PALM SUNDAY 2023
Matthew 21:1-13, St. Mark’s Farnborough, Palm Sunday 2023
It’s hard for us to imagine what the Jewish Passover must have felt like. The best estimate suggests that around two million people made their way to Jerusalem each year – around the same number that used to attend the Notting Hill Carnival weekend when I was a vicar there: an unbelievable mass of humanity, all converging on Jerusalem the Holy City and the Temple that lay at its core.
So many people came that special reservoirs had to be built by the side of the roads, the equivalent of handing out bottles of water at the Carnival. Without those, many children and animals would have died of thirst in the vast queues of Bank Holiday traffic. But there must have been a tremendous sense of excitement too, of anticipation and joy. It’s picked up in one of the Psalms, Psalm 122, so memorably set to music by Sir Hubert Parry: ‘I was glad when they said unto me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’…
This Passover, though, felt a little different. This Passover had an edge to it. For one thing the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate had made himself very unpopular in recent years by constructing a massive aqueduct out of funds he’d stolen from the Jerusalem Temple. It was all over the news, and the people were outraged. For another thing, Jesus of Nazareth had been talking about the kingdom of God and seemed to be heading for a showdown with the authorities. Perhaps this Passover would launch a revolution, the people were thinking. Perhaps this would be the moment when Jesus, the Messiah, would galvanise those millions of Jewish pilgrims, and throw out the hated Roman authorities once and for all.
And at first it seemed to be going to plan. On one of the roads leading into Jerusalem, a great shout went up: ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!’ Men and women had picked palm-branches. They’d lain their cloaks on the ground. And who was the focus of all this attention? Jesus, the Messiah: Jesus coming to claim Jerusalem for himself.
The donkey, of course, was a rather strange touch: hardly the great white charger on which Judas Maccabaeus had made his triumphant way into Jerusalem 200 years before. But those who knew their prophets remembered some words from Zechariah, written many hundreds of years before: ‘Rejoice greatly. O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt the foal of a donkey’. And now that prophecy was going to be fulfilled: now Jesus was going to take his throne as King of the Jews!
People could almost see the headlines in tomorrow’s newspapers:
‘Read all about it!
‘Jesus Ransacks the Roman Palace!
‘Pontius Pilate pushed from Power!’
‘Jesus’ coronation set for Monday!’
People were willing Jesus on to take a strong lead, to march on the city, to throw out the hated Romans.
But then Jesus did an extraordinary thing, an action that would seal his fate at the end of that momentous week. Instead of marching on Pontius Pilate’s palace, Jesus headed instead for the Jerusalem Temple. In the outer courts of that mighty building, special Temple coinage was sold at ridiculous exchange rates and sacrificial animals at exorbitant prices - so that Passover worship made the poor even poorer, if they could afford it at all. And Jesus wasn’t having it. So he took a whip, he pushed over the tables of the moneychangers, and he chased the whole lot of them out of the Temple.
That wasn’t part of the script. The following morning the headlines had turned against him:
‘Read all about it!
‘Jesus Attacks the Jerusalem Temple!
‘Jewish authorities outraged at aggressive young preacher!
‘He clipped me about the ears’, says moneychanger (38)’.
And while Jesus still had his supporters, , the chief priests and others had now made up their minds: that here was a trouble-maker who needed to be silenced, come what may.
So why did Jesus go to the Temple, not the Palace? Why his judgment on Israel, not on Rome? Many other Jews of his time saw Rome as the problem: they were the occupying force, who stole from the Temple Treasury and robbed God’s people of their sovereignty. And what they figured was this: that Jesus was both powerful and popular – so that if there were ever a time for Revolution, it was now.
Yet Jesus, as ever, looked deeper than that. Jesus recognised that true salvation could never be found in a political or military solution - in raising an army and throwing out the occupying force. Jesus realised that if true renewal were to come, it could only start in the hearts of God’s people. The apostle Peter would also recognise that a few years’ later: ‘Judgment begins with the family of God’, as he wrote in his first letter. G. K. Chesterton would famously capture it in the very shortest letter ever written to the Times: in response to the question, ‘What’s wrong with the world?’, he simply wrote, ‘Sirs, I am. Yours faithfully, G. K. Chesterton’. And fifty years’ later the American pastor Oswald Smith would neatly capture it in a memorable little phrase: ‘The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart’.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that we should stop praying for peace in Ukraine, say, or working for justice here in the UK. As a recently signed-up member of the House of Lords, it would be strange for me to imply that politics are somehow unimportant! But Jesus didn’t march on the palace. He marched on the Temple. Because Jesus’ mission – this business of spiritual transformation – is fundamental to the flourishing of humankind, undergirding everything else: a transformation that starts not out there but in here, as we allow Christ to cleanse the Temple of our hearts.
It's a message expressed in the palm crosses we’ve been waving this morning: the palms representing our Halleluias and Hosannas, our deep-down desire to praise Almighty God and connect with Him; but the crosses introducing a sober note of realism too: a reminder of the ‘Crucify him, Crucify Him’ on the lips of those crowds just five days’ later – and of the lengths God went to, to deal with the problem of the human heart.
And as we spend a few moment of quiet now, focussing on those palm crosses at the beginning of this holiest week in the Church’s year, let’s be reminded of our baptisms and maybe confirmations too when we were signed with the sign of the cross in water and in the oil of chrism - and let’s quietly invite the Spirit of Christ to cleanse us of all that is mean or ugly or impure or self-centred within, so that we might become ever more fruitful in His service.
