Different Eyes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 03.24.13

Scripture Lesson: Luke 19:28-40

Human beings can encounter the same thing, the very same slice of reality, and yet see it in completely different ways.

Take, for example, the peculiar case of Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla.  My older son and I were talking through that the other day, after he’d watched another Epic Rap Battles of History Youtube Video.  

If you’re not aware of this internet phenomenon, actors play two figures from history, who then hurl insults at each other as if they were rappers engaged in a musical battle.   Viewers are then asked to determine who won.  You have Einstein taking on Stephen Hawking, and Beethoven laying a smackdown on Justin Bieber, and Gandhi nonviolently dissing Martin Luther King Jr., and Mr. T taking on Mr. Rogers. The videos are funny, and more than a little bit profane, so view them at your discretion.   They’re a big thing, though.   Last year’s Epic Rap Battle between Obama and Romney was viewed 60 million times on Youtube, ten times more than the most viewed Youtube version of their actual debates.  Unlike the actual debate, the Rap Battle was clearly won by the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, who was carried down from the sky by a giant bald eagle to cut them both down to size.  Ours is a very, very strange culture. 

Edison and Tesla was particularly interesting, because it was an actual struggle.  They’d worked together, both brilliant pioneers of the electrical era.  Tesla was a genius, wildly creative.  Edison was also a genius, but more organized.  They ended up as adversaries.  If you were Tesla, Edison was a profiteer, interested more in patents, wealth, and power than expanding human knowledge.  If you were Edison, Tesla was a fool, a distractable, aimless semi-competent who wouldn’t know a business plan from a hole in the wall.  Where was the reality?  It’s hard to say.  

That’s the case with so many things.  Like, say, an article I read in one of my business media inputs this last week.    The article was about the recent uptick in the construction industry, and about the deep concern that some financial analysts had about a phenomenon they were observing.  Construction starts were up, said the article, but hiring was not up by nearly as much.

The reason, according to an interview with a Goldman Sachs analyst, was a practice called labor hoarding.  I’d never heard of this, so I looked into it a bit.  “Labor hoarding” happens when a company hits a downturn.  Instead of appropriately downsizing, the CEO chooses not to lay off workers.  They continue to draw salaries, even if they aren’t being maximally productive.  This is a problem that businesses should avoid, analysts say, because it reduces profit margins further at a time when they are already negatively impacted.

That’s an interesting perspective.  I’ve known business owners who’ve engaged in “labor hoarding,” and I’ve always just assumed it was because they knew that if they fired their employees, it would impact people they cared about.  They knew it meant a family would struggle, and a home might go into foreclosure, and that mattered to them more than profit.   I’d call it “compassion.”  Or being a “Christian businessperson.”   Same phenomenon exactly.  Two entirely different ways of seeing it.

Just as the story in today’s passage from Luke is seen in completely different ways by the different people we encounter.  This is Luke’s version of Jesuses’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem after slowly wending his way down from the North.  He’s been teaching, he’s been preaching, he’s been performing miracles.

If you’ve ever been to a Palm Sunday service before, or if you learned about this story as a child, then you probably have a mental image of what I just read to you.  I certainly do.  I have this old visual image of a cartoon kid’s book of Bible stories from when I was a young pupling in Sunday School at the Evangelical Free Church in London.  I visualize Jesus on a donkey, and he’s coming through the gates of the city, and everyone is waving these palm branches and shouting Hosanna.

That’s certainly the story we get in the other Gospels.  But it’s not the story we’ve just heard, not if we were listening closely.   First, it’s Palm Sunday, sure.  But where does Luke say the word “palm?”   Where does he talk about the people waving branches of palms and laying them on the ground before this strange rabbi?   He doesn’t.  Mark, Matthew and John all include palms, but not Luke.  Luke just uses the Greek world himateeon, which can mean cloak, but is really just a generic word for any kind of clothes.  

In Luke’s story of Jesus, people spread their garments on the ground before Jesus.   Period.  But we’ll stick with our palm fronds today, because taking off our clothes and waving them around just wouldn’t be very Presbyterian.  Maybe it’s Methodist.  I’ll have to ask Pastor Bill from across the street the next time I see him.

But what are they shouting?  Here, Luke mostly agrees with Mark and Matthew, but unlike all of the other Gospels, the crowds don’t cry Hosanna.  Luke chooses to leave that out, because he figured his Greek speaking non-Jewish audience would have no idea what that Hebrew word meant.  It means a weird complex mix of “Yay,” and “Please Help Us.”  There was too much backstory, too much detail that would have to be explained, and so he simply deletes it.  

And as a last blow to my vision of the story, in verse 41, Luke has all of that stuff happening, and then says “And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it...”  This means he’s not even there yet.  Fiddle.  

But as Luke’s vision varies from that of the other Gospels, so too do each of the primary characters in this story.  Each of them thought they knew what was happening.  Each of them encountered Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem.  

The disciples thought the arrival augured a triumph, that it spoke to them finally finding their way to the place where the whole of their world would recognize who he was.  They’d heard Jesus speak of Jerusalem as a place of death and loss, but they figured Jesus was talking about something else.

The Pharisees saw the danger to the structures of their society, to the city of Jerusalem, and even the danger to Jesus himself.  They saw and feared that Jesus would upset all of that.

But from atop that donkey, the smell of animal and dust and sweat strong about him, Jesus saw where he was very differently.    He knew, as his disciples did not, what this arrival meant.   It meant that the end of his life was near.  It meant that suffering was at hand.  It was not triumph, and it was not victory.  That came later, but it would be much harder than any of them thought.

He saw, as the Pharisees did not, that Jerusalem itself and the power struggles around it meant nothing.  Why would he want to overthrow that power?  Why would he desire to take it for himself.  Soon enough, it would be nothing, shattered and smoldering after Rome had annihilated it.

Three sets of eyes.  Three different visions of the very same event.  The disciples saw a triumphal parade, and the Pharisees saw an invading threat.  

But what Jesus saw was rather different.  Jesus saw redemption and love, and the path of compassion.

When we encounter one another through the lenses of our own subjectivity, we tend to see things as we wish to see them.  One person’s hero is another person’s enemy.  One person’s wise financial strategy is another person’s cruelty.  From that place, where we see the world in terms of power, we struggle to encounter the real.

It’s a bit like an old classic 1950 movie by director Akira Kurosawa.  Made shortly after the Second World War, it’s called Rashomon, and it’s the story of a single horrible crime, told from the different perspectives of each of the characters.  None of the stories is the same, and the effect is dizzying.  How do we know what is real?  How can we have any idea what matters when everyone sees a different thing?

The response at the end of Rashomon--spoiler alert, so plug your ears if you don’t want to hear it--is that the only way through the chaos is to have faith in the power of compassion.  And that, as he entered the city, was Christ’s answer.  The faith that carried him there was deep enough that he trusted it could carry him through death itself.

Our journey together brings us into similar encounters.  We encounter difference in every other set of eyes, in every single soul we experience.  That can be enriching, but it can also stretch us to grasp where reality lies.  In the face of that, we can harden ourselves, circling the wagons and pouring our energies into hating the other.  We can become more deeply selfish, more aggressive, more hostile.

What Christ calls us to do instead is to radically value the compassion that guided him, not to allow our varying perspectives to tear us from the call to radically love both stranger and enemy.  He calls us down to that deepest reality, that place that challenges us and changes us.  That’s the essence of self-sacrifice.  That’s the heart of redemption.  And it’s the path he walked.  It’s up to us to see it, and follow.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.