Palm A, 2008
Matthew 21:1-4, 6-11
THE PALM SUNDAY CHALLENGE TO THEOLOGY
It was the first day of the last week of life for Jesus of Nazareth.
According to storyteller Matthew Jesus had arrived
in Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, a short walk from Jerusalem.
A couple of days later he indicated he was joining the procession of people
making their way into Jerusalem
to celebrate the feast of freedom - the feast of the Passover.
And our storyteller says: there was a reaction.
Australian new testament scholar Bill Loader, says we shouldn’t
picture this entry as an historical event
“... in which the whole of Jerusalem lined the streets, thronging the new Messiah. An actual entry with some shouts of praise doubtless occurred but would have been sufficiently lost in the Passover crowds as not to warrant the military's attention, who would have been swift to put an end to what could have seemed like a potential disturbance. Whatever the event, it became highly symbolic,” (Loader/www site 2002).
Loader continues with the suggestion that Jesus was not entering a foreign city,
nor entering the city of 'the Jews'.
He was a Jew.
He was entering the city which symbolised in his faith and his scriptures, God's promise to Israel.
Marcus Borg and John Crossan, in their book The last week, suggest:
“Jerusalem was not just any city. By the first century, it had been the center of the sacred geography of the Jewish people for a millennium. And ever since, it has been central to the sacred imagination of both Jews and Christians” (Borg & Crossan 2006:5).
Neither was Jesus’ entry designed as a great PR opportunity
because of the larger than usual number of people in Jerusalem during Passover.
Rather his entry was an action which in itself is full of ‘parable’ meaning.
For it was an action - even a desperate confronting action -
which had as its focus a desire for, a hope for, change.
Perhaps that is why Matthew has the crowd remembering the prophets
and recognising Jesus as 'the prophet from Nazareth'.
The bringer of change and wholeness and healing.
oo0oo
To confront one's own faith and its traditions in a call for change,
can be a very painful experience.
Because it means challenging existing structures of authority.
Some of you have got to know me reasonably well over the past eight years.
So I guess you will not be surprised to hear me say
that those who have inspired and challenged me theologically,
have usually been those who have confronted
rather than supported the orthodox traditions of the faith.
That is what I understand is the ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ tradition
within the church… or ‘against the stream’ as one of my mentors,
Henry Nelson Wieman, puts it.
Those who have inspired and challenged me have included the likes of:
Wieman (just mentioned), Bernard Meland, John A T Robinson, Lloyd Geering, Sallie McFague, Robert Funk, John Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong, B B Scott and Stephen Patterson.
Some of you will recognise some of those names.
Yet coupled with these theologians, and sometimes standing over against them,
there has been for me a parallel interest in what is called ‘Celtic spirituality’:
the sense of the presentness of God within the universe;
the sense of the presentness of God in the everyday, the ordinary;
the sense of the presentness of God as Creativity.
So when I read and hear the Palm Sunday story, especially this year from Matthew,
and take on board the suggestion that this story
does not gain its authenticity from any triumphalist interpretation,
but instead is a passionate parable about a call for change,
then as the bloke used to say on the TV: I’m excited!
But... and yes there is a ‘but’.
I also admit to being concerned about the current state of the church,
and the at times lack of courage for theological change.
Concerned, because I agree with many of the critics who claim:
it is not hard to see that a Christian church
• which seems to reward fundamentalism,
• is concerned with the spiritual to the exclusion of the material,
• and is shackled to ineffable dullness, creates so many ‘exiles’.
So I gain some comfort from the likes of Jack Spong when he writes:
“Religion... is not an activity designed to control behaviour, to reward virtue, and to punish vice. Religion is, rather, a human attempt to process the God experience, which breaks forth from our own depths and wells up constantly within us” (Spong 1998:225).
oo0oo
It was Palm Sunday... the first day of the last week of life for Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus had (once again) come home
to the place of his faith and his scriptures.
This Palm Sunday we have the advantage of 2 000+ years
of scholarly insight behind us, especially in the areas of
the origins and history of the Christian tradition.
But sadly those in the church who love ‘doctrine’ and ‘orthodoxy’
have not always welcomed those who offer challenging ‘scholarship’.
An invisible wall of silence has often prevented this
‘new scholarship’ from entering the faith and life of the churches.
With the result that in many mainline churches, bureaucrats and clergy have become frozen by fear:
fear of shrinking numbers,
fear of a lack of financial resources,
fear of the world,
fear of disturbing a slumbering ‘peace’.
But scholarship does matter.
And as one of my mentors, Robert (Bob) Funk, often stressed:
• biblical scholars have an ethical responsibility to speak not just privately but publicly, and not just obscurely but clearly, and
• there is a whole lay constituency – inside and outside the church - ready, willing, and able to join in that public discourse.
Funk’s observations have been our experience here at St James,
as well as in The Centre for Progressive Religious Thought.
So this Palm Sunday I invite you to risk the way of sound scholarship.
Where genuine
curiosity and inquiry is welcomed.
Where asking deep questions is more important than
running after easy answers.
And to “set Jesus free” as Funk suggests (Funk 1996:21), and to
“liberate Jesus from the scriptural and creedal and experiential prisons in which we have incarcerated him” (Funk 1996:300).
Then maybe his going to Jerusalem will have been worth it!
Notes:
Borg, M; J D Crossan. 2006. The last week. A day-by-day account of Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem. NY: New York. HarperSanFrancisco.
Funk, R. W. 1996. Honest to Jesus. Jesus for a new millennium. NY: New York. HarperSanFrancisco.
Spong, J. S. 1998. Why Christianity must change or die. A bishop speaks to believers in exile. NY: New York. HarperSanFrancisco.