The Disciples' Last Word

March 20, 2016

Palm Sunday

 

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’

Unless you are a more committed optimist than me – and, in truth, that would make you quite remarkably cheerful – then you may have had moments when you have considered or contemplated that one, certain, unavoidable moment that awaits you – your death. And I wonder if, as part of your imagined surveying of what that moment might be like, you have ever considered what your last words might be.

“Last words are for fools who believe they have not yet said enough,” remarked Karl Marx on his own deathbed. Well, he said more than enough for several lifetimes, so perhaps that was fair enough for him. But your sympathies might lie more with Queen Elizabeth I who, despite living to what was then considered a very grand old age of almost 70, and despite having a life fuller and more remarkable than many of us get to live, famously – and poignantly – said on her deathbed, “All my possessions for a moment of time.”

I sympathize with that great Queen, but I think my own preferences might be closer to the economist John Maynard Keynes, who ruefully remarked, “I only wish I had drunk more champagne!”

Whatever your last thoughts might be, today marks the start of the week when God invites you to consider again the extraordinary story of the Cross – the story of the costly love of God, and thus the story of the death of the Son of God – and to consider again what your last word on this all-embracing and all-important subject might be.

And especially today, when we hear Luke’s account of the great story, we realize that Jesus has been leading up to today with an inexorable sense of purpose. For several chapters, Jesus has been making his way slowly towards Jerusalem until, finally, surrounded by crowds, he leaves Jericho and makes his way to the Mount of Olives, where he is surrounded by his disciples in a state of great excitement. And because they are excited, and because they are Middle Eastern, they make quite a show of it. They make a real commotion.

And that leaves some others – some others who were rather like us, I’m afraid – some others who, in some ways, were sort of the Episcopalians of their day, that left some others feeling quite horrified. For although the gospels are pretty mean about the Pharisees, in truth, they weren’t evil – they just liked things done ‘properly’ – which is sometimes how I hear people talk about how Episcopalians and Anglicans feel about their worship. We don’t like shouting, or fuss, or overt emotion or excitement – we like it done ‘just so’, without too much commotion.

And so, as Jesus’ excited followers shout for joy to acclaim him as their king, the disgusted Pharisees demand Jesus to silence his disciples, to which Jesus says, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

So let’s have a show of hands! Who here this morning does not consider themselves also, to be one of Jesus’ disciples?

And, as the answer would appear to be that nobody here would claim not to be a disciple, we must recognize that we, too, are called to consider what our last word on the extraordinary story of the cross should be. We are called to consider what we should be shouting out – shouting out loudly and clearly not in here, in this precious, hallowed space, but out there, in the mucky chaos of the so-called real world. The real world where most of our fellow Chicagoans are busy talking about a big important man whose name begins with a T and ends with a P, and who, depending on who you ask, is either a new kind of Messiah... or not.

Our fellow Chicagoans, and many other people within the US and beyond its borders, think it really important to talk about Mr. Trump, and Mr. Cruz and Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton. And I’m certainly not saying that is unimportant. But we are here this morning to remind ourselves of someone who is even more important. Someone about whom we are called to shout  out about to the world outside, to proclaim again the truths of the extraordinary story we have just heard.

And the reason we must be ready to shout out the story of the Cross, the reason we must be ready to shout out the story of the death of the Son of God, is that it matters. It matters not just to us few folks who gather in church on a sunny Sunday morning. It matters not just to those folks who claim the label ‘Christian’ if asked. It matters to everyone. It is, I believe, the single most important event in the history of the world.

The American Jewish rabbi and author Chaim Potok was someone who understood this. In 1972, he wrote a remarkable novel about a child born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, very like his own – a child gifted with the most remarkable artistic talent. A talent which you or I might delight to see in one of our offspring,but which, for Orthodox Jews, was far from welcome, as art, painting, and drawing do not sit well in Orthodox Judaism, which takes very seriously the prohibition on making graven images. But so very talented is this child that, with the eventual encouragement of their rabbi, his parents arrange for him to have lessons in art from a non-religious Jew who also possesses great talent.

The climax of the story comes when the teacher tells his ever-blossoming pupil that if he wishes to be truly great, he must go down to the Met – the Metropolitan Museum of Art – and gaze at, study, sketch, and reproduce all the great paintings of the crucifixion in the museum. The boy is horrified at the idea that he, an Orthodox Jew, should be encouraged to immerse himself in pictures of the ultimate expression of the Christian faith. But his teacher is clear – no other image in the world, he says, has the significance in the entire history of art as does the crucifixion of Christ. To be a truly great artist, whatever one’s faith or beliefs, one must encounter the cross of Christ.

And so we are called to echo the disciples of Jesus’ own day, in being ready to shout out to the world our own last word about the Cross. But the problem, of course, is that the great cries of “Hosanna”with which our service began this morning, those great cries are not the last word of the disciples. For as Sunday turns to Friday, in that very short space of time in which even a modern-day politician could probably preserve their popularity, in those few days, the cry turns from“Hosanna”to “Crucify”.

And that is the truth of being a disciple, is it not? For while we all sit here today and claim to be a disciple of Jesus – while we all are happy to acclaim him as the King, just as did the disciples on that first Palm Sunday – while we make such a claim, if we are honest, we know that when we look into our personal spiritual mirror we will recognize the myriad times when our words, our thoughts, or our deeds shout more loudly, “Crucify!”

Truly, if we think of a set of famous last words to suit this morning, it would be those that Shakespeare ascribed to the dying Julius Caesar, as he beheld his own dear friend wield a knife at him – “Et tu, Brute?”For the betrayal of Brutus and of Judas is our betrayal, and it is a constant from which we cannot fully escape.

And so, as we start our journey through another Holy Week, we must hear and answer God’s call to us to journey with Christ as this week progresses. To journey through the solemn darkness of a Thursday night, replete with bread, wine, and acts of service, through the bitter darkness of a Friday afternoon, complete with an undeserved death, and into the expectant darkness of a Saturday night, as the world awaits death turning to new life.

For only if we are faithful to God’s call, and only if we make such a journey, will we be truly able to tell the world our own last word about the Cross, our own last word on the death of the Son of God, our own last word about the unstoppable truth of the love of God. Only then will we properly be able to cry out the news of Christ our King to the broken and confused world which Christ came to save.

Amen.