Juxtaposition Sunday

"Juxtaposition" was one of Mr. Morrison's favorite words. He was one of my High School English teachers. And it became one of my favorite words for a while. It means to put 2 things together for the purposes of comparison and often for contrast. He used it in a literary sense, regarding themes in novels or images in poems. But it could be used for ideas as well, and that's how I liked to use it. I was discovering philosophy and I thought juxtaposing 2 nearly contradictory observations worked better at encompassing the complexity of reality than the usual habit even of great thinkers, which consisted of reducing everything to one main idea.

Since this day can be called both Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday, one could almost add a third name, in the manner of Miami streets, and call it Juxtaposition Sunday. Because we are simultaneously celebrating 2 rather disparate events in the life of Christ: his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his crucifixion a week later. And it is rather instructive to compare and contrast the two.

Jesus' entry into Jerusalem comes first chronologically and so we'll treat it first. Most of Jesus' ministry took place in Galilee, which the cosmopolitan residents of Jerusalem saw as a bit of a backwater. I once made the mistake of saying people saw the disciples as "hillbillies," not realizing that that is now considered by some folks from rural states as a politically incorrect term of derision. "Rednecks" then. My point was that the folks from Jerusalem would look down on them, as urban people usually do toward rural folks. But news of Jesus' healing and miracles, coupled with his spiritually and morally astute if unorthodox teachings, made him an intriguing figure. And after raising Lazarus, just 2 miles away in Bethany, Jesus had garnered a lot of interest in the Capital. Not all of it was healthy.

Jesus had been dogged by Pharisee and Herodian critics even in Galilee. In Jerusalem, he made enemies of the Sadducees, the priestly class. Furthermore, Passover was practically here. Passover is a celebration of liberation and freedom. This made the Romans nervous and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor or procurator of Judea, whose headquarters was in the more paganized coastal city of Caesarea, stayed in Jerusalem during the feast to dampen revolutionary sentiments. So Jesus' following was viewed with alarm by the priests. If Jesus declared himself the Messiah and led an uprising against the Roman occupation, the priests had no illusions: Rome would destroy their country. Caiaphas, the High Priest, who served at the tolerance of Rome, was a master at political expediency. He suggested that it would be better for one man to die for the people than for the whole nation to perish. But they would rather not make a move during Passover because the people loved Jesus.

It was the common people who were cheering Jesus as he entered Jerusalem on a donkey's colt. I doubt many of them knew that he was fulfilling an obscure prophesy of Zechariah. All they knew was that this celebrated healer and teacher was coming into the city. They cut down branches and threw down robes so he could enter on a sort of improvised red carpet. And no doubt many did think him to be the Messiah because according to Luke  they were shouting, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" This naturally made the religious leaders uncomfortable and they told Jesus to rebuke his disciples. But Jesus said, "If they are silent, the very stones will cry out."    

Contrast this with our passion narrative. The term of Messiah or King is applied to Jesus not in acclamation but as an accusation. And later as mockery. And he has no snappy comebacks but is silent before his accusers. He is not being blessed but cursed. He is not being welcomed into the city, carried by a colt but he is being led out of it, carrying a cross.

How could this happen in the short space of a week? How could the crowds that called for his reign at its beginning turn around and call for his blood at the end?

On that point, we can venture to suggest that they were not the same crowds. Throughout the week, we see no change in the admiration of the average Jew for Jesus. All of the animosity is coming from the religious leaders. But the main clue is the timing. John tells us that Jesus was marched before Pilate on the Day of Preparation, the day, in other words, when everyone was taking their lambs to the temple be slaughtered in time to roast for Passover. So no average Jew was hanging around the Antonia Fortress, wondering what Pilate was up to. He was getting his lamb sacrificed at the temple next door. Where, then, did the crowd crying for crucifixion come from?

I have to concur with Albert Ross, who in his book Who Moved the Stone?, written under the pen name Frank Morrison, suggested that the crowd was made up of the Sanhedrin and members of Caiaphas' household. Relations between Caiaphas and Pilate were never good. Had he and a handful of priests brought Jesus over, it is quite possible Pilate would have overturned the Sanhedrin's verdict out of spite. He nearly did so as it was. But if they whipped up some sort of crowd to back up their accusations, people worked up enough to look like they might become an angry mob, that might persuade Pilate. And this explains why they were so adamant on Jesus being executed and why they chose Barabbas over Jesus. And it explains why when the procurator still wavered, they brought up the rather politically astute accusation that not killing a person who proclaimed himself a king was tantamount to treason against Caesar. Caiaphas would have known that Pilate's sponsor Sejanus was accused of treason, putting Pilate on thin ice with the Emperor. The average Jew would not have known this. The campaign for Jesus' death was not a grassroots movement among the people but what they call in modern politics an Astroturf movement, political insiders masquerading as the will of the people.

And so 2 more things are juxtaposed: the cheering of Jesus by the average person and the jeering of him by an elite inner circle of the powerful.

But there is a greater juxtaposition going on this Sunday: it is the contrast of the two versions of glory. The worldly one is close to what Palm Sunday looked like: people praising Jesus and doing special things for him. When we think of glory we think of people at their best, looking good and surrounded by admirers. But in John's gospel it becomes obvious that Jesus' real glory was to be lifted up on the cross. People are making fun of Jesus and treating him badly. It doesn't look glorious to us. But a lot of glorious moments don't. At least those moments for which we should praise people and give them glory. Giving birth, for instance: very messy, very unglamorous. But in retrospect, glorious. Raising children in general is messy and unglamorous and yet glorious. Surgery to save someone's life can be nauseating to watch but is a glorious undertaking. Jesus' violent death was bloody and painful. Its ultra-realistic depiction in The Passion of the Christ is why I can't recommend that very well-made movie to most folks.  If you can't stomach brutality and violence in movies, don't see it. I know a soldier who couldn't deal with it. It reminded him too much of what he had seen overseas. But Jesus did it to save us and so it is glorious.

Often what we think is a person's moment of glory is really the culmination of a lot of long, hard and frequently mundane work. An athlete's win in an Olympic sport is based upon tens of thousands of hours of grueling exercise, practice and discipline. A scientific breakthrough requires a lot of close reasoning, well thought-out experimentation, sharp observation and detailed documentation, repeated obsessively over years or even decades. Even what Jesus accomplished was not begun on the cross. It began in his childhood as he took in the realities of life as a member of a poor family. He soaked in like a sponge the details of the lives of his friends and neighbors: the vineyard owner, the farmer, the shepherd, the hired hand, the domestic slave, the housewife, which became material for his parables. He absorbed the Torah studies offered at the local synagogue, developing his own views and interpretations of the scriptures. Once he began his ministry, he paid attention to the followers who gathered around him, selecting 12 to be his special students. He drilled into them a new way of looking at God's kingdom and the Messiah's mission. All of this was necessary so that they would be able to grasp the significance of his death and resurrection, if only afterward, and to spread God's good news to the ends of the world.

One last juxtaposition: that of two ways of getting things wrong. When Jesus entered Jerusalem on that donkey, people got caught up in the fervor and probably thought that he was the kind of Messiah they wanted: a holy warrior king. That's what the chief priests and Pharisees were afraid of as well. And they all were wrong. On Good Friday, the chief priests and all who watched thought Jesus was a false Messiah and a failure. His followers thought this was the end of him and of the movement he led. And they all were wrong.

Aristotle's golden mean is a method for locating a virtue somewhere between 2 vices that represent extremes. For instance, bravery could be said to lie between cowardice and recklessness. But it can also be used to find the truth between 2 opposite errors. Jesus was not the popular version of the Messiah, but neither was he a failure for dying a humiliating death on the cross. Rather than ushering in a material kingdom of God based on shedding the blood of those unwilling to go along with him, Jesus was ushering in a spiritual kingdom based on shedding his blood for those willing to commit themselves to him.

Before you can change the world, you have to change the hearts of people. None of the political empires that existed 2000 years ago are still around. Egypt is a democratic nation, not an empire ruled by a divine pharaoh. The same is true of the successors of Rome, Greece, Babylon, and Persia. China is not ruled by a dynasty but the Communist Party. But the kingdom of God is still growing. It is spreading through South America, Africa and Asia. Jesus' words still inspire and his call is still heeded. And, oddly enough, that would probably not be true if he had tried to go up against the Roman Empire by physical force, rather than the strength of the Spirit. He would be like Simon Bar Kokhba or if he was lucky, the better known Spartacus, who also ended up on a cross. But he would be listed among the losers in history, people who tried to gain political power and failed, instead of as God showing his love for the world.

C. S. Lewis once said that it was hard to say something either good enough or bad enough about life. It encompasses cruelty and kindness, pain and pleasure, death and life. All of those factor into the events of the coming week. It is a study in contrasts. The creator of the universe washes the feet of 12 ordinary men. The God who liberated a people is arrested. The source of life is killed. The victim of the overkill of fist, staff, whip, and cross comes back to glorious life.

We call this week Holy Week. We do so because of the events that take place within it. Because of the Person involved, the events become holy. And in a sense, it shows that all bad things can become an avenue to holiness as well. God takes the worst thing we can do--kill his son--and turns it into the best thing he can bestow on us--eternal life. That is God's Modus Operandi--to make good out of nothing, to make good out of bad, to make life out of death. Which is another reason we can trust him.

This week we are going to move from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the horror of Good Friday to the stunned silence and muted grief of Holy Saturday to the incredible joy of Easter Sunday. A lotta of juxtaposing will be going on. Fasten your seatbelts; it's gonna be a bumpy ride.