Political Stories

Mark 11

Palm Sunday 2018

Throughout the season of Lent we have spent time during worship engaging some embodied prayer practices, ranging from prayers around the baptismal font to planting seeds to walking the labyrinth up in the chancel, among others. I am particularly fond of labyrinth walking, and I have taken advantage of having our labyrinth laid out since Ash Wednesday walking it several times each week.

As a Lenten spiritual practice, the labyrinth works well for me. To walk a labyrinth you have to pay close attention to your own steps, so it lends itself easily to the idea of a journey inward, a time of self-reflection, of tending to the well-being of one’s own soul, of listening for that still, small voice of God calling to you.

One would never confuse walking a labyrinth with being in a parade. Palm Sunday, with its triumphal approach to the city, invites us to lift our eyes and begins to call us out of ourselves and into the wider world.

I’ll pause right here to note that none of this journey inward/journey outward rhythm ought to be fixed artificially to the church calendar or any other calendar. There are no perfect times for any of this, just seasons in our own lives, the life of the community, and the life of the wider world that call forth particular responses from each of us.

The journey inward/journey outward rhythm, in fact, is more like breathing – its rhythm is constant and its practices essential to life.

Nevertheless, I’ve been intentionally reflective in recent weeks, watching with particular care the path right in front of me, keeping my eyes focused on the next step. I’ve been doing so with regard to my own journey and to our communal one as well.

And having walked with my vision focused inward for a number of weeks, I now find myself having stumbled straight into Holy Week. Sometimes we can get so focused on where we are that we lose sight of where we are going.

The parade of palms, the shouts of “hosanna!,” the canted hymn “blessed is the One who comes in the name of the lord!” are all ways of insisting that we wake up, that we lift up our heads, that we pay attention to what is going on not only within us, but also around us.

The original parade of palms, after all, was not a liturgical observance. It wasn’t some quaint religious rite with no consequence. It was political street theater designed to provoke the authorities and undermine their power.

Riding to the city’s gates on a donkey punctured the self-inflated ego of military leaders who paraded through those same gates on war-horses. Walking into the temple to take a good look around, as Jesus does immediately after the Palm Sunday parade in Mark’s account, seems likely to have been a bit of reconnaissance prior to the direct action in the temple the following day. If this Jesus – King of the Jews – was to be ruler he was clearly imagining a different kind of reign and seizing a differing kind of power.

That his power and reign would be different does not mean that they would not be political. That is to say, this direct action campaign in Mark’s gospel was aimed at particular seats and structures of power and, specifically, Jesus aimed at systems that abused and disenfranchised the poor, women, and the ritually unclean. In other words, Jesus was taking aim at systems that took advantage of the marginalized and kept them in their place.

Reading this text compels me to lift up my head and take a good look around, to step out of the labyrinth and into the march. I can imagine the signs in that march: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” or “Love your neighbor – your poor neighbor” or “Welcome the stranger for you were a stranger once” or, simply “Do Justice.” Heck, some particularly smart-ass disciples might have come marching in waving signs reading: “Woe to you: You brood of vipers.”

The gospel of Jesus the Christ is a political story from start to finish; it demeans the text and diminishes the faith to claim otherwise. The question, of course, is what kind of politics?

I have said it often from this pulpit, and it bears repeating: God is not a Republican … or a Democrat. The story of Jesus is simply much larger than small-bore partisan politics. There is not a liberal education or taxation or defense policy that is Christian and a conservative education or taxation or defense policy that is not, nor vices to all those versas, as it were.

At the same time, Jesus did not come to Jerusalem and confront the powers that be of this world simply to say to his followers, “all this stuff I’m been teaching you about justice is about the next world and it has nothing to do with this world.” Indeed, had that been Jesus’ message, the powers that be in this world would have said, “oh, hey, that Jesus is alright with us.”

That’s not what the story says, because that’s not what happened. The powers that be in this world wanted Jesus dead.

They wanted him dead because he threatened their power. They wanted him dead because he threatened their position. They wanted him dead because he wanted them gone.

While the story of Jesus is much larger than our small-bore partisan politics, the values at the core of the politics of Jesus speak directly to our politics, and the first thing they say is, “think larger.”

That was perhaps the first thing the politics of Jesus said to his own contemporaries: think larger. Your politics are too small. Your vision is too narrow. Your imagination is … well, you lack any.

Throughout Mark’s gospel Jesus continuously prods his followers to lift their eyes, to refocus their vision, to expand their imagination, to get a new mind for a new time.

The weird little anecdote about the withered fig tree that follows directly on Mark’s account of the entry to Jerusalem underscores this. Figs were a symbol of peace and prosperity – everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one will make them afraid, as Micah put it. Heading into Jerusalem, where this direct action campaign will confront the temple authorities, Jesus points to the fig tree and says, in effect, don’t look to the traditional authorities, the powers that be, to provide the peace you seek. It is not their time, it is our time.

In other words, lift up your heads. Think bigger.

If we are to imagine a politics of Jesus in our time we must lift up our heads and think bigger. It is abundantly clear that the peace we seek, the justice we seek, the equal treatment before the law that we seek will not come from politics as usual in our time. That fig tree has withered.

If we lift up our heads, if we think larger, if we get a new mind equal to the challenges of our time, what will that look like? What would a politics of Jesus look like in this moment?

It’s really not that complicated. Politics is, as the roots of the word indicate, about ordering the city – it’s about the shape and distribution of power to create the commonweal. The politics of Jesus in this – or any – time share these fundamental convictions:

·      Every policy focuses first on the needs of the least powerful members of a community. Jesus didn’t turn over the tables and drive out the money changers to get business out of the temple, he did it because those economic practices exploited and abused the poor, the widows, and the ritually unclean.

·      Every voice matters in all decisions, but the voices of the least matter most for God has a preferential option for the poor. After all, the Spirit of the Lord fell upon Jesus ordaining him to preach good news to the poor not tax breaks to the wealthy.

·      Power is exercised only through nonviolence, for, as Dr. King put it, “power without love is reckless and abusive.” In the garden, at the moment of his arrest, Jesus said to his followers, “put away your sword.”

·      Truth matters, for, as Jesus put it, truth will set you free, and, as the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) insists, “truth is in order to goodness.”

We live in an age when national discourse is dominated by pernicious disregard for the truth, when our national leaders have demonstrated continuously that national policy will ignore the needs of the poor in favor of easing taxes on the wealthy, when disenfranchising the least powerful voters is blatant political strategy and giving voice to massive corporations and financial institutions is politics as usual for Republicans and Democrats alike, and when state-sanctioned violence at every level of government is the order of the day.

In such a context, it should be clear, articulating a politics of Jesus is daunting and dangerous. Looking for such a politics from within our current political system and structures is not likely to be any more fruitful than looking for figs from a withered tree. Moreover, building such a politics inevitably entails challenging the powers and principalities, and they are no more likely to appreciate such challenge in our time than were the high priests and temple officials of Jesus’ time.

All of which is to say, looming in the background of our parades and our politics, stands the cross. Its presence, as reminder of the consequences of challenging the powers and principalities, is certainly one of the reasons that so many of us prefer to keep our heads down, our eyes on our own next small step trying to stay within the lines of the labyrinth before us, our imaginations carefully circumscribed.

We may harbor dreams. We may even put them on some signs and carry them out along a parade route. But when the cross comes more clearly into view, most of us rush to set aside the dreams and cast the signs into the dustbin of history.

Our loud “hosannas!” turn so quickly into cries of “crucify him!”

As followers of the crucified one, we are left in the garden without the energy to stay awake to the profound challenge of our time. We enter holy week, longing to rush to Easter, unable to remain awake, unwilling to confront the cross.

Let us pray.