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On Triumphal Entries
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 1, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Joshua 3:7-17 Matthew 21:1-11
My mind is awash in triumphal entries and their aftermath. First there is the triumphal entry of the Israelites into the Promised Land. The aftermath sent thousands to their graves even as it returned the Israelites to the land God had promised them. Second there is the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The aftermath sent One to die for all so that death would finally have no dominion. Both were apparently central to God’s purposes in human history, yet the dissonance within the one God is disconcerting. What follows from both of these triumphal entries, of course, are our own triumphal entries and their protracted aftermaths, one presently being played out in these same lands and among related tribes. What are we to make of the God in whose name, down the dark corridor of history, every nation’s refusal of the things that make for peace turn power’s triumphal entry into a bloody aftermath? What are we to make of God’s Son whose triumphal entry, on the other side of town, has revealed for all time and peoples and nations the power of redemptive love hidden in his singular defeat and death? We turn the page first this morning from the death of Moses to the triumphal entry of Joshua and the Israelites, watching as they cross the swollen waters of the Jordon, waters parted by the same God who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt. Here is the founding story of a nation’s existence secured by an Almighty hand. It was the autumn of the year when God began to deliver the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites into the obediently bloodied hands of God’s people. The story unfolds inexorably: priests bear the Ark of the Covenant (God’s portable dwelling place on earth) into waters stayed--as at creation and the Red Sea--by God’s command; forty thousand, armed for war, cross over in haste to Jericho; Joshua, a proven military leader, directs the action under God’s guidance. “They stood in awe of him as they had stood in awe of Moses all the days of his life,” writes the Deuteronomist in case we have missed the point. “Remove the sandals from your feet” barks a mysterious, self-identified commander of the army of the Lord a chapter later, “for the place where you stand is holy.” This is surely the Moses of the Post-X(odus) generation, a man worthy and chosen of God to lead the conquest. But what follows in the Book of Joshua also can be read, in the words of Jack Miles, as “genocidal slaughter on some thirty-one Canaanite cities…‘letting none escape’…‘not sparing a soul’….Women as well as men are slain; only cattle and spoil escape destruction.” The Deuteronomist, who edited the history of Israel from the prelude in Deuteronomy through the divided kingdom in Second Kings, was a product of the reform movement in the latter third of the 7th century. Influenced by the prophets, these books trace the downfall of the Northern and Southern kingdoms to the people’s continual unfaithfulness. Some date these writings as late as the exile in 587 B.C. So depending on the ground you occupy, the Deuteronomist’s history begins with a wholesale, theologically sanctioned massacre of the Canaanites that foreshadows the fate of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; or the story’s inaugural event is the triumphal deliverance of the land into the possession of Israel, giving hope to exiles in despair. To wit, a debate rages even now among Jewish archeologists concerning what actually followed Israel’s Triumphal Entry in our text. Yigael Yadin, formerly chief of operations of the Israel Defense Forces in 1948, holds that the “decisive military victory under the unified command of an innovative leader” reported in Joshua comports with archeological evidence and underwrites his own theological understanding of Israeli victory in 1948. Yohanan Aharoni contends that the more gradual Israelite settlement recorded in the Book of Judges, followed only later by military conquest, comports with pottery found near Jericho that can be dated around 1220 B.C. This take on the story also mirrors Aharoni’s ideological roots in the kibbutz movement and the left wing of labor Zionism. In other words, a founding story—of a nation, a people, a religion—is likely to be interpreted as a story that justifies the current politics of the exegete. Or put another way, one’s interpretation of Scripture, especially when the interpreter is the leader of a nation, often has global consequences. What, then, of our take on Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem? Few would dispute Jesus’ entry into the City of David was staged as a type of counter-procession to power. On one side of town, Pontius Pilate enters Jerusalem “at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers.” This was customary protocol for Roman overseers during Jewish festivals. “Pilate’s procession,” according to Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, “was a demonstration of both Roman imperial power and Roman imperial ideology.” Pilate represented the Emperor Tiberius who was both the political ruler of Rome and the Son of God. Coming from the Galilee with peasants as his “army,” Jesus set out in the morning from Bethany on a donkey and, according to Matthew’s story, a colt. The beasts are not only the beasts mentioned in Zechariah’s prophecy, but the donkey is the animal that carried kings to be anointed from David’s line. Riding down the winding narrow road through the Kidron Valley, Jesus would have seen the Antonia Fortress, the Roman military headquarters on the northwest corner of the Temple Mount. There guards were stationed to alert the Roman garrison of such crowds during these feast days. Interpreters take pains, at this point, to note Jesus’ lack of interest in power politics. Here is the Prince of Peace who wept over Jerusalem’s violence and unbelief; here is the inaugurator of God’s reign. Says Jewish exegete Hyam Maccoby, author of Revolution in Judea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance, Jesus had no interest in a military overthrow of Roman rule. “To drive out the Romans by force of arms,” he writes, “was not his purpose; such success would only lead to the founding of one more dynasty like the Hasmoneans. Jesus would inaugurate the kingdom of God….” Nevertheless, Maccoby goes on to argue, the Triumphal Entry was “the high point of Jesus’ political career. The…hopes which had centered around him, first as a Prophet and then as a Prophet-King, burst into an ecstatic welcome as the teeming crowd of Jerusalem…hailed him with the cry, ‘Hosanna! Save us!’” The time, says Maccoby, was autumn, not spring; the feast not Passover but the harvest festival, the Feast of Tabernacles. Palms, he notes, would have been browned and withered branches had it been springtime. Furthermore, palms played a major role in the Feast of Tabernacles, serving as a roof over the booths for which the festival was named. Second, he says, the fig tree bears fruit in the fall, making Jesus’ curse of the fig tree potent only if fig trees were in bloom! Third, the cry of the crowd—“Hosanna”—was a cry heard from the Jews during the rites of Tabernacles. “The cry was addressed to God, not to Jesus, and meant something like ‘Save us, God, through your Messiah.’” Fourth and of most significance to Maccoby, the Feast of Tabernacles was a royal feast. During this festival alone, the King of the Jewish royal family “entered the Temple Court and read aloud ‘the paragraph of the King.’” More than any other coincidence, says Maccoby, the entry of Jesus into the Temple Court signaled his embrace of Jewish messianic expectations. Those expectations centered in the overthrow of Roman rule, an overthrow that would be accomplished not by bloody battles, according to Jesus’ apocalyptic world view, but by the cosmic battle God would wage with the powers and principalities. In the end, Maccoby believes, the gospel writers twist and telescope Jesus’ week in Jerusalem (what he thinks actually to be six months in Jerusalem) to fit their interpretation of his defeat and death…to fit, in other words, our founding story. This, he concludes, is simply the story of another failed messianic figure, albeit a charismatic one, who turned out “to be deceived in his apocalyptic hopes.” I would not deny the plausibility of this conclusion if the reply to the city’s question, ‘Who is he?” is “the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.” But if the reply to that question is the centurion’s reply at the foot of the cross—“Truly this man was God’s Son!”—then we must do business with the God who once was known as a mighty warrior and who now, in these latter days, enters the fray armed only with the power of self-emptying love. Bear with me for a moment of wild speculation, born both of the coincidence of our Old Testament reading and my own confession. Matthew has been our gospel throughout Lent because Matthew, more than any other gospel writer, takes pains to connect the person of Jesus with the God of Israel by way of Old Testament texts. Barely a chapter goes by without a citation from a prophet; his gospel is midrash on the story of Moses and the Exodus, from the Sermon on the Mount through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. But on this day I am tempted to say that Matthew might have missed one Old Testament echo in his telling of Jesus’ passion and death. If we hold the stories of these triumphal entries together in the autumn of the year (one led by Joshua, the new Moses; one by Jesus, the Moses of Matthew’s midrash) we behold the God, whose name sanctioned the slaughter of many, now taking on himself the violence and death once visited on the Gentile inhabitants of this land. The One who, at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, received the homage of Gentile Kings from the east and who, at his death, is confessed truly to be God’s Son by a Roman centurion, now rings the changes on the battle God intends to wage with the powers and principalities. Arriving as a gentle king in David’s capital with no sword in his hand, vulnerable to the death he alone must die, we witness in his crucifixion the beginning of God’s victory over any who would claim God’s imprimatur for the intended or unintended consequences of human violence, be that violence sanctioned by the state or strapped onto the back of a terrorist! “Put your sword back into place” he commanded a follower who had cut off the high priest’s ear in his defense, “for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” No doubt the triumphal entries of rulers and nations will draw crowds from now until the end of time. And hear me clearly on this point: the carnage which is war’s inevitable aftermath must now and again be ventured in this world where the powers of darkness still manage to do their worst, the Holocaust being a case without equal. But from this morning on, those who take up arms allegedly in the name of the Son of God without apology are more likely purveyors of a royal theology and worship a god that has no power to deliver any from evil…while the Son of the Living God rides on in majesty alone to die…once for all. Thanks be to God! |