Fortress Around Your Heart
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FORTRESS AROUND YOUR HEART
The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
Palm Sunday + April 13, 2025
“Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” (Luke 19:38)
Over the past few weeks, many people have looked at the state of the world, and they have been inclined to throw up their hands in despair. The stock market, the climate, the nastiness, the measles: that does it. “Calgon, take me away,” cried the woman in the bubble-bath commercial of old. Every so often, however, history records the deeds of someone who decides that retreating into a bubble-bath is an insufficient response to the woes of humanity.
Take, for example, Mathias Rust. In 1987, Rust was a 19-year old West German citizen who cared passionately about world peace. He was deeply disappointed when a summit meeting between the Russians and the Americans failed to achieve any reduction in nuclear arms. Thus he determined that he himself would have to do something about it. Rust was an amateur pilot, so his plan was to fly himself to Moscow, come face to face with the Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, and personally deliver a 20-page peace manifesto that he’d written. The only problem: making an unauthorized, solo flight to Moscow would be suicide. Moscow was one of the most heavily defended cities in the world. The Russians were known to shoot down any planes that strayed into their air space, including a Korean Airlines jumbo jet full of passengers a few years earlier.
Nevertheless, Rust concluded that undertaking his mission was worth risking even life itself. So on May 28, 1987 he turned his rented, single-engine Cessna toward Moscow. Deeper and deeper he flew into Russian airspace. Along the way several MiG fighter jets checked him out, but remarkably never fired. After five hours Rust had miraculously slipped through all air defenses, and approached Moscow. He circled the city until he found Red Square. Muscovites on the ground looked up, and saw through the mist a small private plane descending from the clouds. It was an odd sight, to say the least, as ownership of private aircraft was extremely rare in Soviet Russia. Some thought it might be Gorbachev himself. But no, it was Mathias Rust. He came in low looking for a place to land so as not to injure any pedestrians. With each pass he drew more and more attention from excited Muscovites below. When he finally touched down, he taxied his little craft essentially to the steps of the Kremlin. He climbed out of the cockpit and received the welcome of a crowd that gathered around the plane to cheer and greet him. It took over two hours for the police to figure out that something was amiss, and come to arrest the pilot. The flight of Mathias Rust to the very heart of Moscow stunned the world, and some say it hastened the demise of the Soviet Union.
Or take, for example, Jesus of Nazareth, who in or about the year 29 AD was a 33-year old itinerate preacher throughout the region of Galilee. When Jesus entered Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, the city was a heavily defended, hostile place. Jerusalem was occupied by the Romans, the undisputed superpower of the world at the time. The Romans had a means for dealing with insurrectionists. It was called crucifixion. They would line the roadways outside the city with crosses to make a public example of guilty rebels. As Jesus drew near he might well have passed by the dead and dying victims of Roman justice. Jerusalem was also the seat of religious power, with a huge Temple hierarchy that was heavily invested in maintaining the status quo, even if it meant colluding with the Roman occupiers.
Jerusalem was a tinderbox of revolutionary fervor. It was the time of Passover, when the population of the walled city would swell from fifty-thousand to as many as two-million pilgrims, many of whom were inclined to throw up their hands in despair over the state of the world. The Romans, the taxes, the crucifixions, the nastiness: that does it! Hosanna, Son of David, take us away! They were looking for a messiah to spark the rebellion that would save them. It’s no wonder that when Jesus drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.” (Luke 19:41-42)
In 1987, when Mathias Rust flew right through the Russian air defenses and touched down in Red Square, he did so not in a stealth bomber, not in a supersonic fighter jet, but in an unarmed private plane with a top speed of 140 mph. It’s not that the authorities didn’t notice Rust. They did. They tracked him on radar, they pulled up alongside him, they tried to contact him on radio. Some say the military was skittish about shooting down another civilian plane, and causing more international outrage. Likewise, the Gospels tell us that when Jesus entered Jerusalem he did so not in a war chariot, not astride a mighty steed, but riding on a donkey. It’s not that the Romans and Temple officials didn’t notice him. They did. On the long journey to Jerusalem the Jews had sent delegations of Scribes and Pharisees to monitor his progress, and hopefully trick him into saying something that would be cause for his arrest. But the soldiers and Temple guards were skittish about seizing the popular preacher in public, fearing that doing so might incite a riot.
Somehow, Jesus managed to pass through the midst of them every time, especially on this day when he arrived at the gates of the city. Later he would clear the Temple of the money changers, hold court there with his teachings, and by week’s end come face-to-face with the local ruling powers: face-to-face with the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, face-to-face with the puppet king Herod, face-to-face with the High Priest Caiaphas. Fearsome figures, indeed.
What were they thinking? What did these two high flying daredevils hope to accomplish? Mathias Rust said he wanted to build an imaginary bridge between East and West. He wanted to come face-to-face with Mikhail Gorbachev and speak to the world leader of the things that make for peace. To get there he chose to ride a humble little airplane because that was all he knew how to fly, and nothing else was available to him. Was he idealistic? Of course. Rust himself thought he had about a 50-50 chance of getting through, which were odds no bookmaker would have given. He never did get a meeting with Gorbachev, but the Russian President used the incident to clean house, and fire the recalcitrant members of his military who were stuck in Cold War ways. Thus, it can be said that Mathias Rust’s mission was more successful than he ever could have hoped it would be. As for Rust himself, he was convicted of malicious hooliganism, and spent 15 months in a Russian jail before being sent home. Later, he had run ins with the law back in Germany before settling down as a Yoga instructor and a financial analyst. So end the comparisons between Mathias Rust and Jesus!
What about Jesus and his mission? What was he thinking? With Jesus, we encounter not an idealist who gave himself a 50-50 chance, but rather a realist who seemed to think he had a 100-percent chance of being nailed to a Roman cross. What is more, he chose a humble beast to ride into the city not because nothing more impressive was available, but instead for its symbolic value. The Gospel writers reveal how Jesus took great care to secure the particular donkey he rode in order to fulfill the ancient prophecy of Zechariah (9:9): Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! 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. Jesus didn’t come as an idealistic emissary of peace, but as a king making a royal claim in the face of Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, and all who cheered him. But what kind of a king? Did he want to wield Pilate’s temporal power? Did he want to wear the robes of the Temple High Priest, or the crown of the King of the Jews? I don’t think he did. “My kingdom, “ he would say to Pilate, “is not of this world.” Ultimately, the defenses that Jesus worked to slip through were not the visible battlements, barricades, and checkpoints of a city, but rather, the fortress around the human heart.
Palm Sunday should worry us. Most of the time we in the church tend to think of ourselves as co-pilots with Jesus on his mission to bring peace and reconciliation to the earth. I would say that for fifty-one weeks of the year, the metaphor works. Fifty-one weeks, mind you, not fifty-two. Holy Week turns the tables on us. On Palm Sunday we look up and Jesus comes with clouds, descending through the mist of time. Suddenly, Jerusalem is us. Jerusalem is the inner depths of the human heart, yours and mine. The heavily defended fortress that Jesus is circling is us. At the beginning of the service the procession of palms went around and around the church. If our liturgical action means anything at all, it is to signify Jesus, the Messiah’s, circling and searching our souls for a place to land.
Many people these days have no desire whatsoever to wave him in, any more than Pilate or Caiaphas wanted Jesus in Jerusalem, any more than the Russians wanted Rust in Moscow. Many people – sadly, not here today – want nothing to do with God. Sometimes they make an understandable point. Here comes God the omnipotent who allows the wicked to prosper and the innocent to suffer. Here comes God who is love, but God who is also silent when his children call, and absent when they need him to intervene. God, if there is a God, they say, has some explaining to do. As God’s promised Messiah, Jesus owes us no explanations. He has no apologies to make. Yet we can’t get God completely off the hook for the way things are. Oh, you say, sin is the problem – not God. Adam and Eve obeyed the serpent and disobeyed God and that’s why God’s perfect creation went awry. Yes, but who put the serpent in God’s perfect garden in the first place? Life is a game we’re forced to play but cannot win. Is it any wonder, then, why people are hostile to God, and would sooner shoot him down – or nail him to a cross – before allowing him to touch down and taxi close to their soul?
About the time when Mathias Rust made his notorious flight, and Calgon was running its bubble-bath commercials, one of the most popular singers of the day was a British musician named Gordon Sumner. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because even Gordon Sumner’s mother called him Sting. In 1985 Sting released an album that included a song entitled, Fortress Around Your Heart. The song is Sting’s autobiographical lament over the failure of his first marriage. He seems to recognize how his own actions hardened his ex-wife’s heart against him. And so he sings:
And if I built this fortress around your heart,
encircled you in trenches and barbed wire,
then let me build a bridge,
for I cannot fill the chasm.
Let me set the battlements on fire.
I may be stretching things a bit here, but it seems to me that a similar dynamic might have been in the forefront of Jesus’ thinking. The human heart has a fortress around it, and it seems to many that God himself has had a hand in building it. But Palm Sunday can be a new beginning between you and God, if you drop your defenses and wave him in.
Consider that the one who entered Jerusalem came to build a bridge between God and God’s people, so that they and we, then and now can proclaim, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”