A Royal Waste of Time (Matthew 21:1-11; Palm Sunday A; April 13, 2014)

A Royal Waste of Time

Matthew 21:1-11
Palm Sunday A
April 13, 2014

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

Who doesn’t love a parade?  Maybe the people who have to put up and take down the saw horses and traffic cones to block off traffic or the people who have to clean up after the horses.  But most everybody else loves a parade.  We like to watch them.  We like to be in them.  (Grownups, especially Iowa grownups, don’t want to admit that they like being in a parade, but they like it nonetheless.)  I don’t suppose that the people of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day were any different. 

A parade began and they were there, dropping whatever else they had been doing.  Sellers’ booths closed: there was no point in staying open since the customers were at the parade.  In this parade, I think it was hard to tell who was a “parader” and who was a watcher. 

Of course, this wasn’t like one of our parades.  Jesus didn’t get a permit.  No roads were blocked off.  No extra police were posted to help keep order.  Jesus planned this event, it’s clear.  It’s also clear that the planning committee was very small and did not include the disciples who styled themselves as Jesus’ inner circle of followers.  According the Matthew, there was just one float: Jesus, riding a donkey accompanied by its colt.  The rest was supplied from materials ready to hand: cloaks and branches. 

For a parade, this all seems very spontaneous, very playful.  It was less like a parade and more like a flash mob.  The disciples put their cloaks on the donkey’s back.  Others lay their cloaks on the ground.  People cut branches from the trees, presumably palm trees, and spread them on the road as well.  “This is like a royal processional, isn’t it?  Let’s shout ‘Hosanna!’”  So they did.  Children swarmed around Jesus, running ahead and then doubling back, all the while shouting, “Hosanna!” 

Very little of this was scripted.  And yet it played into a script, the script of conquest, with victorious Roman generals entering Jerusalem on horses.  But Jesus was no general and his donkey was no war horse.  Jesus didn’t just play into a script; he played with it.  With his “royal steed,” his rag-tag band of followers, and the unwashed crowd he gathered, Jesus made mockery of the powers that be.  He mocked the Romans with their pageantry and love of show.  He mocked the Jewish leaders for being impressed by Roman pageantry.

In a way this was serious stuff, but then, play is often pretty serious.  Watch a little girl “host” a tea party.  She fills real teacups with imaginary tea and serves it to dolls and stuffed animals who are imagined to be her friends.  When they prove unable to drink the “tea” themselves, she picks up their cups and places them to their lips.  She is absorbed in her play; she is having fun.  Nonetheless it is serious business. 

A girl playing at hosting a tea party is practicing for a vital role in an important social ritual.  Play is rehearsal.  There are very precise rules that might not be obvious.  But just you try sipping your pretend tea from a saucer instead of a cup and you will quickly discover these rules.  Play is an act of experimentation, of trying on various roles and rules to see which ones might fit and how they fit.  Important things are happening at that little folding table with the imaginary tea and cakes.  It’s never “just play,” any more than it’s ever “just a game” or “just a toy.”

But play is also fun.  It’s engrossing, absorbing.  It calls forth our best efforts and yet it isn’t toil.  It helps of course if you don’t have to wash the tea set when you’re done.  But even if you do, there is a moment when you are the one who has the power to create a space in which a doll and a teddy bear may find themselves at home and able to form a lasting bond.  There is a moment when the play is everything, the whole world and its future distilled into one moment and one place.  There is a moment when we forget ourselves, when we are no longer aware of ourselves as anything separate from what we are doing, when we have given ourselves to the game.  Greeks described this experience as one in which we “stand outside” of ourselves. Their word for that was ek-stasis.  This is, I think, the most common example of ecstasy. 

Jesus played at being a king. The kind of king Jesus was playing at was quite different from the kinds offered to him and to his people by their world.  The disciples and the crowd were caught up in the game.  In their imagination, they welcomed a humble king, a king who had no legions to keep enemies at bay, no intelligence agency to gather metadata, and no media specialists to control what people said and thought.  In their imagination they saw Jesus as a king who came to serve and not to be served.  And it made sense, a lot more sense than so-called reality.

Jesus’ kind of king wasn’t seeking power and did not need to use violence.  And yet, by the time Jesus’ game of “let’s pretend” was over, the powers that be had been shaken to the core and were prepared to use violence to stop him.  Jesus had taken the crowd away from its work for an afternoon of play that produced nothing except a street littered with palm branches.  From an economic point of view—and that’s the only one that counts for much in our world—it was a waste of time.  And yet, with this waste of time, Jesus laid waste to the powers that were preserving the status quo of his world. 

It was a waste of time, but we’re still remembering it.  Once a year we get some cut branches, find some kids to wave them around, and have our own parade.  We even sing our own Hosannas.  For a few moments we are caught up in this long-ago event.  We are caught up out of ourselves.  For a few moments it’s just us and the kids and the palms.  We are caught up into a different world.  In that world there is a king who isn’t a king, a king who doesn’t seek power and shuns violence, a king who comes riding on a donkey.

And that’s what worship is.  We come away from our seller’s booths.  Our labor ceases.  We stop working.  We join a parade.  We are imaginatively sucked into a different world, a world in which our ancient unanswered prayer is answered once and for all, a world in which God’s will is done on earth as in heaven, a world in which God’s name is made holy, a world in which God’s “empire” is realized among us. 

Nothing is produced that can be turned into cash.  This hour doesn’t count for much in our world.  It’s a waste of time.  And yet, it plants a seed in our imaginations, in our hearts.  It plants a dream, a dream of a world free of violence, a world in which we learn to live in peace with each other and with this fragile planet we call home. 

Nothing is produced and yet the foundations of the empire are shaken.  From the perspective of the empire it is a waste of time, and, done right, it is a dangerous waste of time, but it is a royal waste of time.  empire is shaken and we get palm branches.

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