#does involve bringing jordan to brink of death but i think everyone does that at some point

[kiwibirdlafayette]

now even my fucking dreams are tryna get me to write more bc im not kidding that I had an Aitheaca dream last night that somehow has given me a possible scene idea?? idk it was kinda cool ig

[firstumcschenectady]

“Crying Out” based on Psalm 118: 1-2, 19-29 & Luke 19:28-40

I long thought that Palm Sunday was a big Yay-Jesus parade, where people shouted Hosanna to say “YAY God!” and it was clear that everyone got how great God really is and how God was working through Jesus.  I thought that the enthusiasm for God and Jesus was just so big that the stones themselves were on the brink of crying out.  Then I read John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg's book “The Last Week” and learned that wasn't it.

The story of Palm Sunday is so much bigger, so much deeper, and so much BETTER than what I originally understood.  It was, indeed, a Yay-Jesus parade, and it did, indeed, reflect people celebrating their excitement over God's acts in the world.  But a WHOLE lot was happening underneath and around it, and to understand that, we need to look at the Jesus movement itself, the thing that was being celebrated.

I'm working today largely from John Dominic Crossan's book “Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus.”  When he was here last fall for a Carl lecture we learned that he goes by “Dom.”  As he often does, Dom manages to get into the heart of things by explaining the context.  Context is what makes his scholarship so awesome.

Jesus was a Galilean, whose ministry was centered in Galilee, right?  What was Galilee?  Galilee was a colony of the Roman Empire, and it was a part of what had been the Northern Kingdom of Israel.  We talk about the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judea because under King David and his son King Solomon there had been a single united Jewish country, Ancient Israel, for about 80 years after 1000 BCE.  It then had a civil war and split into two – north and south.  The Northern Kingdom of Israel lost a war to the Assyrians in 722 BCE and its leadership was taken into exile.  The Assyrian empire took over the land and imposed their customs.  The Southern Kingdom did better, it didn't lose and go into exile for another 150 years, AND the Southern Kingdom also got the chance to  return from exile and rebuild. Afterward, it became extra judgmental of its secessionist northern neighbors, both for the differences that had been present in the civil war AND for the fact that they were no longer a pure Jewish state, in faith or custom.

We know some of this history because of the stories of the Samaritan woman at the well and the Good Samaritan.  Samaria is, after all, directly north of Judea, the Southern kingdom.  What we sometimes forget is that Galilee is the region NORTH of Samaria.  It was ALSO a part of the old Northern Kingdom. The difference is that in the time of the Maccabees, about 150 years before the birth of Jesus, faithful Jews from Judea moved up to Galilee to try to resettle faithful Judaism up north.  The Galilee of Jesus day was multicultural and multilingual,  rural, and full of faithful Jews as well as lots of people who weren't Jewish at all.  It was also a colony of the Roman Empire.

Now, as Dom says, “The Jewish peasantry was prone … to refuse quiet compliance with heavy taxation, subsistence farming, debt impoverishment, and land expropriation.  Their traditional ideology of land was enshrined in the ancient scriptural laws.”1 Galilee itself was a fruitful place, and the land was useful to the empire.  Dom explains, “Lower Galilee's 470 square miles are divided by four alternating hills and valleys running in a generally west-east direction.  It is rich in cereals on the valley floors and olives on the hillside slopes.”2 It was also pretty rich in radicalism, perhaps BECAUSE of the percentage of very faithful Jewish people who believed land to be a gift from God for the people of God.

Now, John the Baptist did NOT do his ministry in Galilee.  (I JUST figured this out.)  His ministry across the river in Perea, in the DESERT.  I hadn't realized that Galilee didn't have deserts until Dom pointed it out.  The other side of the Jordan is the side people had waited on, it is the side they entered the Promised Land from.  Galilee, like Samaria and Judea, had been part of the Promised Land.   According to Dom, John the Baptist “is drawing people into the desert east of the Jordan, but instead of gathering a large crowd there and bringing them into the Promised Land in one great march, he sends them through the Jordan individually, baptizing away their sins in its purifying waters and telling them to await in holiness the advent of the avenging God.”3 He was re-enacting the entrance into the Promised Land, that gift of LAND for the people.  Thus he was challenging the religious, political, social, and economic bases of Roman control.4  This got him killed.  

Being a colony isn't a great thing for people.  That's obvious, right?  Colonies exist to bring wealth to the country that controls them, and that means that the people in the colony are means of wealth production.  Dom explains a bit more:

“When a people is exploited by colonial occupation, one obvious response is armed revolt or military rebellion.  But sometimes that situation of oppression is experienced as so fundamentally evil and so humanly hopeless that only transcendental intervention is deemed of any use. God, and God alone, must act to restore a ruined world to justice and holiness. This demands a vision and a program that is radical, countercultural, utopian, world-negating, or, as scholars say eschatological. That terms comes form the Greek word for 'the last things' and means that God's solution will be so profound as to constitute an ending of things, a radical new world-negation.”

The best known example of this in the Bible is when God acted to free the people from slavery in Egypt.  The people were oppressed, they cried out, God heard them, and sent Moses and set the people free.

That particular story is celebrated and remembered at the Passover.  The Passover is holy celebration of God's action to set the people free when they had no power to free themselves.    The Palm Sunday parade was a formalized entrance to the Jewish celebration of Passover in Jerusalem, at the time when Jerusalem was ALSO under Roman Imperial control.  It was, thus, a very dynamic situation.   The potential for Jewish upraising at Passover is the reason that the Roman Governor showed up then, with a lot of military might and show..  In fact, the Roman Governor came into the West Gate with a LARGE military parade, at about the same time that the Gospels say that the Jesus movement came in the East gate with a populist God parade.  

Can you feel the tension rising?

Dom goes further into explaining how religious ideas of eschatology, of last things, work.  He says that there are two models, and John the Baptist used one while Jesus used the other.  The John the Baptist way was passive for humans and active for God.  It was the idea that God is going to come save “us,” where us indicates a single group defined by those who know that God is about to act.  This sort of eschatology is based on a future promise that God will act to save us.  Dom says, “This future but imminent apocalyptic radicalism is dependent on the overpowering action of God moving to restore justice and peace to an earth ravished by injustice and oppression.”5 That might sound pretty good, until you hear the one Jesus used.  

As a reminder, Jesus was baptized by John.  That means he was a DISCIPLE of John (a student of John's), but one way or another he branched off of John's teachings and went his own way.   The second way that Jesus ended up going is called sapiential eschatology.  Dom says, “The word saptientia is Latin for 'wisdom' and sapiential eschatology announces that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God's power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.  It involves a way of life for now rather than a hope for life for the future.  … In apocalyptical eschatology, we are waiting for God to act.  In sapiential eschatology, God is waiting for us to act.”6

As far as I can understand it, this is the crux of it all.  We follow Jesus, who taught us about God who is already present to us, who works with us to change things for the better.  We aren't waiting on God.  We're working with God.  Jesus's ministry was one of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  Dom explains this well too, “the sayings and parables of the historical Jesus often describe a world of radical egalitarianism in which discrimination and hierarchy, exploitation and oppression should no longer exist.”7  The Jesus kingdom movement, “is not a matter of Jesus' power but of their empowerment.  He himself has no monopoly on the kingdom; it is there for anyone with the courage to embrace it.”8 All of this may explain why they could kill Jesus, but not his movement.  

It also explains why the crowds were so excited on Palm Sunday and throughout Jesus' ministry.  Jesus was speaking to their problems, oppression, debt, loss of land, loss of subsistence, loss of dignity AND he was offering them the reality that God was already with them and they could change it themselves! No wonder they were having a Yay-Jesus parade.

I think the big questions this leaves US with today are about how we best live the Kingdom.  If it is already here, if God is already with us, if we can partake in the radical egalitarianism, if  God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God's power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers... then what is it that we need make space for so that we can LIVE it!???  How do we access that wisdom we already have, how do we live that life that God has made  possible?

Or, to put it another way, how do we step out of the world’s obsessions with consumption, acquisition, fear, existential anxiety, competition, hierarchy, and distractions SO THAT we can live the GOOD life God already made possible?  Since the goal is to live in love and allow lovingness to expand in us, and I wonder if it is a matter of balance.  There is a need for rest, to savor the goodness; AND there is a need for activity, to respond to the goodness.  There is a need for more learning to know how to best respond, AND there is a need to teach others what we know.  There is a need to attend to the goodness of life AND there is a need to attend to the brokenness and see it clearly.  There is definitely a need to play – to live into joy, laughter and delight AND a need to be courageous and loving in seeking justice for all.  Because part of the call of Jesus is to live a good life, and the other part is to make it possible to for others to live a good life – but not JUST a good life!  The call is to a life that is a transformed, courageous, God-soaked with love.

In the end of our story we hear, “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, 'Teacher, order your disciples to stop.'  He answered, 'I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.'” This is the part I had entirely wrong.  It isn't that the stones are bursting with joy.  It is that the people cannot be silenced because they've been empowered. God's empowering love is with them, and they've learned that they already have what they need to change their lives and change the world.  And once people know that, they can't be silenced.  Thanks be to God!  Amen

1John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA: HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 40.

2Crossan, 42.

3Crossan, 44.

4Crossan, 44.

5Crossan, 47.

6Crossan, 47.

7Crossan 48.

8Crossan, 48.

Rev. Sara E. Baron First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 Pronouns: she/her/hers http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

April 14, 2019