Sunday, March 24, 2013

The Hero We Need, Not the Hero We Deserve: Jesus and the Dark Knight

Text: Luke 19:41-48



          One of the great things about reading the Bible in an orderly fashion, as we’ve been doing now for almost a year, is that you begin to see how stories connect in ways you may never have realized. For instance, you’re probably all pretty familiar with the Palm Sunday story. Jesus comes to Jerusalem, people wave palm branches and shout praises at him. That is the yearly ritual. It’s our intro-to-Holy-Week-Jesus-party. Everybody’s going to be there: Jesus, the donkey, some disciples, people waving Palm branches; it’s going to be a blast. However, I should warn you that since we’re reading more than just the Hosannas and the branches, this party might not turn out quite like you would want. You see, Jesus isn’t doing anything particularly royal in Jerusalem. He’s not making some nice gesture for his big supporters, and he’s not having a campaign fundraiser with $10,000 plates. Instead, Jesus is going to do what Jesus does. He foretells the destruction of Jerusalem (just wait about forty years) and then he heads over to the temple to throw some of the wealthy out. You can imagine, that was unexpected for the gathering throngs of supporters. His speech was heavy on the judgment and his actions didn’t seem to curry any favor with the wealthy elite. What kind of politician was this Jesus anyway?

            It’s natural for us to replicate that first part of Palm Sunday year after year. It’s a really good excuse to get our kids waving palm branches and participating in the service, but if we look at what Jesus’ purpose in coming to Jerusalem I think we can safely assume that the palms are not the part he would have wanted emphasized. On that first Palm Sunday, the people didn’t know what they were celebrating. They thought they were welcoming a king who was going to overthrow the government. What they got was a king who was going to overthrow all the powers of evil and cleanse not just the temple, and not just the land of Israel, but who would die for the sake of all of us to cleanse the whole world.
That was what Jesus came to do, and it was decidedly not what the people wanted. A normal everyday king was just fine with them, thank you. My worry when we wave Palm branches and shout hosannas is that we are missing the point in exactly the same way as those who stood along the road on the first Palm Sunday. We don’t want the Jesus on the cross; we want the king who is going to fight our wars. We don’t want the Jesus who foretells our destruction, who condemns us for our sin; we want the celebrity Jesus with 100 million twitter followers. We don’t want the Jesus who tells us truths about us that make us uncomfortable that make us ask, like Peter, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” We want Jesus to be our good friend. Palm Sunday is a celebration of the shallow things we want instead of the true Jesus.
And with that, the pastor has ruined even Palm Sunday.
But it’s not all bad news. In fact, it’s not bad news at all. The king we wanted is not at all the king that we needed. If you’ve seen the most recent Batman movies, it’s like at the end of The Dark Knight where Jim Gordon says to his son: “He’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.” Jesus is the king that the people needed, but they weren’t yet ready for him, just as the people of Jerusalem weren’t truly ready for Jesus—and with that, I just compared Jesus to Batman, Lord forgive me. The king we want on Palm Sunday is one who makes our lives easier, but we don’t need easier lives—we already live easier than almost any people in the history of the world. The king we want is one who defeats our enemies, but we don’t realize that the greatest enemy is within us; the part of us that is ruined by our desire to put ourselves before God and our neighbors. The king we want is one we can lift up on a throne, but we don’t need a king on a throne; we need a king on a cross.
When Jesus is crucified Pilate puts those simple words above the cross: “Jesus Christ, King of the Jews.” Little did he know what he was saying. Little did anyone know the truth those words spoke. Christ was a king, a ruler unlike any the world had known or will know, because he humbled himself in the only way that could befit a true suffering servant. He died for our sake, and he did so utterly alone.
Should we celebrate that? I think so. I think, in fact, it’s just about the most important thing to celebrate in this often messed up world. We wave Palm branches today not because of the good things that are going to come to us but out of duty for the sacrifice that has been made for us. That changes the timbre of the celebration, but it remains a day worthy of remembering. So go ahead and wave those palm branches, sing hosannas, do whatever it is that befits such a time as this, because Christ the king has come to overthrow the temple, to prophecy our destruction, and finally to die. He’s not the king we wanted, nor the king we deserve, but he is precisely the king that we need.

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