You Always Have the Poor with You (Palm Sunday; Mark 11:1-11; 14:3-9; March 20, 2016)

You Always Have the Poor with You

Palm Sunday

Mark 11:1-11; 14:3-9

March 20, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

When I was in seminary the mainline churches-- or at least the seminaries of the mainline churches-- were in the throws of what we called the Liturgical Renewal Movement. We brought a renewed focus on worship. We revived and re-imagined old liturgical practices. We urged more frequent celebration of communion. We smeared actual ashes on Ash Wednesday, just like Catholics! Gasp! We promoted the use of the revised common lectionary. And we did lots of other things, some of which stuck and some of which have, mercifully, faded into oblivion. It was a good thing on the whole, but some things it simply got wrong.

For example, we invented a thing called "Passion Sunday." The problem, we said, was that most people did not go to church on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. In effect they went from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the triumphal rising from the grave on Easter, and so skipped the whole of Jesus' suffering and his death. So we shoved Palm Sunday into the first part of today's service, making it into an entrance rite and then we proposed that the rest of today's service be given to the passion readings from the gospel of that lectionary year. Readers and congregations got off lightly in Year B when the gospel was Mark, not so much in Years A and C.

It was a sort of liturgical "bait and switch." People came for palms and got the passion instead. Some years ago, I, an enthusiastic participant in the Liturgical Renewal Movement, rebelled. I dumped Passion Sunday and restored Palm Sunday. No more bait and switch. And no more unending readings of the Passion narrative. I don't know if you are grateful, but I'm pretty sure that the readers are.

But the false advertising isn't the only thing that's bothering me about the Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday mosh. The other thing is that I think this is based on a false understanding of Palm Sunday.

So, the traditional understanding goes, it's Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week! There is triumph in the air! Jesus enters Jerusalem as if he were a conquering general come to claim the allegiance of the citizens of the city that he has defeated in war. Ancient praise shouts are revived. Palm branches are waved. Jesus and his steed, his warhorse, aren't even permitted to touch the ground; it is lined with cloaks and palms. The crowds, longing for any hint of deliverance, are all stirred up and eager for Jesus to be their king. "Glory! Hosanna!"

Except that Jesus isn't a general. He is not making a bid for the throne. There has been no war. The city's forces have not been defeated. Jesus' "warhorse" is a donkey, and that's just silly. He wears no polished armor. He carries no bloodied sword. This parade is obviously anything but the triumphal entry it pretends to be.

The conventional wisdom is that the people of Jerusalem are looking for a war-like messiah and when Jesus shows up and does his bit of street theater they mistakenly assume that he must be it. When nothing much actually happens in the next few days, conventional wisdom says that the fickle crowd-- they are Jews, after all-- deserts and abandons Jesus. Remember that conventional wisdom over the centuries has had no problem at all with antisemitism.

But my question is this: Did anyone think that Jesus was taking up the mantle of the warrior messiah by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey? Did anyone participating in that day's events believe that Jesus was a king? I find no evidence for that outside the account of the street drama itself.

In my reading the procession with palms is satire directed at the Romans who were masters of propaganda, who knew how to send a message with the clever use of symbols, who knew how to make an impressive entrance. Jesus, on the other hand, knew how to mock the Romans, their propaganda, and their clever manipulation of special effects.

The beauty of satire is that it invites watchers and listeners to join in the fun of saying something forbidden with acts and speech that are, on the surface, unobjectionable. Satire depends on its listeners and watchers getting the joke before the authorities realize that the joke is on them, in time to watch their faces as they slowly get it that they are being ridiculed. Making fun of the elite is one of the few free pleasures of the underclass.

Jesus went to Jerusalem to pick a fight with the powers that be. The palm processional was his way of thumbing his nose at them and saying "Nyah-nah-na-nah-nah!" The palm processional was not a triumphal entry; it was the first round of the passion. Jesus intends to make a public mockery of the Romans and their brown-nosing Jewish collaborators to provoke them into responding with the brutal violence that their rule rested on. In this way he stripped the regime bare of its claim to love justice and peace. By the time Jesus was done with them (that is, by the time they had strung him up and killed him) they would be de-legitimated, stripped of any moral authority. The whole of the passion, in short, is contained in the palm procession.

Guy Nave likes to ask his Introduction to New Testament students, "Why was Jesus killed?" They usually answer as they were taught in Confirmation (remember, these are mostly nice Lutheran kids), "To save us from our sins." Not an entirely bad answer to a different question. No, why was Jesus killed? What was it that motivated the people who put the killing machine of Roman so-called justice into motion? This is a question that doesn't just belong in an academic classroom; it belongs in a Sunday School classroom and even in a sanctuary on Palm Sunday. And here is my answer (Guy's answer, too): "Jesus was killed because he threated the power of the powers that be."

And he did it not by trying to become more powerful, not by staging a coup. Opposing violence with violence was a simple enough game to play, but the powers that be understood that game. And they were very good at it. And even if the coup had succeeded, it would have changed nothing except to put Jesus on top of the same oppressive arrangement.

Opposing violence with violence was not Jesus' strategy. He acted more radically than that. Jesus stripped violence of its authority. The powers still had the ability to be brutal, but they could no longer claim that their brutality was in the service of justice. It was revealed to be brutality for the sake of maintaining power. To that brutal power Jesus opposed a strategy of non-violent resistance that focused on symbols and undercut the believability of the regime's press releases.

But a strategy of non-violent resistance in the service of what, exactly? We had a hint of that two Sundays ago when Jesus attacked the Temple's abuse of a poor widow's piety. And we have another nudge in the rest of today's reading.

While Jesus and his followers were resting in the home of Simon, the Simon with the skin disease. Skin disease would have made Simon permanently unclean. Simon is a marginalized character. That's the first thing to notice. While they were eating, a unnamed woman came in with an alabaster jar of expensive perfume. She broke the jar open, spilling the perfume on Jesus' head, a gesture of anointing. The disciples were aghast: "Think of how much good this could have done if we sold it and gave the money to the Food Pantry!"

Jesus rebuked them, saying that she had done a good thing, a thing that would always be remembered, a thing that would be told wherever and whenever the good news was told. The second thing to notice is that, while we have remembered her deed, we have forgotten her name. She was to be a famous person who did a famous deed, but the church could not be bothered to remember her name. But, of course, she was a woman and therefore unimportant. Conventional wisdom cares as little for women as it cares for Jews.

The woman anointed his head as a prophetic act that foresaw his approaching death. It is a good thing to do.

And besides, Jesus said, "You always have the poor with you; and whenever you want, you can do something good for them." Oh, how this saying of Jesus has suffered at the hands of conventional wisdom! "There isn't any point in trying to do something for the poor," it says. "No matter what you do you will not change the fact of poverty. Poverty is a fact of nature. Poverty is the will of God. We would be wrong even to try to get rid of poverty."

That is not what Jesus meant at all. No, he assumed that the people of God would always make their home among the poor. Of course the poor would be with us; we would be with the poor. The notion never dawned on him that his followers would ever choose to be anywhere else. He never imagined a church of people with property and means who would blame the poor for their poverty. He never imagined a church that aligned itself with the interests of the rich. He never imagined a church that turned its back on the poor. We would always have the poor with us. We would never try to distance ourselves from them.

So, of course, any time we wanted to help the poor, all we would have to do would be to go next door or across the street.

So now we know why Jesus acted the way he did. Jesus enacted a strategy of non-violent resistance in the service of the poor. He did it in the events that we remember today as a protest march, a parody, a parade. And he invites all of us to join the party. Everyone is welcome: the hospitable unclean, wasteful women, extravagant widows. Everyone is invited and welcome. But before we accept, we should consider that he does this for the poor, for the oppressed, for the despised, for the unwanted. If we join his movement, his people become our people. If we join his protest, we will threaten the same people whom Jesus threatened and they will hate us for it. If we join his parade, we will make our way forward with him and, come Friday, we will discover our own crosses to bear and to die upon. We will discover our own graves. We will be barricaded behind our own stones. And then, as surely as these things are true, we will be made alive once again come Easter.

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