March 29, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
This is a tale of two Jesus’. Actually, there are a gazillion Jesus’. Every one of us has our own personal monitor upon which we project our own personal Jesus… our own personal world for that matter. The trick is to keep track of the truth that what we see on our monitor is not the world – it is only the way we see the world. The world, the truth, the reality is not seen by us – not even those who have the biggest, widest monitors a lowly human being can have. I don’t even know if a composite of all those individual, personal projections is what truly is, or if truth lies too far beyond the capacity of humans to ever discern
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“A Tale of Two Jesus’”
Palm Sunday (March 28, 2010) @ 10:30 a.m.
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
This is a tale of two Jesus’.
Actually, there are a gazillion Jesus’.
Every one of us has our own personal monitor
upon which we project our own personal Jesus…
our own personal world for that matter.
The trick is to keep track of the truth that
what we see on our monitor is not the world –
it is only the way we see the world.
The world, the truth, the reality is not seen by us –
not even those who have the
biggest, widest monitors a lowly human being can have.
I don’t even know if a composite of all those
individual, personal projections is what truly is,
or if truth lies too far beyond the capacity of humans
to ever discern.
Wow…what a way to begin a sermon.
Let me start over again.
This is a tale of two Jesus’
with daily showings on personal monitors everywhere.
We could call them all kinds of names but today
we will call them the Crucifixion Jesus
and the Post-Crucifixion Jesus.
On Good Friday we will reflect on the Crucifixion Jesus
and on Easter Day we will wonder about the
Post-Crucifixion Jesus.
Now you might naturally assume that they are the same Jesus
but they are not anything alike.
One is Jesus and one is Christ.
One is human and one is Divine.
One is an historical reconstruction
available to those with or without Christian Faith,
and the other is available only to those with a particular kind of Christian Faith.
One is based on the narratives of Matthew, Mark and Luke,
and the other is based upon the theological claims of
Paul and John.
One is rooted in the teachings and practice of Jesus
and the other is rooted in the nature of Jesus.
It is not possible to hold them both
without ignoring the claims and implications
of one or the other.
Today, because it is Palm Sunday,
I want to show you both, side by side,
without commending one or the other.
Although to be honest,
if you know me,
you know that one appears on my personal monitor…
and the other occasionally in my personal prayers.
Okay, the Post-Crucifixion Jesus.
Jesus goes to Jerusalem
against the advice of friends and colleagues
because he knows that God is sending him there to die.
He is going there, not just to die,
but to suffer a terrible death and rise from the dead.
He is repeating the Patriarch Abraham’s perfect surrender.
He is knowingly heading into betrayal
by a close personal friend,
arrest by the authorities of his own religion,
tortured at the hands of foreigners,
and finally a painful if heroic death with the world looking on.
He knows, perhaps not clearly but with certainty,
that he will be raised from the dead on the third day,
and he predicts it three times with varying degrees of coyness.
Knowing it ahead of time does not soften it.
Knowing it ahead of time may even make the anguish worse.
Knowing it ahead of time grants a certain courage
by knowing the meaning and purpose of it all,
but it does not lessen the physical, emotional and spiritual suffering of it all.
So Jesus climbs aboard a donkey to enter Jerusalem,
knowing that in doing so he is fulfilling an obscure
prophetic image of the Messiah
entering the holy city from the Mount of Olives
riding an ass.
Throngs of adoring fans immediately swarm Jesus
and show their devotion by laying garments and palm branches on the road –
a first century peasant kind of red carpet treatment.
Once in Jerusalem he pronounces guilt upon the city,
and the Temple and its clergy.
He smashes kiosks in the outer courtyard of the temple
because they are doing business to which he objects.
Because all of this is God’s plan,
neither the Roman military nor the Temple guards
try to stop him.
The crowds adore him so much
that the authorities are afraid to incite a riot by arresting.
So a stealthier, more strategic plan is hatched.
In order to leave no doubt about where the fault lies
for his arrest and execution,
the religious authorities pay a lot of money to one of Jesus’ core team to tell them when Jesus is isolated from the crowds.
That night, when he is praying by himself in an olive grove,
a posse of vigilantes, led by Jesus’ friend, captures him.
Again, because it is God’s plan,
Jesus prevents his followers from fighting on his behalf.
The vigilantes take him to a midnight kangaroo court
held by the religious authorities.
They find witnesses who testify that Jesus claimed to be
the Messiah, even the son of God.
Jesus doesn’t say much, not wanting to acknowledge that
these hypocrites have any authority over him.
They find him guilty of blasphemy
but have no authority to execute him.
So they take him to the Roman military authority,
a figure in Roman history named Pontus Pilate.
Pilate is nervous about executing Jesus,
fearing a possible crowd reaction.
Wanting to keep the peace he refuses to hurt Jesus
and looks for ways of side-stepping the demands of the
persistent religious authorities.
The religious authorities actually threaten
Pilate with blackmail.
They threaten to tell Caesar, Pilate’s boss,
that he refused to execute someone that claimed to be
King of Judea,
a direct challenge to the sovereignty of Roman rule.
Pilate feels like he is between a rock and a hard place
until the religious authorities send out rabble rousers
to work up the crowd to chant for Jesus to be crucified.
(Having learned from experience,
I have always told my kids to remember:
you are never as good or as bad as other people say).
In the end, Pilate has no choice but to execute Jesus,
and in one version even ritualizes his own innocence
by washing his hands and telling the religious authorities
that Jesus’ blood is on their hands.
God’s plan is worked out in detail.
In order to fulfill another obscure prophesy,
that the Suffering Servant will be killed among thieves
and common criminals,
Jesus is crucified in between to common criminals.
The intricacy of God’s plan is astounding.
The Roman executioners get to divide the spoils
retained by their victims,
mostly clothing one would suspect.
But the robe that Jesus was wearing,
that had been placed on him to mock him,
was too nice to tear in half
so the executioners roll dice for it.
This fulfills another ancient prophecy.
In fact,
almost every aspect of the story that describes Jesus’
arrest, trial, torture and execution includes details that
lead to or makes possible
the fulfillment of a verse of ancient scripture –
mostly from Isaiah, a psalm or Zachariah.
Jesus dies on the cross as expected.
Unexpectedly, his friends get permission from Pilate
to collect his body from beneath the cross,
and bury it in a barrowed tomb.
Some versions tell about the religious authority’s growing
paranoia about tricks that Jesus’ followers might play,
like stealing his body and saying he’s not really dead.
So they make sure a guard is posted
outside the tomb for a period of days,
presumably to insure that decomposition has begun.
Then, as we know, there are four different and dramatic
stories about what happened next:
From an empty tomb to the sighting of a risen Jesus.
Mark ends with an empty tomb,
and with some of Jesus’ women friends running away afraid.
The other gospels add some stories,
and with varying degrees of detail and activity,
tell about Jesus appearing many times
over a fifty day period
before finally leaving for the last time.
So that is the Post-Crucifixion Jesus.
It is a story, from beginning to end,
that unfolds down to the tiniest detail
in order to fulfill God’s strategic plan,
a plan that had been put in motion
five and six centuries before,
and that has implications for our total future.
The Crucifixion Jesus is somewhat different.
Those that believe in the Crucifixion Jesus
acknowledge up front that the gospel stories are not historical – that they may contain fragments of events that occurred,
but that they are not dependable accounts
of what actually happened.
This does not mean the gospel stories lie,
simply that they are not history as we think of history;
because history as we think of history
did not exist in the world –
and wouldn’t exist for more than a thousand years.
Rather, the gospels are theology.
They are theological renderings of events.
They use metaphor,
they use previous scripture,
they use contemporary stories and images,
all as a means of telling the meaning of what happened.
The Crucifixion Jesus is based upon the projections seen in someone’s monitor that has been preserved for thousands of years – and there are actually four different monitors
with four different Jesus’ looking back at us.
The Crucifixion Jesus is also seen via what we have learned through anthropology and archeology
about the world that Jesus lived in,
and compares that information with the details
described in the four gospels.
Those who believe in the Crucifixion Jesus
believe that the four gospel stories were written
as epic poems
around the figure of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant,
and other Messianic images popular at the time.
Where the Gospels use strands of ancient Hebrew Scripture
to “prove” that Jesus is The One,
the Crucifixion Jesus
sees the Gospels as constructing their stories
from those images,
and conforming their version of events
to those images.
For example, Palm Sunday.
Those who believe in the Crucifixion Jesus,
see the triumphant entry into Jerusalem riding on a donkey,
as part of the story made to conform to ancient Scripture.
To them it seems an unlikely historical event
due to first century realities on the ground.
Had Jesus actually had a parade,
with thousands chanting for him to be king,
given what we already know about Roman administration,
he would have been arrested on the spot
and the crowds crushed and dispersed.
Likewise, the Crucifixion Jesus
assumes that the authors of the Gospels did not have much information about Jesus’ arrest, torture and execution;
because no one was there to see it,
so they had to conjecture and they did so with the use of Hebrew Scripture.
The Crucifixion Jesus
is based upon historical and anthropological data
that suggests that Pontus Pilate was not a softy,
and that the so-called religious authorities
had no authority and no influence
on any of the events surrounding Jesus’ execution.
Rather, the Crucifixion Jesus is based upon the historical information
that Pontus Pilate was recalled to Rome three years after Jesus’ death
for being too brutal –
so brutal in fact that his tactics of suppression
caused greater social unrest.
It is based upon the knowledge that crucifixion itself
was invented by the Roman Empire
as a weapon of state terror,
and that it was reserved for those found guilty of insurrection.
With this in mind,
the Crucifixion Jesus is pronounced guilty as charged:
someone that was,
for reasons we may never know,
a threat to Roman sovereignty.
The Crucifixion Jesus probably did not know ahead of time
what was going to happen,
and surely did not plan to be arrested, tortured or executed.
The Crucifixion Jesus was a victim,
not of God’s plan,
but of human coercive power.
The Crucifixion Jesus was likely taken abruptly, by force,
and swiftly executed; and,
like all usual victims of crucifixion,
left to die and be picked apart by insects, birds of prey,
and other animals at the foot of the cross.
Then something happened.
Something happened
among the followers of the Crucifixion Jesus
that was never preserved by any of them –
not even by those closest to him.
Others, forty to seventy years later,
told stories about it – and we have those in the gospels.
But what actually happened,
after the Crucifixion Jesus was executed,
like all religious experience,
could not be captured with words.
So there they are,
a two tales of two Jesus’.
One of the blessed things about this congregation,
and about the community that gathers around this altar,
is that it entertains both Jesus’…and many more.
The reason for that
is that no one has the authority
or pretends to have the secret knowledge
to tell us that one of those Jesus’
is the one and only Jesus.
Now that may make it harder for some of us
as we struggle to expand the size of our monitors,
but in the end…
it actually increases our opportunities for wisdom and understanding.
We also have before us a tale of three Holy Weeks.
One Holy Week uses today’s insert
to remember the story before us –
because story matters,
and story is powerful,
and which stories we choose as our story
makes all the difference in the world.
So the first Holy Week,
which may be spent far away from here,
is rooted to this community through the sharing of the story.
The second Holy Week may use the insert also,
and in addition, because of availability and access,
participates in the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday worships.
By engaging in a communal worship
centered on the story before us,
we discover personal connections to that story
that may surprise us and challenge us.
The third Holy Week ignores the whole thing
and arrives at Easter disconnected from the story.
I don’t really know what happens in that version of
Holy Week.
So, whichever Tale of Jesus you are listening for,
and whichever Holy Week you participate in…
welcome to Holy Week and,
if you are elsewhere next Sunday,
have a blessed Easter.
