“You are a peculiar people.” This is how the King James Version of the Bible translates a line from the letter of 1 Peter written to the early Christians. It occurs at a place where Peter is offering different phrases to tell these folks just what kind of people they are for choosing to follow the Jesus way of life. “You are a royal priesthood, you are a holy nation, you are a peculiar people.” Peculiar isn’t a word we use much anymore, so it hasn’t made it into the more recent English translations, but it does a good job of capturing a certain spirit of identity of who we are. Peculiar can mean that one is distinctive and belongs to only one master, such that we are peculiar in belonging only to God. But peculiar can also simply mean strange, weird, odd, not fitting in to the ordinary pattern of things. Most of us already knew this about ourselves – that when you get right down to it, we’re all pretty weird. But Peter is speaking this to a collective personality, the church, the Jesus-followers. He’s saying You, as a group, are a peculiar people, so get used to being out of step with how things seem to be ordered in the world. You focus on serving people while others focus on being served. You share your possessions with each other while others focus on hoarding theirs. You have this odd devotion to this crucified rabbi from Nazareth while others direct their devotion to the gods of power and greed. You’re peculiar, and that’s the way you should be.
As those who place ourselves among this strange community, today and this week is one of those times when we become quite peculiar. As everything in the world goes on as normal, school and business and eating and drinking and running errands, we direct our attention to reliving this ancient drama of the last days of Jesus life, Holy Week. Suffering and death and the persistent human tendency to crucify those who are innocent are not subjects that we naturally gravitate toward as matters of contemplation. It’s much easier to distance ourselves from suffering than face it head on. But here we begin this strange journey into that very place. We remember the trail that Jesus blazed through the darkness and the way that his light of self-giving love, in the words of John, continues to shine in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
And it is indeed strange, how a week of struggle, confrontation, betrayal, abandonment, unjust trial, torture, and execution, begins…with a victory parade. If we weren’t so accustomed to Palm Sunday being the opening event of the week of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion we might be a little more jarred by the disconnect between what’s goes on here and what goes on the rest of the week. Jesus seems to know what he’s getting himself into – that in going to Jerusalem he’s walking right into the lion’s den, making himself extremely vulnerable to the powers that consider him a threat. He doesn’t appear to have any illusions about the fact that this is going to cost him his life. With all this in mind he might as well have organized a funeral procession for himself as he entered the city. He’s as good as dead, another of the countless people of his day deemed criminals of the state and executed on the common instrument of capital punishment, the Roman cross. He’s going to lose. So if this is to be his fate, then what more logical way to get things started then to have a parade in which he is hailed as the one who rides victorious! Either Jesus has a dark and overdeveloped tendency for the ironic, or he is communicating something that will alter the whole orientation of the world in regards to that which is being defeated and on its way out of existence and that which is standing triumphant.
Clues within and between the lines of the text indicate that this Triumphal Entry was an intentional, well-planned occasion of communication, an enacted parable. In organizing the event, Jesus sends two unnamed disciples on an errand to go to the next village and find the donkey colt that will be tied there. The way he describes how they will find the colt and what they are to say if anyone asks what they are doing seem to indicate that the Jesus sympathizers of this village have already been clued in to what is going to happen and have a colt ready to go for when the time is right. Jesus could not simply have walked on foot and conveyed the same kind of message he was aiming at. The colt was an important prop in the drama.
This would not have been a one of a kind spectacle. It was common at the time for Roman military leaders to have triumphal processions in which they compelled their prisoners of war to march with them through the crowded streets of Rome. It is quite possible that the very same day Jesus was riding into Jerusalem from one direction, Pilate and his entourage of security personnel would have been processing in from the other direction, in keeping with his regular practice of coming down to Jerusalem from his palace in Ceasarea during the times of the Jewish feasts in order to keep the peace as the population of the city swelled with pilgrims coming to the temple. These processionals right down Broadway would have been clear public acts of communication about who had the true power and authority and who deserved the people’s reverence and allegiance. Jesus’ small off-Broadway drama of peasants claiming their reverence and allegiance to God would have registered as a counter claim to where true power and authority lies.
There was also a tradition within the Jewish scriptures that spoke of a king who would rule with humility and bring peace to the nations. Matthew is so anxious to demonstrate that this is that key moment in human history that he makes a rather humorous and awkward move in how he tells the story. The prophet Zechariah had said “Lo, your king comes to you triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” In the typical style of Hebrew poetry, Zechariah makes his statements in couplets, offering one line and then following that up with a second line to reinforce the meaning of the first. “He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim….and the war-horse from Jerusalem” “His dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.” He comes “humble and riding on a donkey…a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Two ways of saying the same thing. All the other gospel writers are aware of this and have Jesus riding on a single colt on this occasion. But Matthew wants so dearly for us to see that Jesus is the bringer of peace to the world that he follows Zechariah to the letter, having the disciples go fetch Jesus a donkey and a colt, the foal of a donkey, and having Jesus riding both of them simultaneously as he makes his way into the city. In Matthew 21:7, “(The disciples) brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and (Jesus) sat on them.” Not quite sure how that worked out for him, but let us be assured that this is not just an ordinary procession, but an acting out and fulfilling of these deeply embedded hopes and longings of the people and the prophet. The King of peace is on his way into the city and he is triumphant over the kings who rule with violence.
The song says “Ride on King Jesus, no one can hinder thee.” Jesus does dismount his royal donkey and colt, but keeps on riding. He rides right into the temple and quite literally turns things upside down. He calls on the temple system to live up to its institutional calling of being a house of prayer for all nations. He keeps riding through the conflict of the debates throughout the week. He keeps riding through the last meal he eats with his disciples when he charges them to remember his gift to them. He keeps riding through the fervent prayers that made him sweat blood in the garden, wanting this whole thing to just blow over and let him live. He keeps riding through the betrayal, the arrest, the rigged trial, the torture of the beatings, the carrying of his own cross, and the final breaths of crucifixion.
It’s fitting that Holy Week coincides with the fifth year anniversary of the Iraq war, which will be this Wednesday. The American soldiers who have died and their families who are living with loss, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died and their families who are living with loss, these are the contemporary scars and sufferings of Christ. It’s highly disappointing, but fitting, that our President has just vetoed a bill that would outlaw certain forms of interrogation deemed as torture by the international community. The logic of Rome going to all lengths to deter those who threaten it, and the pride of Pilate who believes he can wash his hands of the whole ordeal are still alive and well in our world. It’s fitting that in several weeks we will remember the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a preacher who called us to live out the Beloved Community that Jesus envisioned and met the same fate as the preacher from Nazareth. We relive this ancient story of Jesus’ passion this week because we are reliving the story every week. It’s not a matter of whether or not the story is happening, but how we choose to live within the story.
When Jesus sits around the table with his companions the night he will be betrayed and handed over to those seeking his life, he communicates a most peculiar announcement. When he talks about his death, he doesn’t talk about it as a defeat, as if this will be another case where Rome and the ruling authorities show once again that they hold the power of life and death fully in their hands. Instead, Jesus talks about his death as a feast, a great banquet of wine and bread, that is now being made available to the discipleship community for their continual eating. As often as they pour out wine to drink and break bread to eat, they are invited to remember this life that has been poured out for them and this body that has been broken for them. And as they do this they become the living, breathing body of Christ.
All of this royal language of king and lord and ruler that we see throughout the New Testament spoken about Jesus is these early believers’ attempts to put into words this strange revelation that the powers that appeared to be kings and lords and rulers aren’t the ones who end up on top. Somehow Jesus had ridden right into their palace, stepped onto their turf, taken the worst they could give him, and still emerged victorious. And these believers experienced that victory within themselves because they had been conquered by this love.
Folk singer Leonard Cohen would have us remember that “love is not a victory march, but it’s a cold, and it’s a broken hallelujah.” (From his song, “Hallelujah”) Perhaps, the New Testament is saying, it is both. The cold and broken hallelujah of Jesus’ life was also a victory march.
How strange of us to believe this. That against this dark backdrop of pain and brokenness a great light has begun to shine. That the powers of death that appear to be victorious have actually been defeated. And most peculiar, that we have been entrusted to be a part of that light in the world. That by feasting on that bottomless reservoir of Christ’s love that has already conquered, we actually become Christ’s love within the world. That, even though we are cold and broken, through our kind words, our humility, our prayers, our thirst for justice, our quest to help the institutions that we are a part of live up to their calling, our self-giving love toward each other, that we are a continuation of that odd, festive, joyful, victory march through history. And that’s exactly who we are. Thanks be to God, Hallelujah.
Let’s prepare to share the feast together…
