From "Hosanna!" to Crucify him!"

Luke 19:28-40

28 After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.

    29 When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, 30 saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’ ” 32 So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. 33 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” 34 They said, “The Lord needs it.” 35 Then they brought it to Jesus, and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. 36 As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. 37 Now as he was approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, 38 saying,

     “Blessed is the king    who comes in the name of the Lord!      Peace in heaven,    and glory in the highest heaven!”

39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” 40 He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

Palm Sunday is odd.  I remember being a bit confused as a child when we would sing triumphant songs and wave palm branches around, then a few days later we’d be in the dark talking about how Jesus got nailed to the cross.  How do you get from there to here?   How do we get from crowds yelling “Hosanna!” to crowds yelling “Crucify him!”?  

One possible answer is that these are simply different crowds, one wishing his exaltation, one wishing his humiliation.  It’s impossible to say one way or another, but the fact that Jesus died alone - even his own disciples had scattered - strongly suggests that whatever hopes people had placed in Jesus quickly faded.  Another possible answer is that the religious authorities managed to turn public opinion against him.  A plausible theory - but then how could they be so easily persuaded?  

If you’re trying to reconstruct what actually might’ve happened, the likeliest explanation, to my mind, is that the crowds genuinely hoped that Jesus was the king, the son of David, who would overthrow the Roman occupiers and deliver God’s people, establishing a new, never-ending kingdom, but then it soon became apparent that Jesus was no political revolutionary and, rather than triumphing over the authorities, he soon found himself subject to them.  

Perhaps the best explanation of how we get from “Hosanna!” to “Crucify him” is that the crowds felt somehow betrayed by Jesus, found themselves feeling foolish for having gotten their hopes up, and condemned him for not being who they wanted him to be.  So at his crucifixion the crowds mock Jesus for being a fake king, a deluded man who met a fitting end.  

Palm Sunday is an ironic day.  Irony is not an attribute we usually ascribe to Scripture, but we cannot really understand this passage without it.  

The fact that Jesus enters Jerusalem riding a donkey fulfills Scripture (Zechariah 9:9), of course, but it remains somewhat comical that these folks shouting Hosanna imagine that this guy is going to topple the empire.  What about this picture suggests military triumph?  Nevertheless the crowds, apparently see what they want to see, and somehow convince themselves that Jesus fits the mold they’ve cast for the messiah.   They declare him the king, the one who comes in the name of the Lord - and they are right! - but they do not understand what they are saying.  They speak true words without knowing their true meaning.  Jesus is indeed a king, but nothing like they expected, like they wanted, even if in retrospect we think it’s obvious that they should’ve known better.  

In this season of reflection and repentance, we ought to consider if our own praise of Jesus is unwittingly ironic as well.  That we proclaim things without fully understanding them is something we take for granted in this community, but might we also, like those crowds, fundamentally misunderstand what it means for Jesus to be king?  Might we get fundamentally wrong who he is and what he’s here to do.  

We might ask if, to some extent, we are like those people who have gone from yelling “Hosanna” to those yelling “crucify him”?  One of the buzzwords in the Christian subculture, I’ve gathered, is that people are undergoing “deconstruction” of their faith.  You’ll hear various Christian musicians or other minor ex-evangelical celebrities claim that they are “deconstructing”, often with some ambivalence about whether they even hope to put the pieces of faith back together.  I suspect some of you might identify with this little movement, but even if not, I imagine that just about all of us who grew up in the faith have, in some way or another, journeyed from where we began, and we now understand ourselves to have a truer faith - or, perhaps even might say - a more realistic one.  

The truth is that faith in Jesus often disappoints us.  You grow up thinking - or maybe you convert thinking - that Jesus will solve your problems, make your dreams come true, provide peace and comfort, answers to all your questions, protection from mishaps, insures a long and prosperous life.  Then you discover - at least if and when you open your eyes to the obvious - that not everything seems to be working as you were led to believe, that you encounter significant tension between reality as it was presented and reality as you actually experience it, that the answers seem inadequate, the paradigm doesn’t fit, the worldview obscures more than it reveals.  

Much like the crowds who had a faulty picture of what to expect from their messiah, many of us have a faulty picture of who Jesus was, is, and will be.  And just as their conception could not withstand an encounter with the harsh realities of life, so too have many Christians found themselves in a position where the options seem to be either to continue believing certain teachings despite contrary evidence or seriously to question the very foundations upon which their faith has been constructed.  To be clear, we are right to question if what we have been taught is true - including here - but a major problem arises when we don’t have an alternative conception of what the faith might actually be all about.  Like the disillusioned crowds, we easily feel our own sense of embarrassment at our former beliefs which easily produces cynicism about faith in general.  We find ourselves identifying more with those who yelled “crucify him”.  

This movement from “Hosanna!” to “Crucify him!” also provides a useful way of thinking about the  history of Western Civilization.  For centuries Jesus was received as if it were permanently Palm Sunday, as if he were indeed the one who comes in the name of the Lord, though the expectations of those singing his praises often bore little resemblance to what he had said and done.  Christendom was hardly an exemplary embodiment of Christ himself, though we carried along for quite a while with a religion into which Jesus often did not fit comfortably.   The usual way of telling the story, from the perspective of “the faithful” is to say that modern people rebelled against the faith, rejected any authority, exchanged the one true God for idols.  From the perspective of the fully-secularized modern person, the old faith is antiquated, retrograde nonsense which couldn’t withstand an encounter with reality (as principally revealed by science).  In the West it is now very much Good Friday.   Christ has been shown to be an impostor, the claims made about him revealed to be wishful thinking, the peoples that once praised him now mock him. We are disillusioned with faith itself.  

In this little allegory, could Easter ever come for Western Civilization, could those people who once cried “Hosanna!” but who now shout “Crucify him” once again worship the crucified and risen Lord?  If so, their/our journey will look something like those who lived that first Holy Week, as their conceptions, broken by experience, gave way to a new and better hope.  Jesus was indeed the answer, but not to the questions they were asking.  In our age everyone thinks that know what religion is for, what problems it addresses, what questions it attempts to answer.  That paradigm has been rejected, but perhaps this is not to be lamented, perhaps it is even necessary for true faith to flourish once more. 

As Jesus hung on the cross anyone would’ve concluded that he was irrelevant, soon to be forgotten, just one in a long line of pretenders.  It was only upon his resurrection that the disillusioned and disbelieving could see him a new light - it was then that they could begin to see clearly who he was and who God must be.  And the nature of their hope shifted from their own provincial concerns to the destiny of humanity itself.  Through Jesus they gained only new way of seeing and experiencing reality.  

That many people - including perhaps, some of us - have deconstructed or even rejected the faith is not necessarily bad news.  To reject what is false or inadequate is good and right.  And it even presents us an opportunity to relearn what we thought we already knew.  That’s my hope for this community.  If we’re asking the right questions then Jesus remains the best answer, not just for us, but for the world.  The persistent challenge before us is to receive Jesus as he was, not merely as we would have him be.  He was always going to be humble, riding on donkey, and we shouldn’t forget it.