Footsteps (Palm Sunday; John 19:16b-22; March 25, 2018)

Footsteps

Palm Sunday
John 19:16b-22
March 25, 2018

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

Who doesn't love a parade? We love them here in Decorah. We parade in the summer. We parade in the winter. We parade in the fall and spring. If we're not in the parade, we bring our chairs and blankets and stake out places on the Water Street sidewalk hours before the parade, so we'll have a spot in the front row where we can see everything but from where, more importantly, we can catch the candy. We love parades.

I've seen parades in a lot communities. I've even been in a few. Sitting on a flat-bed trailer on the 4th of July was my introduction to one town. From there I saw the community from a unique perspective. Coming as it did on the heels of ten years of life in an eastern city, I was plunged into culture shock so deep I really could have used defibrillator paddles. I saw three-generation families gathered along the route. I saw welcoming faces in a town where being the United Methodist pastor still confers high status--not as high as being a Lutheran or Catholic pastor, but high status nonetheless. I saw families whose homes were along the route grilling in their yards, bratwurst and hamburgers generating smells to make a carnivore salivate. I saw kids running alongside their favorite parade entries waving to friends and cousins, their parents unconcerned if they ended blocks away, out of sight, in a community that never thought to be afraid. I also saw that the 1% of racial and ethnic minority folks who lived there were entirely accounted for by adopted children in white families. A parade is an animated and choreographed version of a myth: a story a community tells itself about itself to explain itself to itself. Most communities are mostly good, so a parade is mostly an honest story about a good place to live.

I've been in a military parade or two and I've watched them. These parades are intended to project a visual image of power and strength, to comfort those who are being defended, and to induce awe and fear in potential enemies.

The Romans were past masters at the use of parades to send a message. The triumphus was one example. A triumph was, in the time period of the New Testament, a special honor granted by the Senate to a conquering general. The general would ride into Rome in a chariot, trailed by the enslaved enemy and tokens of plundered wealth. The general's armor, the chariot itself, and the horses' harnesses would be polished until they shone with the reflected glory of the gods whose favored mortal this general was. His armies, interestingly enough, were not allowed to enter the city itself, perhaps because it would be too tempting to the general being honored.

Another Roman parade was the adventus. This was the parade that began an emperor's official state visit to a city. In burnished armor and mounted on a war horse, the emperor would lead military units in their spit-and-polished best. They would be met outside the city by its leading citizens dressed in white who would throw themselves face down on the road. The emperor held in his hands both bane and boon--rich rewards and lavish punishments. He could grant either. In terror and hope the citizens waited to discover which it would be.

The people of Jerusalem had experienced neither triumph nor advent, but the Romans made the most of even ordinary comings and goings. Even a routine patrol would announce its return with trumpets, tighten its ranks, and enter the city as a disciplined body of men. The residents of Jerusalem would stand aside, pressing themselves up against the walls or into the doorways along the street between the gate and the barracks, watching with fear or respect or resentment as the occupiers marched past. It was that or be trampled.

The Romans knew how to project power with everything they did. It amounted to propaganda in human flesh. The Romans' message was simple: They were number one. They were the best that had ever been and the best that would ever be. Their power was natural, their rule was ordained by the gods. To oppose them was like opposing the tide. Revolt was suicide.

On the other side of town there was a different sort of parade. It was hard to tell just what it was. It had elements of triumph, elements of advent, shaken and stirred together, that added up to mockery. Here was "conquering general" dusty and unpolished with no armor at all and mounted on a burro. There were no captives, no loot, no trailing army, only his band of men and women, themselves foot-weary and dirty. Jesus' followers began the cheering, but the crowd quickly caught on to the game and joined in: “Hosanna! Lord, save!” It was a traditional prayer shout. “Hosanna! Lord, save! Blessed is the one who comes in God's name! Hosanna!”

If the Romans were sending the message that resistance was futile and stupid, what was the message that Jesus was sending that day? Was it a way of holding Roman pretense up for ridicule? Was it a reminder to the people of the covenant that the God of the covenant was also a player in the human drama of Roman Jerusalem? If it is true that every revolution begins in the imagination--whether it imagines a world without hunger or one without the threat of gunfire in school, then what space did Jesus' little street drama open up for imagining God's dream?

Of course, this parade came with its risks. Any dissenting parade risks the reaction of the powers that be, whether they are the Roman governor and his legion or the NRA and its legion of bought and paid for politicians. In the case of the hundreds of thousands of kids who marched for their lives yesterday in the United States and around the world, the risk is of a backlash from people who tell them that they aren't qualified to protest their own endangerment, that they aren't smart enough to see through thread-bare arguments, that they aren't dedicated enough to last for the long haul, that they are pawns in the hands of a manipulative left. They have been insulted by people who not as smart as they are. They have been impugned by people whose allegiance is for sale. And all this while trying to recover from the trauma of losing friends, classmates, and teachers at the hand of someone with a weapon no civilian has any legitimate reason to buy, own, or use. They will overcome this opposition. If they persist, they will win.

For Jesus and his friends, the stakes were, if not higher, then certainly more immediate. The Roman occupiers would not allow an insult like this go unpunished. The Roman machine--with or without the cooperation of the Jewish elites--would crush this resistance. The process was put into motion that day. The end result would be the judicial murder of Jesus.

Now, what tyrants hope for is that those who envision a different world will accept the tyrants’ terms of engagement. Tyrants work hard to maintain a monopoly on violence. They understand violence. They know how to use it. Tyrants hope for rebels planning a violent rebellion. The history of Roman Palestine is littered with crushed movements that thought they could beat the Romans at their own game.

But that's not what Jesus does. He knows that Roman power, not only their political and economic power, but especially their power over the imagination, depends on the Roman's appearing to uphold justice. If the Romans can be enticed into making clear that their so-called justice is a pretense to cover their lust for power, their control over the imagination will collapse. If the Romans can be tempted into executing someone who refuses to play their game, someone who will not recognize their claim to justice, someone who--in the face of a dehumanizing regime--refuses to surrender their humanity, if the Romans can be enticed into that then their ideological regime will collapse and all that will be left is naked power. People might fear naked power, but they will never respect it. People might obey naked power, but they will never give their hearts to it. Regimes that are forced into using naked power teeter on the edge of collapse.

To put this into theological terms, Jesus understands that God's story is always a movement from slavery into freedom, from exile into homecoming, from death into life. He not only understands this but is willing to commit his life to it. Jesus understands and is resolved on what he is doing. Pontius Pilate does not understand, but he sees the certainty and commitment in Jesus and it scares him, as well it should. That is because Jesus has put Pilate in a position where he has no winning moves. Pilate makes one losing move after another and never more than when he orders Jesus to be killed.

Of course, we can't recognize this without skipping ahead to Easter. But then, we cannot help but skip ahead. We know how the story turns out. We've already heard it and cannot pretend not to.

Still, no matter how many times we've heard it, it always surprises us when someone not only hears the story but believes it to the point of stepping into it. It always surprises us when someone joins in the parade. It surprises us because by joining the parade they launch themselves on a trajectory that goes from a palm procession to a trial that leads to death and burial and only then to new life. It scares us, too. That's only normal. We don't see ourselves as made for the sort of big things that overthrow regimes. We don't see ourselves as the hinge of history that pivots on our decisions toward or away from God's dream. We're just ordinary people, not heroes.

Of course, heroes don't see themselves as heroes. They just do what they feel they have to do, even if it can't be done. Oscar Romero is one of that kind of hero. He came from a modest background. He trained for the priesthood which promised a modest sort of comfortable life. He was an able student. He made friends easily, one of whom, Rutilio Grande, was to influence his life deeply. He said the right things around the right people. He worked hard, loved his people, and stayed out of trouble. The church hierarchy thought he was a safe choice as the bishop of San Salvador. And that's how it might have turned out.

However, less than six weeks after he was appointed as the bishop of San Salvador, his seminary friend was assassinated. Fr. Rutilio had gone beyond caring for the poor people of El Salvador to asking why it was that they were poor. The answers he found infuriated the powers that be who saw to it that he paid with his life. Knowing Rutilio as he did, Oscar Romero could not see any other alternative than to follow the same path, to use his office as best he could not only to give help to the poor, but to proclaim their deliverance from poverty as part of the gospel. About three years later, about the same time as the traditional length of Jesus' ministry, Romero and El Salvador's powerful families were deeply in conflict. Romero demanded an end to repression, an end to the death squads, and an end to the assassination of his priests. These demands were treated with scorn in San Salvador, Washington, and even in Rome.

A few days before he was assassinated he said, "As a Christian I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be raised in the Salvadoran people." Like Fr. Rutilio and countless others before him, and like Jesus long before that, he knew that the path he had chosen would lead to Good Friday and he trusted that it would also lead to Easter.

If we walk the Palm Sunday parade in the footsteps of Rutilio and Oscar we know that like them we follow Jesus. We know that this path leads to the struggles to be faithful and to what that faithfulness will cost us. These are the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We know that this path leads us to the darkness and silence of Holy Saturday. We trust that these footsteps also lead on to the light and new life that await us on Easter.

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