April 13, 2014 (Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion) Matthew 26:14-27:66
Matthew 26:14-27:66
Cheers to Jeers
Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion – April 13, 2014
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
December 14th of last year was Ondrej Pavelec bobble-head day at the MTS Centre when
the Winnipeg Jets hosted the Dallas Stars.
It was supposed to be a day of celebrating the Winnipeg Jets goalie.
He received cheers at the beginning of the game when everyone in attendance was
happy to receive their Ondrej Pavelec bobble-head.
But two periods in the crowd was of a very different mood.
After having allowed 5 goals on only 24 shots, Pavelec was pulled from the game.
And the crowd was no longer happy – and hasn’t really been since!
Pavelec was a well-liked net-minder for his first couple of years here.
But now many are offering suggestions as to how the Jets might get rid of him.
Why? His inability to save.
You wonder if that is what is going on in Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem.
You wonder if that is what is going on in our liturgy this morning.
Jesus is welcomed so heartily when he first enters Jerusalem:
the people wave celebratory palm branches for him and shout
“Hosanna” in Matthew’s account, which means “save us!”
Save us from the Roman occupation! Save us from being humiliated! Save us from poverty!
But it doesn’t take long for the majority of people to turn on him and forsake him.
You really feel that in the way this morning’s liturgy is constructed.
It turns so quickly from cheers to jeers, just like on Ondrej Pavelec bobble-head day.
And you sense the real pivot point comes when Jesus refuses to save the people through
violence: in Matthew only, Jesus says, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father,
and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”
You know that means about 60,000 nasty warrior angels?
Jesus has the power to save the people in the conventional way and doesn’t use it.
God does not want to save us in that way. And Jesus knows it.
There is another way to save. And Jesus knows it.
And so the crowd, disappointed, turns from cheers to jeers.
Jesus is abandoned by everyone in Matthew’s account: the people, the Jewish leaders,
all the disciples, even the criminals on the cross: in Matthew’s telling there isn’t even
one nice criminal to soften the blow for Jesus.
And, in the end, again only in Matthew’s account,
Jesus experiences himself to be abandoned even by God as he cries,
“My God, my God: why have you forsaken me.”
This, though, is the second pivot point in this long story.
This is the point where you realize how it is exactly that God does intend to save:
through God’s own compassionate, forgiving, suffering presence in Jesus.
In Jesus, God is present in moments of deepest suffering.
In Jesus, God feels the betrayals we all experience.
In Jesus, God feels the pain.
In Jesus, God experiences – somehow, mysteriously – what it is to feel godforsaken.
In Jesus, God is not remote from pain. In Jesus God is deeply present in it and through it.
God does not manipulate our world in the way we often wish God would:
God has chosen not to save us in that way.
God does not send legions of warrior angels to fix all that is wrong with this world –
because God knows that would lead only to more trouble.
God does not avenge the wrongs we suffer and the hurts we deeply feel.
Instead, on this day, Jesus shows us that God is deeply, abidingly present in the tragic.
We are never truly alone: no matter how bad it is, God has been there.
And God is here – now.
There is nowhere that we can go, there is nothing that can happen to us, where God cannot be.
Maybe God doesn’t explain all the bad things that happen.
Maybe God doesn’t rescue us from the tragic.
But God in Jesus on the cross gives us something that is even better:
God’s own presence in the tragic.
That is the good news on this Sunday of the Passion:
this is how God in Christ chooses to save us:
by entering into our suffering and seeing us through it.
In Matthew’s reckoning that was reason for everyone in that week long ago to jeer Jesus.
But it is surely enough reason for us cheer on this day.
And to cry once again: Hosanna! Save us.
Save us from our fears by entering into them with us.
Save us from injustice by entering into it in the lives of the unjustly treated.
Save us from anger by entering into our own anger and forgiving us for it.
Save us from all that would thwart your intentions for this world.
Save us especially on this day from jeering your ways of forgiveness.
Save us from jeering your way suffering with.
Save us from jeering your compassion for the poor and the vulnerable.
Save us by entering into all that we would suffer – and never ever let us go.
Save us, Jesus. Save us. And together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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