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"Behold Your King"
April 13, 2003 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower
This morning we have the last, the final installment, in a series of messages looking at what the Bible has to say about war- and peace-related issues. This is the last one. Next Sunday is Easter, and we won't be preaching about politics on Easter! But it has been important to look at some things, especially in light of the fact that the war against Iraq has continued over this same period. We looked at the story of Cain and Abel. We have looked at New Testament sayings of Jesus, "Turn the other cheek." We've looked at Old Testament prophecies such as turning swords into plowshares, beating swords into plowshares.
This morning we're going to look at the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. You may want to follow along in your Bibles. Matthew chapter 21. Again, let me just say that it is important that people are focused on Jesus to ask what light does the Bible shed on the perplexing issues that we confront. And some of those times we are talking about issues that are of broad social concern.
Reinhold Niebuhr was the one who said it is always a good idea to preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. I would say it's sometimes a good idea to preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Maybe not absolutely every Sunday, because some newspapers really aren't that interesting. And, there are some issues we need to confront which tend not to get covered in the newspaper. But this morning I have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other and I'm making this point, hopefully to lay a foundation for our new pastor who is to come, that our Pastor Nominating Committee is in the process of seeking even now. We do want sermons that relate the Bible to something present day. [Someone] used to make fun of sermons that were biblical and only biblical, illustrating that by saying, "Come back next week and we'll all find out whatever happened to the Amalekites." If we start with the Bible and we end with the Bible and all we're doing is giving history lessons out of the Bible, then we're not giving ourselves lessons for living today, which is what the Bible is actually for.
If we look at our Palm Sunday passage this morning, Matthew 21, verses 1-11, this is what we find:
Now it's interesting. You know, there are some questions that are very interesting to us that were not interesting to the writers of the New Testament. So there are only a few places that provide us with answers. One of those has to do with . . . and by the way, before we get into that, let's just say this story of Jesus coming into Jerusalem is found in all the four gospels. All four gospels record this, and that's very important because outside of the crucifixion and the resurrection, there aren't that many things that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all record. So the ones that all four of them record, we know are very, very important and they take us back. We can trust the historicity of them all the more because they date back to a time before the concerns of John's gospel and the synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke) before they developed. At the earliest time, the early followers of Jesus remembered together and emphasized in their gatherings together the things that were the most important to them and were fresh in their minds. This is one of those.
Now as they did (as I started to say before I got ahead of myself)--a question that I have looking at this is about going to a village and finding a donkey and a colt and untying them and just, "If anyone asks. . ." I want to know, is this really a miraculous thing? They're just supposed to go and is this a miraculous instance of borrowing that we have in the New Testament? And the owner of the donkey and the colt, hearing that the Lord needs them, will he just sort of miraculously say, "Oh. OK." Or is this something that was set up ahead of time? Had that particular donkey and particular colt been picked out? We can't get an answer. We have no idea. And the reason we don't know how this exactly came about--naturally or supernaturally--is because Matthew and other writers of the gospels--they're not interested in that.
They are very interested in saying, "Now the fact that there was this donkey is in fulfillment of the prophecy, 'Tell the daughter of Zion, "Look your king is coming to you . . ." ' " --that is, that this entry into Jerusalem was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. All the more so because we're told by each of the gospel writers that the crowd going ahead and coming behind--they were laying cloaks on the road, they were waving palm branches, and they were saying (quoting Old Testament Scripture), "Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!" These are the things that are very important in the gospels: The fact that this event marked the coming of the Messiah to the holy city and that Jesus, the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee, is the one who fulfills all these Old Testament longings.
So it's important to understand what it was that the first followers of Jesus regarded as so significant out of the life of Jesus and so significant out of this particular moment in the life of Jesus. And for our turn, to get up to speed on this, we want to ask what sort of a king is this? If the prophecy is, "Look, your king is coming to you," what kind of a king does Jesus turn out to be? And that's a question that we have and it is one that each of the gospels is very interested in answering. So we're not left in the dark about that. The Bible gives us an answer to the question, "What sort of a king is Jesus?" Not necessarily the king that we sometimes suppose.
If you remember back in the sixties and the--that's 1960s. Some of you probably don't remember the 1860s, so let's only go back to the 1960s. The 1960s and '70s when it was very common to present Jesus as if He were a political revolutionary, as if He was sort of like a predecessor, a first-century Che Guevara-type person--a rabble rouser, a political troublemaker. That was very popular, and books were written on the politics of Jesus in that regard. Unfortunately when you read those accounts, number one, they all seem so dated now, but even at the time if you read those you realize it takes a lot more faith to believe in what this author is telling me than it does simply to read Scripture, because there's so much that has to be left unexamined and wrenched out of context in order to make Jesus a political revolutionary--starting with here He is on the Sunday that we commemorate as Palm Sunday. There's incredible momentum. The crowds from Galilee have come down, they're excited, they're enthusiastic, and because of the tumult of the parade and the entry into Jerusalem, the entire town of Jerusalem, the entire city is astir, with people asking, "Who is this?" Well, if Jesus were a political revolutionary, He would certainly have wanted to capitalize on the momentum and He does not. What we find is that following this event, He spends a week just teaching in the temple, and the parables in one way or another that He teaches, as they're recorded for us, have Him saying in some sense that His Kingdom is really not of this world. So the historical evidence, such as we have it, does not present to us a king like that, a king who wants to achieve victory through military force of arms.
There's another presentation of Jesus, however, that we also want to sort of understand. Since the sixties and seventies, people have presented Jesus in an entirely mystical light. New Age spirituality has a Jesus in this way, where Jesus is so otherworldly that the things that He has to do and say have absolutely nothing to do with politics in the here and now. In the same way, you can see from Scripture that that's not true, because actually, the Jesus who really came to Jerusalem was not so otherworldly that Herod and Pilate, that the political structures of the day, would take no notice of Him. No, they were threatened by Jesus. You can see that the gospel that He preaches ends up scaring the powers of this world in some way. So it's not the case that we have an otherworldly Jesus, the implications of whose gospel have nothing to do with politics. It was from Jewish society, the Essenes of the Dead Sea scrolls, who lived out in the desert and had nothing to do with social society. Jesus was not like that.
He is not a military man. He is not a political revolutionary. But neither is he the New Age mystic Jesus. So who is the Jesus that we have here? I want us to consider that the real Jesus--the Jesus that we find in Scripture--and we have good historical warrant for taking as the actual historical person who came with the crowds from Galilee down to Jerusalem--that that Jesus comes to Jerusalem the way the Word becomes flesh. The Bible teaches that the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, the Word of God--that Word becomes flesh. And the Bible teaches us to understand that in Jesus Christ--the Son of God, the Word of God--God came to dwell fully, so that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine. So it is Jesus coming to Jerusalem in a real way. Not in a mystical way, not in a hidden way, but in a public demonstration kind of way.
And God could have communicated with the citizens of Jerusalem in other ways, of course, but that's not how God chose to do it. I mean, God could have just sort of written it in the sky if He wanted to. Am I right? Something like, "Surrender Dorothy" . . . Or something of that nature. But, no, God came into the world fully and completely in incarnation in Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ comes to Jerusalem fully and completely in a way so literally real as to shake up all of the people, all of the families, all of the neighborhoods, and all of the political and social structures of the day. There's not a political and there's not a social structure in Jerusalem but that gets shaken up by the way that Jesus comes to Jerusalem.
However, Jesus does not come and join this group or that group. Jesus does not come and join up with the Pharisees in Jerusalem at the time. He does not come and join with the Saducees, or with the Zealots. And that's one of the reasons--the Zealots were the revolutionaries of the time-- and one of the reasons we, looking at the evidence, can say, "No, Jesus was not a political revolutionary." He did not join any of the existing parties of the time. He came as a unique King in His own unique way. We can't associate Him with this group or with that group because the Kingdom that He represents, though it has an impact on all of those groups and every person in each one of those clusters has to make a decision for or against His Kingdom, He doesn't come and line up with one or come and line up with the other.
What I'm saying is Jesus comes to Jerusalem the way the Word becomes flesh. And I'll just ask what would it mean for the Church to come to politics the way that Jesus comes to Jerusalem? You see, Jesus comes to Jerusalem the way the Word becomes flesh. What would it mean for the Church to come to politics the way that Jesus comes to Jerusalem? We're already sensing that the answer would not be the Church ought to come to politics in a way that is kind of ethereal, and spooky, and never makes any ripples on the political scene. That can't be right. That was not true with Jesus in Jerusalem. And if we were coming to the political structures of our day, there would certainly be an impact of the Church on society. However, that said--and this is my main point--the Church needs to be very, very careful in conferring its blessing on any particular group in society and adopting an adversarial stance toward any opposing group within society. The Church has made terrible mistakes in this regard in the past when we have decided that in order to be politically relevant, we would become identified with a particular party, with a particular group, with a particular aspect.
And because we've been talking about war and peace issues, I want to relate this to two extremes that I think the Church needs to avoid being identified with. The one extreme (and this is going to be the easy one, I believe--this is not going to be a hard point to argue) the Church, in order to be politically relevant, should not line up with an American militarism so sufficiently that we decide that we can go to war whenever we want and God will always be on our side: "God is on our side so we can use American military force of arms, and we can go to war whenever we want." And I'm not saying that's been our attitude with Iraq. But it has been the attitude of the Church in society at various time. We know the outstanding example of the Crusades, for instance, where the idea is the church is simply going to use European military might in order to impose God's rule in Jerusalem. And I don't think I have to say that's been a mistake every time it's been tried in the past and it would be a mistake today. I said this was the easy point to make because I don't hear anyone in American society saying, "That's right. We're a Christian nation. Let's just go bomb all the non-Christian nations until we're the only Christian nation left." (Well, a few people might say that about France . . .)
But except for that, we can't say, "Let's impose our values on the world militarily." Now, if you read this morning's Star Tribune, in the very, very top piece, "Who might be next? The White House talks tough." I invite you to read that and ask yourself, "Is this an example of the thing I'm saying would be a mistake?" When the Spanish conquistadors came to the New World, it was for "God, and gold, and glory." And the Spanish Catholic priests were right along with the soldiers. The idea was, "We're going to conquer and civilize and Christianize the peoples that we find." And I think because of the mistakes that we've made in the past, I don't think that we have an appetite for that. But let's make sure what we're saying. What we're saying is it would be wrong to take the name of Jesus and just kind of baptize anything military that America might feel like doing and saying, "Hey. You've got God on your side. Just go do it." No. We don't want to identify Christianity with anything and everything that America might be able to do at the present time. Why would that be wrong? Well, Jesus did not identify with any of the groups in Jerusalem and He probably hasn't changed His style. It would be wrong for us to completely bathe ourselves in the warm glow of Christianity and say, "Therefore because we're a Christian nation, we have the right to forcefully advance the cause of Jesus using the military." Now, I've belabored this even though I think it is an easy point to make.
Now, the opposite point. You do find an awful lot of voices at the present time saying the mirror opposite of that. If we're not going to say, "Christian military might: Wrong." We have a "Christian pacifist might" voice that is being spoken at the present time. My argument is, if we don't want to be identified as taking over the world in the name of Jesus through military force of arms, is it any better to identify with the name of Jesus taking over the world through pacifist means? Just so you don't think that I'm making this up, one of the prominent pacifist movements at the present time--very church-oriented as you'll hear--is the "every church a peace-church" movement. And you may have seen their literature and you may have heard from them. The "every church a peace-church" movement. This is the quote by which they define themselves. [Name] a Christian pacifist and one of the leaders of this movement, says this: [quote] "The church eternal works for peace if every faith-community lived as Jesus lived and taught."
And that's what they're about. "We're going to turn the world toward peace by calling on all the churches to live as Jesus lived and taught." Now, let's just make some observations. One is, if you've hung around churches very long, you already know that the idea of getting churches to live as Jesus lived and taught is . . . easier said than done, shall we say. Let's be kind and say, "This is easier said than done." But, even if you say, "Faith Presbyterian Church, we could start today! We can start living like Jesus lived and taught. Do you think we can turn the world toward peace and unity?" Now, do you hear a note of power in this like I do? Do you hear a desire to control like I do? "We're going to take over, us pacifists. We know how to do this. All we have to do is get everybody pacifist enough and then we'll rule the world."
How different is that--I mean, in a way they're entirely different--the methods are nicer, more benign. But, you know, "We're going to take over through military might--we're going to run the world" or "We're going to take over through passive resistance--we're going to be completely Ghandian and take over the world." I don't think we find that Jesus came to rule the world through military might and I don't think we find in the gospels that Jesus came to turn all the Jews into pacifists. Because you know what? If that's what His purpose was, He failed miserably. The Jews have not been pacifist. And the Christian churches--most of the Christian churches--have not been pacifist churches. A few have been--Quakers, and Mennonites. We know that story. But that has not been where the mainline denominations (Roman Catholic and other Protestant mainline denominations) have been.
Jesus comes to Jerusalem the way the Word becomes flesh. And if the Church were to come to politics the way that Jesus comes to Jerusalem, we would recognize there are going to be political ripples to everything that we do and say. There's going to be an incredible impact on society. But it's not going to be lining up with this group or that group. It's not going to be because this one little faction has God on its side and we're all going to line up there. That's not how Jesus came to Jerusalem. That's not how the Church should come to politics.
Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Word which is our light in darkness. Lord, we ask that you would give us eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts and minds to remember, how it was that you came to Jerusalem. And it's in the strong name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower Interim Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota
[Transcribed from an audiotape of the 9:00 a.m. worship service on April 13, 2003.] |
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