Timely and Timeless
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TIMELY AND TIMELESS
The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
Palm Sunday + March 24, 2024
Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Mark 11:9)
On Palm Sunday we celebrate the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. This year, as I’ve pondered the meaning and message of today, I’ve been struck by the parallels between Jesus, and another figure much in the news: Alexei Navalny, the longtime thorn in the side of the Russian dictator, and now war criminal, Vladimir Putin. In the early 2000s Navalny was a lawyer and politician, holding various offices and essentially working within the system. Such experiences, however, exposed him to the corruption at every level of Russian civic life – from local elections to the highest reaches of the Kremlin. By 2011 he had seen enough, and began rallying the Russian people to oppose Putin. Navalny galvanized public demonstrations where tens of thousands of people were calling for Putin to be voted out in a fair and legitimate election, unlike the sham that occurred last weekend.
Putin, predictably, didn’t take kindly to Navalny or his demonstrations, and therefore worked to make the reformer’s life as difficult as possible. Multiple times Navalny was falsely accused, arrested, tried, and imprisoned. Always in and out of the authority’s clutches, he started his own political party, ran for Mayor of Moscow, and even President of the country. Navalny’s influence was growing, and Putin knew it. So at every step, Putin’s machine would be ready with new trumped-up charges, new arrests, and more jail time. Finally, the attempts on Navalny’s life commenced, the most serious of which was a deadly poisoning in August of 2020. Navalny’s supporters evacuated him to Berlin, where he could recover in a hospital equipped to treat him. From there he continued his social-media campaign against Putin.
Navalny’s supporters warned him against ever returning to Russia. He could carry on the resistance from exile, and live a long and happy life with his family. But Navalny vowed to go back to the country and people he loved. How could he reform Russia from outside of Russia? Thus, on January 17, 2021, he boarded a commercial flight for Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. Word spread that he was coming. Crowds gathered to greet the arriving hero, and shout praise to the reformer who came in the name of peace, but would not back down from the evil powers of this world. It promised to be a moment not unlike Palm Sunday, the day we celebrate today.
The reason I’ve been talking about Alexei Navalny’s return to Russia is to help us gain a fresh understanding of Palm Sunday. It is to strip away the centuries of assumptions so that we can see how real, and raw, and dangerous it was for Jesus to enter Jerusalem. The fact is, we don’t really know much at all about the life of Jesus. Two of the four Gospels give us some stories about his birth. We have one story about his being in the temple at the age of twelve. Then, beginning when he was about thirty, we have the more detailed accounts of his public ministry. But even these are hardly exhaustive of what we estimate to be a period of three years. What is clear, however, is that due to his words and deeds, Jesus rapidly gained a large following. He was as close to being a celebrity as one could be in first-century Palestine. Crowds followed him everywhere he went. Thousands at a time pressed in close to touch his garments and hear what he had to say.
In addition to admirers, Jesus also had detractors. He developed enemies in powerful places who were threatened by his teachings about the kingdom of God. Because he taught dangerous and destabilizing things about God, he drew the attention of the religious authorities. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, and the chief priests predictably didn’t take kindly to being called hypocrites and blind guides. In one parable (Matthew 21:33-41) he compared these clerics to wicked tenants who murdered the vineyard owner’s messengers. Matthew writes in his Gospel that when the chief priests and the Pharisees heard the parable, they perceived that he was speaking about them (21:45). Oh, they were clever – those chief priests and Pharisees. You couldn’t get one past them! They resolved then and there to have Jesus arrested. Jesus would have to travel the countryside by stealth to avoid them.
Because Jesus talked about a kingdom, he drew the attention of the political authorities also, particularly the Roman occupiers. Rome would consider anyone proclaiming a rival kingdom to be an insurrectionist, worthy of the death penalty. They had no king but Caesar. For a time, the scribes and chief priests tried to bait Jesus into making a political blunder, but he always passed through the midst of them, because, as he said, his hour had not yet come. We don’t know for sure when the attempts on his life began, but Matthew writes his Gospel as if to suggest that powerful people were trying to kill Jesus from the time of his infancy. Mary and Joseph had to take the child and flee to Egypt to escape Herod the Great’s murderous rage. Many years later, Herod’s son, Antipas, would continue his father’s vendetta. Not all the Pharisees were against Jesus. At one point, some of them came to warn him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you (Luke 13:31).”
Such was the danger that always seemed to be one step behind Jesus. But Jesus was determined to make his royal claim according to the prophecies he’d heard in Isaiah, Zechariah, and the Psalms. His calling was to enter Jerusalem on a colt, not a war horse and chariot. Today we’ve heard how the Gospel writer, Mark, describes the scene. Using a complex series of passwords given to inside supporters, Jesus’ disciples obtained just the right humble beast for Jesus to ride into the city. As he approached the gate, the ever-present crowds preceded and followed him, waving palm branches, spreading their cloaks in his path, and shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” It was the perfect time. The Passover was at hand, and Jerusalem would be bursting at the seams with pilgrims from far and wide. Many of them believed or at least hoped that Jesus was the Messiah, and that the great campaign to establish the kingdom of God had begun. Palm Sunday was a success for Jesus.
Fast forward, now, two-thousand years. Sadly, for Alexei Navalny, things did not go as well as they initially seemed to be going for Jesus. In January of 2021, when the Kremlin learned of the crowds gathering at Vnukovo, they diverted Navalny’s flight to another airport, where the authorities arrested him the moment he stepped into the terminal. Navalny would never again know freedom. He was imprisoned in a Siberian facility designed to bruise and crush the spirits of its inmates. There, last month, he died under mysterious circumstances, despite appearing well the day before. Why did he return at all? Was his a suicide mission? No, Navalny did not want to die, even though he knew it was a strong possibility. He wanted to reform the corrupt Russian system from within, and perhaps be elected President himself, in the mode of the South African reformer, Nelson Mandela. Alas, it was not to be. Navalny’s death was a great tragedy, perhaps a crippling blow to his movement.
Likewise, Jesus. Was his a suicide mission? No, Jesus did not want to die, even though he knew it was his destiny to offer his life. Jesus was following in the mode of no earthly ruler or reformer. Rather, his principal guide seems to be the prophet Isaiah, who foretold of a suffering servant of the Lord, whom we heard about in today’s reading (52:13 – 53:12). The servant would bear the griefs and carry the sorrows of God’s people. He would be wounded for their transgressions, and bruised for their iniquities. He would lay down his life as an offering for their sins, and by his stripes, they would be healed. As an observant Jew, Jesus would have read from Isaiah his whole life, and he perceived that the prophet was talking about him. As much as Jesus may have wanted to sidestep his mission, what consumed him instead was a burning passion to be obedient to God’s will. He would enter Jerusalem, confront the ruling religious and political authorities, and lay down his life on the inevitable cross, a perfect offering for the sins of the whole world. The way Jesus read the prophets, his death would be integral to his mission, not an unfortunate tragedy.
Ride on, ride on in majesty!
The angel armies of the sky
look down with sad and wondering eyes
to see the approaching sacrifice.
Many of you know that I teach 5th Grade Bible over at Grace Church School. My task is to give the New Testament to a roomful of 10 and 11-years olds across a semester. It’s a weekly class, which amounts to anywhere from 15-17 sessions, depending on fire drills, holidays, and the whims of school administrators. In one of the first sessions I ask the students to call out the names of famous people, and I write the names on the board. Entertainers, athletes, politicians, even notoriously evil people from history usually round out the list. Then we try to figure out who among them is timely, and who is timeless. Timely people may be widely known in their own day, but history will move on and largely forget them. For example, much to the dismay of the 5th graders, I suggest that Taylor Swift is timely. You can’t escape her image or music today, but in 100 years, to say nothing of 200 years, the world will make little note of her. All of the Swifties will have dispersed. I may be completely wrong, but that’s my prophecy, and I’m sticking to it.
Timeless people, on the other hand, are those whom the world continues to wonder about, and puzzle over long after their careers and even their lives are finished. They broke some mold, or blazed some trail – for good or for ill – that was unforgettable. You can be a timeless person for all the wrong reasons, such as Pontius Pilate. Or, you can become a timeless person for all the right reasons, such as Rosa Parks. Sometimes the choice is not yours. Sometimes you are simply in the right or the wrong place at a pivotal moment, and what you do determines your legacy.
What of Alexei Navalny? Is he timely or timeless? One could argue that he went where he did not have to go, and laid down his life for others, in the hope that oppressed people might live in a free society. If his movement continues, and Russia remarkably is reformed, then Navalny will be timeless. History will be the judge.
What about Jesus? The question I put to the 5th graders is the one I now put to us in our different context. Why are we still talking about Jesus not 100, not 200, but 2,000 years after he entered Jerusalem and died on a cross? Why has his movement continued? Why have his followers not dispersed?
As you know, what comes next in the story raises Jesus into the realm of timelessness. What comes next is that God highly exalts him, and bestows on him the name that is above every name (Philippians 2:9). Fear not that I am jumping the gun, and racing out ahead of where we ought to be on this first day of Holy Week. God’s timelessness is not like our own. God inhabits eternity, yet for his own loving purposes deigns to visit us, dwellers all in time and space.
Thus, for God, every day is an eternal now. For God, every day is Easter. God makes all things new every day. For God, every day is Good Friday. God in Christ forgives the sins of the whole world every day. For God, every day is Palm Sunday. God arrives at the fortress around your heart every day, seeking an entrance. Which is why on any day, but especially today, we gather to greet him, and dare to shout, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”