Peace be with you.
Friends, it is Palm Sunday
and we have the great privilege on Palm Sunday
to read every year one of the Passion narratives.
And this year we're reading from the Gospel of Mark.
So we read Mark's and the extraordinary thing is
Mark's is the very first one written.
And there's a famous statement by a 20th century theologian that
the Gospels are basically Passion narratives
with long introductions.
So in a way, the Passion narrative
is the whole of the Gospel.
So there's so much we can say about them.
What I want to do today,
something a little bit different.
Instead of putting the focus on Jesus,
I want to focus on a series of people around Him
as they react in different ways to the events of The Passion.
Putting ourselves in the scene,
do we identify with any of these people
as they react to Jesus as He comes toward His death?
Here's really how The Passion narrative opens up.
It's the woman with the alabaster jar of perfume.
Remember the scene where she
breaks open this jar of very expensive perfume
and then she pours it on Jesus' head
and it scandalizes people around and say,
"Well, wait a minute. That's very expensive.
Couldn't that have been sold and the money given to the poor?
I mean, what a waste and what an over-the-top gesture."
Well, of course, Jesus dismisses that critique
and Ge praises her and says
in a way that's fulfilled every time we read this,
what she has done will be remembered for all time.
Well, here's what I love about that scene,
and she's one of the first now to react to Jesus
as He's coming toward His death.
His death represents God's extravagant gift to us,
that God went all the way down,
He went all the way into our dysfunction.
And so she responds with an extravagant gesture.
Yes, we could question it, as they did long ago.
We could sort of weigh it in the balance
ethically and so on, but that's not the point.
The point is, she breaks open that jar of perfume
as though she's breaking open her whole heart
and pouring out her whole life
and soul in gratitude to Christ.
That's the right reaction, everybody.
That's why Jesus praises her.
What's our reaction to Him?
Is it a constrained, careful, moderate response?
Or do we break open our hearts
and pour ourselves out for Him?
Go now to the garden of Gethsemane,
Jesus praying, sweating blood
at this climactic moment of His life,
this time of enormous struggle.
And Peter, James, and John, His most intimate disciples,
He takes them with Him.
And what do they do?
They fall asleep.
I've told you before, throughout the Bible,
falling asleep is a very bad thing.
It's a symbol of the lack of spiritual attention.
It's something of great spiritual moment is happening
and we don't care.
We fall asleep.
It makes no difference to us.
In a way, everybody, it's a symbol
of contemporary secularism, seems to me.
The things of God are happening all the time.
God's activity in the world, God's love poured out,
the sacraments, the church,
the preaching of the church, the word of God.
And what's our response, more often than not?
We fall asleep in indifference.
Move into their space, Peter, James and John,
these intimate friends of Jesus, by the way.
So especially those of us who,
we're in the church and we're with the program,
okay, but what are we doing
as the Lord is acting in our lives and in the world?
Are we snoozing away?
Think of the Old Testament symbol here of Eli in the temple.
Remember the scene where the Lord calls to Samuel
and the two of them are asleep in the temple?
And the Bible says that visions and locutions of God
were very rare in those days.
Why? Because God decided to withdraw?
No, I would say,
because especially religious people
began to fall asleep even in the temple.
Peter, James and John, in the very presence
of Christ at the climax of His life,
fall asleep.
Here's a scene. Of course,
it's unique to Mark
and I've preached on it before.
I love it.
There's a mysterious young man, he's not named,
but when they come to arrest Jesus now
in the garden of Gethsemane and there's the little struggle,
and then the disciples run away and there's this
young man we hear who runs away.
And as he runs, they grab at his tunic
and it is taken away in the hand of the man
and the young man just runs naked into the night.
And you say, what a peculiar detail to include.
Well, it's peculiar until we remember the word that's being used there
for the garment is the same word that's used
for the baptismal garment.
When someone was baptized, they put on this
white garment that symbolized their devotion to Christ.
They had put on Christ.
How often at the moment of truth,
when our Christian faith, listen now,
it's going to cost us something.
Maybe when they're coming after us,
when things are getting dangerous and dicey because of our faith,
what do we do?
Do we stand our ground or do we run off into the night
leaving behind our baptismal identity?
That's a great scene.
It's difficult to take in.
I'll grant you that,
but that's a very important scene for us to identify with.
How often, if I ask myself in the course of my life,
am I like that young man,
that when things got a little difficult,
I abandoned my baptismal identity,
ran away from the struggle?
What's your attitude at those moments of truth?
Another wonderful scene now.
The high priest, they brought Jesus
to the Sanhedrin for trial.
High priest, after hearing various witnesses said,
well, okay, let's cut to the chase here.
"Are you the blessed one?
Are you the son of the blessed one, the son of God?
And Jesus answers in such a shocking way
that the high priest tears his robes and declares blasphemy.
What did Jesus say?
He quoted Daniel chapter seven.
Daniel speaks of seeing the ancient of days.
And then, coming on the clouds,
one like the son of man
and the ancient of days gives him his authority and so on.
It's a messianic prediction, yes,
but even more than that,
this one coming on the clouds, this son of man
is someone who shares in the very authority of God.
In citing this, Jesus saying,
"Yes, I am.
And you'll see coming on the clouds, the son of man."
What's He affirming?
Not that He's just a great teacher,
not that He's just a great political leader,
not that He's just the Messiah
in the conventional sense of that term,
but is saying that
God from God, light from light,
true God from true God.
And the high priest can't handle that.
That's too much for the high priest.
Listen, everybody, there are a lot of people today
that are okay with Jesus as a distant historical figure.
They're okay with Him as a literary device.
They're okay with Him as an inspiring teacher
of the spiritual life,
but they can't handle the claim
coming mind you, fromHis own mouth,
the claim that He is God from God,
light from light, true God from true God.
But that's what's at stake when it comes to Jesus.
Are you with Him or are you against Him?
To be with Him is to say,
you're the Son of God.
You're the Son of God.
To fall short of that is effectively to be against Him.
How often are we in that stance of the high priest
where we tear our garments
because we can't handle that central claim of the church?
Next, Peter, the head of the apostles,
the first pope, Peter, Jesus' intimate friend.
Oh Lord, I don't know what the others are going to do,
but I will never betray you.
I wonder how often in our spiritual lives we say something like that?
Lord, of course not.
No, I'm your faithful follower.
You're my everything.
I'll always, Lord, be with you
and follow you.
And then the minute that scapegoating mob breaks out,
remember in the courtyard of the high priest's house,
they're warming themselves by the charcoal fire.
It's a cold night and someone notices Peter.
"Well, he was with that Jesus."
"No, no, no, no, no.
I don't even know Him."
"Yes, you were. I saw you."
"No, I'm not."
"Your accent gives you away. You're a Galilean."
"I tell you, I don't know Him."
Three times he denies Him.
Again, everybody we're fellow sinners here.
How many times in the course of our lives
do we who have pledged our complete loyalty to Him,
but again, when things get a little dicey and difficult,
when affirming Jesus means
we might get ourselves in some serious trouble,
do we stand firm
or do we deny as even Peter did,
even the first pope did?
Next, we hear about the Roman soldiers.
They come and they put that crown of thorns on His head.
If the Shroud of Turin is right,
it wasn't so much a ringlet, but a cap
placed upon the whole top of His head.
They put the reed in His hand like a mock scepter.
They cover Him in purple
and then they beat Him and spit upon Him
and they laugh at Him.
Is there a lot of that going on today?
You bet.
It's got an old vintage is the mockery of religion.
I can give you, I won't bore you with it.
You can go on the internet, find them.
There are thousands of examples of people today
who love to mock Jesus.
Not just ignoring Him.
That's the kind of secularism,
that's the falling asleep.
This is worse.
It's knowing about Him, but mocking Him.
Have we done it?
That's a tough question on this Palm Sunday.
Have we ever been like these Roman soldiers who said,
yeah, we're with our buddies or people are saying
disrespectful things and we don't say anything,
or we, even worse, join in?
How often have we mocked the Lord,
mocked Him with our words, mocked Him with our lives,
mocked Him with the kind of people we associate with?
Tough. I know it's tough,
and I think it's good on Palm Sunday, everybody,
as we walk through this still terrible story
of Jesus' passion,
identifying with these various figures.
I'll end, though, on a positive note.
Throughout the Gospel of Mark,
there is what the scholars call the messianic secret.
That means that when people are tempted to say,
oh, Jesus is the Messiah, He usually quiets them.
Don't tell anybody.
And it's puzzled people for a long time.
Why would Jesus be so reticent?
Well, at the very end of the Gospel,
when Jesus' head has bowed in death,
when He can no longer silence anyone,
the Roman Centurion says,
"Truly, this man was the son of God."
And now there's no messianic secret.
Jesus doesn't quiet him. He can't.
And so the words of the centurion,
with which the story basically end,
go out across the centuries
coming from a very unlikely source,
the Roman centurion who's putting Him to death,
but he's the one who says,
as a kind of proto evangelist,
"Truly, this man is the son of God."
And mind you, as I've said to you before,
who was called Son of God
in that place in time, but the Roman Emperor,
Caesar was the “Huios tou Theou”,
He was the son of the God.
The very fact that a Roman centurion,
the one putting Him to death says,
"Truly, this man is the son of God."
That's the evangelical message.
And in terms of this sermon,
as we identify with these various people,
can we say those same words?
That's the question.
Can we say those same words with that same confidence?
"Truly, this man is the son of God."
And God bless you.