“Palm Sunday”

Rev Dr. John Shepherd, AM

Readings - Philippians 2:5-11,  Matthew 21:1-9

Whenever we think about God we usually start off thinking that God’s a bit like us. We know that God’s not ‘actually’ like us, but it’s hard to think of anything ‘better than us’ to compare him with – anything superior.  So we think of God as being pretty much ‘like us’, and even though we know that’s not exactly right, it’s probably our best way to start.  And it lets us start like this:  We all have problems. And when we have a problem, we have to find a solution to it. So if God’s a bit like us, we might think of God as having problems, and finding solutions, just like us.

And so we could put it like this. God had to make us in such a way that we would survive.  So He had to give us hunger and thirst, so that we’d know that we had to eat and drink, in order to live.  He had to give us pain, so that we wouldn’t hurt ourselves.  We’d know that fire destroyed us, for example. He also had to give us fear, so that we would avoid danger. And one of the fears that I suppose we all have is fear of things that are more powerful than us – lions, crocodiles, sharks, storms, floods, fires.  And they’re all bigger than us.  But there are smaller things as well – like snakes and spiders, and we have to be wary of them. And people – people who are more powerful than us - tend to frighten us.  And we have to be especially on our guard, even fearful, in order to cope with them. So a rough and ready rule is that anything that’s bigger and more powerful than me, I’m wary of, suspicious of, even afraid of. 

Well, if God’s made us like this – given us fear of great and powerful things to help us survive - then his problem is – how can he possibly relate to us? Because God is, by definition, the greatest and most powerful of all the beings that there ever are, and ever could be - because God’s the Maker of them all.  God’s obviously greater and more powerful than us.  So how can he overcome this fear that He’s already given us of things that are greater and more powerful than us?

And the solution to God’s problem is - he can do it - by scaling himself down.  So God becomes a human being, like us.  But even when he’s become a human being, he chooses not to be a powerful human being.  He doesn’t come as a high priest, a learned man, a writer, a leader, or a popular figure, but as a homeless child in a manger, born of an unmarried mother in a stable. His birth didn’t cause the kings of the earth to tremble – it was witnessed only by a handful of shepherds. The sun wasn’t darkened, and the stars didn’t fall out of the sky – only one was said to shine more brightly.  Then he and his parents were chased out of town by Herod. 

And that’s just the beginning.  During the whole of his ministry, God gradually gets rid of everything that could come between him and us.  He gets rid of status.  He has no power, no authority. He didn’t annihilate the wicked with the sharp two-edged sword of judgement; on the contrary, he befriended shady characters and drop-outs. His family thought he was mad.  The Pharisees thought he was bad.  He was betrayed and deserted by his disciples. He was accused of being a blasphemer.  And instead of being honoured and revered as a King, he was mocked and ridiculed. He’s dressed in a cloak, crowned and given a sceptre.   The Roman soldiers salute him as they would to a King and address him as king. But it’s done in jest.  The crown is made of thorns.  The sceptre is a stick. They spit on him and use the sceptre to hit him on the head. And the deliberate irony is that Jesus is not being mocked for what he’s not.  He’s being mocked for what he actually is.  Mark and his readers believe that Jesus really ‘is’ the King of the Jews.  Matthew in particular goes to a lot of trouble at the beginning of his book to show that Jesus was descended from David along the line of the Kings of Judah and makes sure that Jesus is addressed all through his Gospel as ‘Son of David’.

So Jesus’ sense of self is destroyed.  And in the end, so is his sense of mission. Even of God’s presence.  His last words, according to the writer of the first Gospel, were that God had abandoned him: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’   So Christ ends up – totally bereft, thinking of himself as abandoned by God . And cursed. To be crucified meant to be cursed by God.  ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’, Paul tells the Galatians. (3:13).

He was expected to be a conqueror, but instead he was condemned as a criminal and crucified.  So Christ has got rid of it all – to get to the level at which he can meet us. 

Which means that God can deal with us on the basis, not of our successes, which when we think about it, are pretty few and far between anyway, but on the basis of our failures, which we all have in abundance.Now this doesn’t mean we set out deliberately to be the most abject failures in the world, the most hopeless church community ever, with the smallest congregation, the worst services, the most undrinkable coffee. And it doesn’t mean it’s OK to be careless about relationships, and haphazard in our desire to serve and love others. 

What it does mean, though, is that we don’t have to pretend to be what we’re not.  And we don’t have to think that our weaknesses and failures cut us off from God. In fact, it’s quite likely that God’s more interested in our weaknesses and failures than in what we like to think are our successes.  Who knows, God’s probably totally bored with the lists of successes we come up with.  And how do they really rank anyway?  And let’s imagine that Jesus’ cry of desolation and abandonment from the cross reveals just how close he considered himself to be to God – that he was so close to God that he could share that closely with God his weakness and failure and sense of abandonment– then we can say  that it’s our weakness and failure and our sense of abandonment that gives us permission to talk to God, and for God to relate to us, to talk to us, to get inside us and work with us, and heal us.

And this is all possible because He has associated himself with us at the lowest level, the level of weakness and of failure – and abandonment - all so that we don’t need to be afraid of him.  He got rid of it all – to get to the point where he can most effectively meet us and eventually take us with him to the glory of his triumph over our greatest weakness - that of death. 

To this God then, who for us has gone all the way to the lowest level, to be with us wherever we are - to this God, whom we experience as that glorious Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be all glory, honour, praise and thanksgiving, today and always.  Amen.