrowing the government doesn’t change anything except for putting a different group of thugs in charge.  If you’re not one of the thugs, before and after look the same.

If you want to change things, I mean really change things, you need more than a coup.  What you need is a revolution.  To get a revolution you need to get at the roots of the way things are.  You need to call into question the deepest assumptions about power and how it works.  You need to get past the lies that regimes tell themselves and their citizens in order to keep doing business as usual.  

You need to show what the regime really is, stripped bare of its pretenses.  You need to show that its version of justice is not just at all, just brutality dressed up to look civilized.  You need to show that there is nothing natural or divinely-ordered or inevitable at all about the regime, that like other human power arrangements, its power is the result of ambition and ruthlessness and luck.

One of the best ways to do all of that is parody, to hold up the regime to ridicule.  Yes, it looks as though Jesus is staging a coup d’état, but unless Jesus was a whole more naïve than I think he was, this entry into Jerusalem is starting to look more like parody in the form of very daring and very dangerous street theater.  

The Roman conquerors come into Jerusalem on the backs of war horses, the commander with polished armor and brilliant crimson capes.  At their backs are legions of 4,500 men each, carrying their javelins.  When Jesus entered with his “triumph” he was dressed in peasant garb, riding on a donkey.  A few dozen men, women and children—a few hundred at most—carried their branches along the way and they shouted a welcome to the “king.”  With his little parade, Jesus has made mockery of the trappings of Roman power.  

Jesus has the powers that be off-balance and confused.  They knew how to deal with a rebel commander at the head of a band of would-be liberators.  Street theatrics were something else.  If anything, though, the street theater is a greater threat to their rule.  Soon enough they will recover.  Then they will kill him, callously and brutally.  When they do that, though, the Empire will be revealed as a collection of thugs in fancy clothes and pretty uniforms.  The Empire’s justice will be revealed to be no more than state-sanctioned violence to protect its power.  With the moral shabbiness of the Empire on display, a revolution would be launched, or at very least, it would become possible.

I wish I could say that the story ended well.  We in the Jesus movement don’t always get it right.  Too often we in the church have ranged ourselves with the Empire rather than against it.  Too often we have preferred the comfort of palaces and nice clothes to the place that Jesus has appointed for us with the outcast and the poor.  More often than that we have turned his message and mission into something harmless and bland.  We have imagined that there can be any salvation that it is not as political and economic and social a salvation as it is a spiritual and moral one.

Some of us have stumbled our way into faithfulness, almost by accident.  Oscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, was one of them.  Monseñor Romero, as Salvadorans call him today, was an ordinary Catholic priest of upper class roots.  He was hard-working and socially and politically conservative.  When he was elevated to the episcopacy, everyone assumed that he would be just another in a long series of archbishops who looked after the interests of the upper classes and reminded the poor of their place in the scheme of things and so helped the regime keep order.

But that isn’t what happened.  Other priests were working among the poor and naming their poverty as an injustice of the economic and political system in El Salvador rather than something the poor deserved.  The government for its part was responding by harassing and even assassinating these prophetic priests.  

Monseñor Romero, supposedly a safely conservative bishop, was transformed and radicalized by his own work with the poor of San Salvador and the Salvadoran countryside and by the government’s brutality, brutality that, I am ashamed to admit, was paid for by us in the form of military aid. 

Monseñor Romero encouraged the poor and called on the government to care for the people instead of making war on them.  He stripped away the government’s legitimacy.  He preached a God who loved the poor and stood with them.  And in his practice of ministry, he demonstrated what that love and that solidarity looked like in practice.  He was therefore a threat to the regime.

Two weeks before Romero’s assassination he told a reporter from Guatemala, “If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people.”  He was shot to death while celebrating Mass thirty-three years ago today.  He had preached that morning on the saying from John’s gospel, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  

Monseñor Romero knew that there is no salvation that is not political and economic and social as well as moral and spiritual.  He took the pattern of Jesus’ life as his own.  He was not afraid to stand up to oppose the hatred and violence of the Empire with God’s love.  I can tell you that Monseñor Romero is alive today, risen indeed in the Salvadoran people, just as he said he would be.  

So we’re going to take a little walk after Sunday School this morning.  We’ll have some tacos and take a little walk and wave some palm branches and sing some songs and pray some prayers.  It’s only a gesture, but it’s a gesture in the direction of standing with God’s love against the violence and hatred of the Empire.  Maybe our own Palm Sunday triumph in celebration of Monseñor Romero’s triumph will give us just a little of his spirit and his love.  I hope so.

Jesus went to Jerusalem to start a revolution.  He succeeded.  It isn’t over yet.

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