By The Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
St. Matthew 21:1-17
“It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.”
The Talmud, Pirkei Avot, 2.2
Several years ago someone in a bible study I was doing expressed a concern a lot of Christians feel. She said, “I’m uncomfortable with saying that Jesus is Lord of everything, of the whole universe. It sounds so closed-minded and prejudiced toward a Christian point of view. What about the other religions, and good people who don’t believe in Jesus?”
We had been looking at biblical passages about the Cosmic Christ, passages such as Ephesians 1: 8-10, “With all wisdom and insight (God) has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth,” or the passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians that we just read: “Therefore God also highly exalted Jesus?and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus?every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess?that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” These passages give absolute Lordship and authority to Jesus, which is bound to make any open-minded person uncomfortable.
So I pointed her to the context in which the Lordship is given. For instance, in Philippians Paul points to Jesus’ humility and self-sacrifice for the sake of all humanity, and His willing submission to the will of God, even to the point of death. And in the big picture, that willing submission goes further: Jesus is the Lord who will establish God’s justice on the earth, which means justice for the poor, the weak, and the least of these, and fairness and equity for all. He is the bodily form of the God who loves us and has given everything for us out of incredible, inconceivable divine humility.
Then look at what Jesus taught. Forgiveness and grace are at the center of His message. The Love of God is the paramount principle of the cosmos. We are to seek reconciliation with those alienated from us. We are to love everybody, not just friends, not even only strangers, but He even teaches “Love your enemies.”
Forget the fact that Jesus is the center of a particular religion and think instead of who He was and what He stands for—what He was willing to die for. And ask yourself, are those the principles by which the world should operate? Are those the principles that will heal the world? Is Jesus the kind of person who we wish was the Lord of the Cosmos?
I think for most of us, even for non-Christians, the answer would be “Yes.” Jesus stands for the way the world should be.
And that is why the world killed Him.
On what we celebrate as Palm Sunday, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem from the east, entering the Holy City just north of the Temple through “The Beautiful Gates.” It’s a bold move: His procession takes Him past the Temple and directly under the arches of the Antonia Fortress, the Roman outpost attached to the Temple wall and guarding the city, where Roman Praetorian Guards, Rome’s elite special forces, would have upped their numbers in anticipation of the Passover. It’s possible that Pilate himself overlooked Jesus’ procession as it passed. Scholars Markus Borg and John Dominic Crossan speculate that Pilate may even have been entering the Holy City at the same moment at another gate, in a grand procession filled with pomp and circumstance. In contrast, Jesus’ procession was humble, almost laughable: a peasant prophet riding a donkey, surrounded by peasant disciples, surrounded by a larger crowd of peasants waving palm fronds and throwing their dirty cloaks on the ground to be trampled on by the donkey. Matthew makes it even more laughable by suggesting that somehow Jesus rode two donkeys at the same time.
Hardly the Cosmic Lord of the Universe.
Jesus then does something unheard of: He engages in successful non-violent direct action against the Temple itself. The last time the Temple had been seized had been during the rebellion of Judas the Galilean some thirty years before, and the evidence that nobody was ready for it is right there in our story: Jesus and His disciples not only overturn the moneychangers’ tables, they actually lay siege to the Temple grounds for several hours with no resistance. They have complete control of who enters and exits the Temple. Jesus welcomes the lame and the sick, the very people who would have normally been begging at the gates but never allowed into the Temple grounds, because they were unclean—Jesus not only welcomes them in, but He heals them.
All this we readers today don’t often notice because the most sensational aspect of the Temple seizure is Jesus overturning the moneychangers’ tables and chasing them off the grounds. That is an act of divine justice—the money-changers were scalping the poor who came seeking to worship God, charging them exorbitant prices for their sacrificial offerings and for changing unclean Roman money into Jewish money that could be accepted to pay the Temple tax.
In the course of a few hours, we see the world as it ought to be made a present reality in the world as it is. A king comes, not proud and haughty, but humble and riding a donkey, and the poor and the children honor Him. He lays claim to the place where God is symbolically enthroned, the Temple, and overcomes injustice and invites in and heals the most needy and desperate, effectively telling them that they are precisely the people God most wants in His company. He does this not by violence, and not with an army, but with normal, everyday people. It’s a moment, a crystallized moment, when the Kingdom of God becomes a living reality on earth.
Those moments don’t last. When Jesus does these things, He knows full well that He’s stepped into a hornets’ nest, and that He’s started the ball rolling that will lead inevitably to His crucifixion. You simply don’t defy the Powers that Be, in the World as it is, in such a dramatic fashion, without a backlash.
To this day, I think we struggle with what all of this means. Wasn’t it arrogant of Jesus to claim to be King? What did He hope to accomplish will his comical donkey procession? Wasn’t it in-your-face to seize the Temple grounds? Couldn’t He have worked within the system to make changes? Isn’t seizing the Temple grounds like that arrogant and disruptive and not like gentle Jesus meek and mild?
Gentle Jesus versus zealous Jesus… How do the donkey and the Temple go together?
And the answer is, they go together perfectly if you understand what Jesus was about to begin with. As crazy as it seems, Jesus did understand Himself to be a king, but He understood Himself to be king by God’s grace. And unlike other people who assume their kingship is by divine appointment, Jesus understood that God’s king is humble, not arrogant; that God’s king isn’t haughty or proud. Jesus understood that God’s king is supposed to put the poor and the needy first, to stand up for justice and equity in the world, even if it means calling the unjust to account for their misdeeds. Jesus understood that God’s king doesn’t try to change the world by the world’s means—by violence or domination or by stepping on others on the way to the top. God’s king changes the world by boldness, by example, and by standing up for what He believes, and especially standing up for the powerless. And God’s king doesn’t leave the sick and the lame and the marginalized outside the gates to beg for scraps—God’s king makes them the members of His royal court. God’s king knows the world is sick, and has the power to heal it and make it whole—and that’s what He does.
Living by the standards of such a king is bound to get you in conflict with the world as it is. But Jesus would have been quite comfortable with a saying from the Jewish Talmud, written hundreds of years later: “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.” God’s kingdom is not going to arrive overnight. It will certainly arrive in its fullness at a time of God’s own choosing. But that doesn’t excuse us from trying. If our Lord stood up for it and was willing to die for it, in a time and place where getting killed for what you believe was a real, actual option, then we who follow Him today, who live in a time and place where it’s possible to stand up for what you believe without the same risks Jesus faced, really need to continue to stand up for those things. Because though this world, or at least this country, is a better place than Roman-ruled Palestine in the First Century, that’s a pretty low bar to judge ourselves by. There’s still so much need, so much injustice, and so much arrogance at the cost of the poor and the needy and the least of these. We’re still a long way from the World as it should be.
But by God’s grace, we have the ability to stand up for the values of the world as it should be; and by God’s grace, doing so can make a big difference. It can change, perhaps only in small ways, the imbalance of power; it can increase justice; it can create more balance and fairness between the powerful and the powerless; it can further the healing of what ails our world; it can inspire the world to hope and to believe that there is a Kingdom where the Lord of Love rules over all.
As Jesus’ modern disciples, it is not incumbent upon us to complete the work, but neither are we at liberty to desist from it. What that really means is God has blessed us with the ability to prove, even in a small measure, that this humble, self-sacrificing, merciful, and just King Jesus we serve really is the Lord of the World. And even if we prove it in only a small way, it’s worth it. It provides a foretaste of the world as it shall be.