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-Palms, Pilate and Protest By The Prince of Peace
By Administrator | March 16, 2008
Palms, Pilate and Protest by the Prince of Peace
a Palm Sunday Sermon
March 16, 2008, at Palm Bay, Fl
by Rev. Scott Elliott
Those of you who are able are invited to raise your hands and move them about your head. Put them down. Now you can all claim you waived “palms” on Palm Sunday!
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner makes the claim that “religion without humor is blasphemy.” 1
I don’t think the good rabbi was referring to preachers making fools out of themselves by tripping on the way up to the pulpit, tripping over scripture, or tripping over goofy theologies.
What I think he meant was that God is in all of life and shines most particularly in the good and the joyful and if we stifle humor in our religion we do a great disservice to God and ourselves. Humor is a good and Godly gift. And to deny it is to deny a part of God’s creation.
Those of you who have been here before have probably figured out by now that I love humor. I look for it everywhere and embrace it whenever I can.
I even used to read the Bible and privately laugh at many of the stories. Stories that I think were meant to be funny.
I did this in private for years out of fear we were not supposed to guffaw while contemplating the Sacred stories of our faith. But in seminary I decided to come out of that comedic canonical closet. Mainly because in seminary I kept seeing more and more humor in the Bible and I began to wonder about a theology of humor.
“Theology” is the study of “divine things or religious truth.” Humor is a “comic [or] absurd situation causing amusement.” 2 So, if you will, a theology of humor amounts to the study of divine things or religious truth in comic and absurd situations.
Frankly as a whole at church we don’t often consider the Bible as full of both religious truths and humor. But it is. Our cultural ethos of piety seems to keep us from seeing or acknowledging it. We tend to check our sense of humor at the church door.
Oh, we laugh at little jokes, but usually we stick with serious views of the Bible. By doing so we miss out on some fun stuff in the Bible. And if God did not put it in there for us to use, what’s it doing there?
Think about it, humans in the bible are often involved in the comic or the absurd. From David donning an over sized suit of armor (1 Sam 17:38) to Balaam’s arguing with a talking donkey (Num 22:28) to Jesus asking how we can see a speck in our neighbor’s eye when we have a log in our own (Matt 7:4), the absurd and the comedic are an integral part of the Bible.
God uses humor to teach. Jesus also used humor to protest and preach.
We can see ourselves in much of humor’s caricatures and we more easily learn from seeing how silly we are, than direct criticism.
But it is more than just teaching, laughter is good for us and apparently for God. Psalm 2:4 states that the God who “sits in the heavens will laugh.” As images of God we also laugh. It is a gift from God, as Job 8:21 notes “God fills our mouth with laughter.” 3
Indeed there is much power in humor. Science has long reported that laughter is healthy. Friends, families and life-long mates share humor together. And so do communities. It helps in our bonding, relieves stress and allows us to share in common a good laugh. I think God laughs with us, and Jesus too as we gather two or more in his name.
But humor does more than make us feel good and teach. Humor can be subversive, if it is used to point out the absurdity of oppressor’s positions, to make the oppressors less than the lofty gods of power they or we might imagine that they are and to give us new vision to alter standards of what is truly powerful.
We know that God acts in ways that are subversive. 4 From the Exodus to the Cross God subverts the status quo, and calls us to do so as well.
God often uses humor to subvert the status quo in the Bible.
Mighty Pharaoh adopts and raises a poor Hebrew child who ends up as Moses the leader of liberation and law.
Mighty Herod is driven nuts in his unsuccessful hunt for a poor little baby born to be a king in a stinking stable.
The rich we envy have about as good a chance of getting to heaven as we have of, oh say, now really picture this, stuffing a camel through the eye of a needle.
The kingdom of heaven is a mustard seed, not a golden palaces on high. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast spreading in flour, not having more wealth than others.
Or imagine this, a bad Hell’s Angels-like Samaritan can be a better neighbor than religious leaders. The story of The Good Samaritan is more than just humorous it calls us to see the world differently. Those we think of as enemies are not only as human as us, but capable of being God’s agent for good.
Putting it in today’s context: a story titled something like “The Good Hell’s Angel,” has got humor to it.
If you have ever seen the Musical Godspell you have experienced a good deal of humor straight from the gospel. Properly done the first act of that show is virtually one punch line after another from the Bible, and if properly done it is also very Love centered and spiritual, as well as scriptural.
If we ignore our culture’s piety it really does not take much to see the humor in Jesus’ stories. For example, in Godspell the story of Lazarus and the rich man plays out just like it can when we read it, with the selfish non-neighbor loving rich guy haughty as all get out before death, and then in death just as haughty, only more foolishly so. Through Jesus’ humor we see that rich man’s selfish conduct is foolish not only in Hades, but in life as well.
And that brings me to today’s reading. I have to give you some background to understand why the Palm Sunday story is not just poignant, and powerful, but, also funny.
It’s the start of Passover week. Everyone who is anybody is arriving in Jerusalem for the celebration. Not just devout celebrants, mind you but rabble rousers and rebels. Not just Jews, but, Roman legions.
Pilate, the Roman governor of Palestine arrives from Caesarea on the Sea (his year round home). He arrives to oversee the added troops and volatile multitudes which gather for Passover.
Pilate’s procession into Jerusalem was no doubt in a stately fashion, mounted on a well groomed horse leading an entourage of spiffed up legions with all the pomp and circumstance and shiny gleaming metal befit a man of worldly power and wealth.
Pilate comes into Jerusalem from the west in an imperial pageantry representing not just imperial power, but, imperial theology. Emperor Augustus was understood to be the Son of God. His father was Apollo and he was conceived by an earthly mother.
Augustus’ successor who reigned during Jesus’s final days was Tiberius who bore the same divine titles as Augustus, so Pilate embodied not only the power of Rome in the worldly reality of the very-few-wealthy-oppress-the-rest social order, but also a rival theology to Judaism, and rival idol gods to Yahweh. 5.
Pilate’s entry to Jerusalem is met – is countered by– Jesus’s supremely ironic and symbolic entry as the representative of a reign in conflict with Rome: the Reign of God. God v. Human Power. Peace v. War. Non-violence v. Violence. Christ v. Caesar. It is met in every way with opposite visual splendors by Jesus and a multitude of adoring followers.
How does Jesus come marching in? Matthew says the disciples”brought [him] the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them!” Lot’s of folks see the description of Jesus riding two animals at once as an oversight or lack of care by Matthew.
Me, well, I am like Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins, I love to laugh and it seems to me a fair read that Matthew is bright enough to get the absurdity of the visual image his words paint. Jesus humbly seated simultaneously somehow astride both a donkey and a colt.
It’s like a circus clown parody, a first century Saturday Night Live lampoon. And it is anything but a pompous promenade in a parade like Pilate’s prancing in on an over-preened pony.
This is an image of Jesus having fun with the over-the-top opulence of the pomp and circumstance of Pilate, by being over the top in his own way, an OPPOSITE WAY to Caesar’s show of authority.
John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg in the book The Last Week suggest that Jesus’s entry to Jerusalem was a staged a political demonstration. What could have been demonstrated?
How about the one that God has chosen as Son of God, the one to reign as Lord is not the one of worldly ways of military might and oppressive wealth. Or that God’s chosen human leader is way, way different than the men who lead Rome.
Jesus comes to people full of fun and life and care. He comes to people who lay before him the very coats off their backs and natural limbs – palms fronds– from God’s creation, a first century Palestine red carpet, if you will .We are told as Jesus entered the city
Jesus on his humble and humourous ride into Jerusalem is understood to be one who can save.
Jesus’s Way of love and non-violence and inclusivity is radically in opposition to Pilate’s show of crushing human power and opulence, Jesus’s extremely different way is understood as the way of salvation.Jesus on his humble and humourous ride into Jerusalem is understood to be one who can save.
Jesus’s Way of love and non-violence and inclusivity is radically in opposition to Pilate’s show of crushing human power and opulence, Jesus’s extremely different way is understood as the way of salvation.
On that first Palm Sunday there was a choice, the same choice we have today. The way of unjust imperial violence offered by the Pilates of the world who dominate by exclusivity, elitism and force; or the radical way of God’s inclusivity who reigns through non-violent justice and love. 7.
Jesus on his humble and humourous ride into Jerusalem is understood to be one who can save.
Jesus’s Way of love and non-violence and inclusivity is radically in opposition to Pilate’s show of crushing human power and opulence, Jesus’s extremely different way is understood as the way of salvation.
On that first Palm Sunday there was a choice, the same choice we have today. The way of unjust imperial violence offered by the Pilates of the world who dominate by exclusivity, elitism and force; or the radical way of God’s inclusivity who reigns through non-violent justice and love.
Jesus can be understood to have made a seriously funny entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, so funny we can smile at it still, so serious it caused the oppressed multitude to yell out “Hosanna!” O SAVE NOW.
Jesus’s joke made his point. Choose Caesar or choose God.
Those yelling “Hosanna” made the joyful sound of choosing God.
We can choose too, to yell out Hosanna!
In fact lets do it. Hold your palms up and wave them! Now on three shout “Hosanna!” 1….2….3 HOSANNA !!!!
AMEN.
–End Notes–1. Kushner, Harold, I recall Rabbi Lawrence Kushner stating this during an interview in Corvallis, Oregon at the “God at 2000″ conference in the winter of 2000.
2. Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (2001),”theology” and ’humor.”
3. I got the ideas and the cites and/or quotes in this paragraph from Lee van Rensburg’s book The Sense of Humor in Scripture, Theology and Worship, (Lima, Ohio:Fairway Press, 1991) 21, 33-34.
4. I got this idea primarily from Yehuda Raddy and Athalya Bremmer’s book On Humour and the Comic in the Hebrew Bible, (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1990), 100.
5. Borg, Marcus, Crossan, Dominic John, The Last Week, (HarperCollins, 2006 ). This book’s chapter on Palm Sunday, (along with Matthew 21:1-11) is the source of the descriptions in this sermon of the parade at either end of Jerusalem. This book gave me the insight and inspiration for a sermon that compared the two contrasting parades and the protest angle to Jesus’s ride. This made me think of Rabbi Kushner’s quote about religion and humor and basically the whole idea that Palm Sunday celebrates Jesus’s cleverly ironic and humorous entry into Jerusalem.
6. Westminister Dictionary of Theological terms “Hosanna.”
7. The Last Week, 215-216
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