Bend Mennonite Church
Palm Sunday, April 5, 2020
Sam Adams
It is Palm Sunday. Jesus makes his way into Jerusalem on a small donkey, crowds lining the road, laying garments before him and waving palm branches. It’s the beginning of holy week, the high point of the Christian year. This is the week when the gospel comes into crisp focus; when we see who Jesus is, see how he confronts the powers, see how they respond, and see what God does in and through Jesus for us. It truly is a holy week, and for millennia the church has gathered together to anticipate, mourn and finally celebrate during this beautiful season.
Today is also the 14th anniversary of our little church and some of us have gathered virtually on computer screens. I’m looking forward to next year when we can gather and the kids in our church can actually wave palm branches in celebration of this occasion! But here we are—or, here I am and there you are. There is no gathering, no palm branches, no crowds shouting or singing, “Hosanna!” We’re staying home, voluntarily isolating so as to avoid making this pandemic so much worse. This raises the question for me, on this particular day, Palm Sunday: How do we proclaim the Lord’s arrival to Jerusalem at the beginning of Holy Week during such a time?
Perhaps it should be noted that pandemics are not new in the church’s experience, although in our short-term memory this year’s coronavirus pandemic feels quite new, novel, even! And, indeed, our understanding of pandemics and the diseases they bring is more advanced than ever before. We understand what is happening in biological, sociological, political, economic, and demographic ways and can communicate these on a minute by minute basis around the globe with immediacy and urgency on a variety of media platforms. We are experiencing it together as a global community in a way the world never has before.
The church participates in this new situation, too. You’re probably reading this on a website, perhaps shared through social media, maybe watching me read it online, live or recorded. If I wanted to, I could link it to some nice music, and even invite you to participate in communion if we could just coordinate a Zoom call and have the bread and wine in front of us at the same time. This raises for me the question: How ought the church respond to this pandemic? What does church look like at this time? How can we be faithful to the one who rode into Jerusalem at the beginning of holy week?
I listened to a couple of church leaders on a podcast this past week remarking how this new situation for the church, with the demand to go online and offer virtual worship experiences, had actually increased, to a dramatic degree, the ‘attendance’ at the weekly services. The increase was not just a few here and there, but by thousands, all measured by “views” recorded on their YouTube channels. One thing they’ve learned from this is that they will always, from here on out, have an online presence.
I’ve been watching commercial TV a lot more now—mostly the news—and am struck by the ads by Christian groups who have seen this as an opportunity to answer the fear and anxiety that exists in our society with their message of personal salvation or at least a renewed focus on God. There does exist a renewed sense of our own mortality and the gospel can be interpreted as an answer to that heightened awareness; it might even be the case that more people are open to considering the gospel during this crisis.
I’ve also been reading a bit about the way the church has historically responded to pandemics. In 1527 the Bubonic Plague arrived in Wittenberg. A decade after Martin Luther pinned his protest to the door at the church there, the plague was wreaking havoc across Europe and Luther had to confront the question of the proper Christian response to that pandemic. Listen to what he writes to Johann Hess at Breslau in response to the question whether or not one ought to flee the plague:
Use medicine; take potions which can help you; fumigate house, yard, and street; shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence or has recovered, and act like a man who wants to help put out the burning city. What else is the epidemic but a fire which instead of consuming wood and straw devours life and body? You ought to think this way: “Very well, by God’s decree the enemy has sent us poison and deadly offal. Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above.” See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.
It should be noted that Luther assumes that someone who has recovered from the plague is to be avoided. I suspect today he would recognize that those who have recovered, after a certain time, actually have immunity and needn’t be avoided. He also believed that the plague was spread through the help of demons—but such was the state of epidemiological knowledge 500 years ago. For Luther, as for the church through two-thousand years of pandemics, the issue was not one of opportunity for church growth, but of loving our neighbor.
This I well know, that if it were Christ or his mother who were laid low by illness, everybody would be so solicitous and would gladly become a servant or helper. Everyone would want to be bold and fearless; nobody would flee but everyone would come running. And yet they don’t hear what Christ himself says, “As you did to one of the least of these you did it to me” [Matt. 25:40]….If you wish to serve Christ and to wait on him, very well, you have your sick neighbor close at hand. Go to him and serve him, and you will surely find Christ in him, not outwardly, but in his word.
The crisis for the church in a time of pandemic is not whether or not we will take an opportunistic posture toward a community newly ready to accept our message. Rather, the crisis is how we can be a community knit together as a body, in service of the suffering world around us. How can we love this suffering world? Palm Sunday opens us to holy week, the week when God shows us what it means to love a suffering world.
In a significant way, Palm Sunday is a mirror of advent season. It is the arrival of God to the people of God, the holy city of Jerusalem. It is the Messiah arriving to the city of kings, where in the temple God has a throne, right there, in the holy of holies. In this sense, it truly is a triumphal entry. However, Palm Sunday, as the beginning of holy week, cannot be celebrated without one eye glancing toward Friday. Through the waving palm branches we glimpse the hill outside the walls where Jesus will be proclaimed king in a new way; from palm branches to a sign nailed to a cross: the king of the Jews.
The fanfare that welcomes Jesus—present in our day as much as in his own—is not necessarily a sign that those waving the branches have a clue what is really going on. Jesus knows this as he enters the city.
This is worth noting: In Mark’s account, Jesus gets the donkey and approaches the city where the crowds then greet him. In John’s account, the crowds hear that he’s coming, and, in response, Jesus gets a donkey. In an important twist, he confronts their expectations head on and turns them on their head. This is what God is doing when God shows up, when God arrives. God is confronting our expectations with the sheer reality of who God is. This is the God worthy of Hosannas, but it is in his humility that those Hosannas are received.
A local church has been advertising on TV that the virus is a great equalizer. It affects all equally: young and old, rich and poor, etc. So too, hope. There is hope for all, equally. Such is what we would expect when the Messiah comes. It’s a nice message but so much more needs to be said. As the great New Testament theologian, Ernst Käsemann writes,
To put it pointedly, the Father of Jesus Christ, in whose revelation alone we learn the truth about him, our neighbors, and ourselves, is in opposition to what we require of earthly justice. [God’s justice] is thoroughly partisan. The Beatitudes tell us this. God resists the proud and descends to the poor, the shattered, the despised of the earth. None could be saved if he were impartially just. The whole world would otherwise be lost, a world that we even today can see is an inferno for the majority of its inhabitants.
God’s justice, God’s partiality, in a time of pandemic, is not a mild presence settling in the comfortable space where we are all brought together as one people, e pluribus unum. God’s gospel, the good news, in a time of pandemic is radically for the one who is suffering, who is left behind. This is not just the old, the young, and those brought down by the disease. It is also the immigrant who picks our fruit and has no recourse to a multi-trillion dollar aid package, the laborer who stocks our shelves and supports her parents who are both out of work, the prisoner stuck in a legal system that has been dramatically slowed down, the homeless who are forgotten and don’t have recourse to Zoom meetings, and the undocumented afraid of deportation, disease, and hunger.
God doesn’t come to us to grow our churches, fill our virtual pews, or make us feel good about our collective efforts. God comes to us to send us out to those we have forgotten about and ignored. In the words of Mary, as we often sing together,
I proclaim the pow’r of God
You do marvels for your servants
Though you scatter the proud-hearted
And destroy the might of princes
To the hungry you give food
Send the rich away empty
In your mercy you are mindful
Of the people you have chosen
I don’t hold myself up as a model of what this looks like. Rather, I am humbled by the calling of Christ to bring hope to those who are forgotten. I don’t know what this looks like at this time. But I know where Christ is going on this Palm Sunday.