Facepalm Sunday

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.13.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 21:1-11

There are some things, now, that are a little hard to understand.  There’s a peculiar new shift in language, something having to do with our slow transition away from being people who can actually read to people who can only look at pictures of kittens.

Among the new words we might not understand is one that wasn’t around 20 years ago: meme.  “Meme” is a unit of cultural data, a bit of information that is passed along from person to person, kind of like a gene is passed from generation to generation.  Now, it tends to involve pictures of kittens.

Another new word is a mix of two others.  Face and palm give us “Facepalm,” that movement you make when someone says something so impossibly oblivious that your head sinks down in despair, resting in your hand.  Face, meet palm.

These things, we get.  But there are some things I just can’t get, and have never been able to quite grasp.  Like, say, the concept of “winning.”  On the surface, that would seem like a pretty basic one.

There’s something to be said for winning, for triumphing, for coming out on top.  I’ll freely admit that it doesn’t happen often in my own existence.  That fierce competitiveness, the intensity of our aggressive culture, I seem to have missed out on it somehow.  I like doing my best, but I just don’t have that killer instinct.

But compete we do.

It’s a peculiar form of madness, which was everywhere last month.  March Madness is done now, finally, and I notice it even though I suffer from Sports Enthusiasm Deficiency Disorder.  Honestly, I’m glad we’re done with March, because it’s starting to freak me out a little bit.  Maybe it’s the reinforcing effect of the social media echo chamber.  I pop onto Facebook to see how my friends are doing, and they’re all talking about brackets, and sharing brackets, and making up brackets that involve prominent figures from modern Christianity and superheroes and global political figures.  I wake up on March mornings, haunted by the fear that I’ll go outside, and everyone I know and love will be shambling around with dead eyes, mumbling the word “brackettttts” over and over to themselves.

And in those brackets, there is just a single winner, just one who makes it.  From Connecticut, or so I’m told, although why Connecticut as a state should be so dominant eludes me.  Maybe there’s a special place in America’s heart for a team named after extra large boys clothing.  

We approach so much of life as conflict, and in some ways that’s a good thing. Being competitive strengthens us.  It pushes us.  It drives us to stretch ourselves. Striving with another person makes us stronger, just as straining against a weight builds us up.

But when we view our whole world in terms of conflict, when we look at everything in the binary and polarizing terms of our victory and their loss, we create a world that looks a certain way.  We establish a way of relating to other persons that defines them as either our adversary or the opposing team.

That’s fine when it’s a game, something done for mutual enjoyment, and for mutual strengthening.

But in the world, as a way of understanding everything?  As a way of running a political system, or a legal system, or an economy?  It often causes more harm than good.  It creates adversarial relationships that do not need to exist. It turns us from those around us who may have something to offer, and instead drives us to view every moment as time to be in conflict.  That approach to living just drives us away from being able to see others with a heart of compassion.

And it is the way of human relating that sits at the heart of the Palm Sunday error, the fundamental misunderstanding of who Jesus was that colors every retelling of this story every year we retell it.

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. There’s Jesus riding into town on a donkey, and he’s coming through the gates of the city, and everyone is waving these fronds in the air and hosannahing like they just don’t care.

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.   Matthew, earnest and eager and passionate about finding connections between everything Jesus ever did and the stories from the Torah and prophets.

In Matthew’s story of Jesus, the tale gets told a little bit differently.  He takes a quotation about the arrival of the messiah from the prophet Zechariah (14:4), pitching out to us the vision that the one will arrive riding a donkey.  Well, not just a donkey.

Hebrew poetry doubles things up when it wants to emphasize something.  Many of the Psalms and sayings of the prophets end that way, saying the same thing again in a slightly different way to make sure you haven’t missed it the first time.  I do that with kids all the time myself.

What’s being emphasized is the humbleness of the mount.  This is a small, mild, and nonthreatening beast of burden, not the noble steed of a mighty king, but another kind of creature entirely.  This isn’t a mighty stallion, or even an elephant.  This is nothing like Prince Ali’s arrival scene from Aladdin, kids, and it’s not just because there’s no Robin Williams genie or 95 white persian monkeys.  

Matthew wrote like a Jewish scribe, meaning he was eager to double-down on every scripture that might have possibly in some way pointed to Jesus.  And so, unlike Mark, Luke and John, Matthew gives us Jesus riding not one, but two donkeys, which I honestly have a little trouble visualizing.  

He’s “sitting on them both?”  

In my more mischievous moments, I see Matthew’s Jesus riding them like a dolphin rider at Seaworld, one foot on one, one foot on another like he’s donkey-skiing into Jerusalem.  

But that’s just being silly.  Jesus enters the city, and the story Matthew pitches out to us covers that, more or less.

As the story tells it, everyone in Jerusalem thought the arrival meant there would soon be triumph, that it spoke to them finally finding their way to the place where the whole of their world would recognize who he was.  The world had been cruel to the people of Judah, and they were looking, eagerly, for their savior.  They understood that savior as the meshiach, the anointed one, the king who would come and set the whole world right again.

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 the crowds and his disciples did not, what this arrival meant.   It did not mean the crushing and humiliating defeat of Herod and Rome.  It did not mean angelic armies, or God showing up with face-melting death beams like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark to smite the infidels with a big smitey smiting.

He saw, as the Judeans in Jerusalem 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.  And then, in just a blink of an cosmic eye after that, the false glory that was Rome would tear itself to pieces, just as every empire does.

The most peculiar part of what Jesus proclaimed was that it wasn’t just about one group winning out over another.  He was not there just to give the Judeans victory over their Roman oppressors.  He was not bringing them the thing they were cheering for.

What Jesus had been teaching was different.  What he saw was rather different.  Jesus saw redemption and love, and the path of compassion.  And in the cheering of that crowd, in their yearning for victory, Jesus would have heard them not getting it.  

They didn’t get that compassion, radical and fundamental, was at the heart of the message that carries through this most holy of Christian seasons.  They didn’t understand that the reconciliation and hope Jesus brought was not just theirs, but was also intended to restore their enemies.  It was not just meant for them.

And from that misunderstanding, so written into our sacred story, it is maybe better not to think of this as Palm Sunday.  It’s more Facepalm Sunday, that day when Jesus rests his face in his hand, the shouting throng around him, and says, “Oh, me, they really really don’t have a clue what I’ve been talking about.” 

And to be honest, we still struggle with this.  We struggle with it as we look out to those who are different, to those who stand in opposition to us.  Our task, if we take what Jesus taught us seriously, is not to destroy them.  It is not to prosper at their expense.  It is not to rout them, but to find a way to love them as God does.

In this sacred season, take that out into the world with you. 

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