I would like t explore four events in life of Jesus during his last week in Jerusalem: His procession into Jerusalem, the disturbance in the Temple, his Last Supper, and the Garden of Gethsemane. Each of these could be explored imaginatively in depth, but I want to touch up these events because they present dense and dangerous moments in the life of Jesus. They tells us a lot about God’s mission in Jesus and reveal the depth of Jesus’ passionate involvement with us.
Jesus enters Jerusalem or to Warren Carter’s phrase “Making an Ass of Rome:” What we are celebrating today with the blessing and distribution of the palms this morning is Jesus entry into Jerusalem. The conflict between Jesus and Pilate begins the day that Jesus enters in Jerusalem.
Prior to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is Pilate’s entry. Within the LGBT community and Hollywood movie events such as the Oscars, dramatic entrances are important. They are choreographed theater on red carpets, communicate success, attention to the gowns, and companions attending. Roman entrances into city were triumphant. No red carpets, but soldiers trumpeting, followed cadence war drums sounding the entrance of the conquering hero with Roman legionnaires brandishing shields, and spears, and military insignia. In this case, it was Pilate who represented the triumphant Roman Empire and Emperor Tiberius. It communicates Roman greatness and military power, reminding the crowds that they were conquered by the powerful Roman legions—the greatest power in the world blessed by the Gods.
But Jesus intends to literally make an ass of Pilate and Rome. He choreographs his own dramatic and symbolic entrance into Jerusalem. He adopts some of the Roman trappings but queers them or rather reframes them in symbolic counter challenges. His entrance into Jerusalem is to remind the Jews of their religious history in which God enters the holy city to serve, not dominate. He chooses an ass, not a war horse in which Pilate rode into the city. He uses dramatic parody of the Roman triumphant procession to point out to his disciples and the people. Matthew remembers the line from the prophet Zechariah: “Tell the daughter of Zion, your king is coming on an ass,” (9:9). The rest verse states that your king comes triumphant and victorious, and humble riding an ass.
Jesus is recognized as a king, or more likely anti-king. He is teaching humility, non-violence, and peace-making, not conquest and domination. God’s community does not consist by military domination but is constituted by a new a kinship as children of God—not be wealth, prestige, gender, or ethnicity. It is constituted by God as Abba, parent in love with all and equally.
Jesus lives what he teaches—as meek and lowly in heart. He identifies with the suffering poor, the throw-away people, the powerless and humiliated—those crushed by military Empire of Rome. He parodies Rome and Pilate with God’s empire whose kinship comes from love and service and sharing of goods together.
Jesus acting up in the Temple: Jesus had problems with the Temple from the very beginning of practice of radical inclusiveness at table and his ministry. He associated indiscriminately with independent minded women such as Magdalene and the Samaritan woman at the well, prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers and the ill. The religious authorities of the Temple and their Pharisaic collaborators were horrified at his coming in continuous contact with the unclean and sinners. They represent a Temple of orderly social and religious categories of people into pure/impure and holy/sinful. At the heart of this system was the book of Leviticus, whose author biblical scholar Callum Carmichael points out is reflecting on the Israelite ancestors in the book of Genesis. Male homoerotic relations are abomination because they are deformity of Israelite masculinity. The purity code in Leviticus is justifying what constitutes as normal masculinity.
Remember that the purity code in Leviticus is grafted onto animals and humans alike. Its religious perspective divides humans and animals into pure and impure, deformed and acceptable. It is also the book that spells out and inspires the Pharisees and priests to categorize all people into holy/unholy such as mamzers (born out of wedlock), sinners, shepherds, gentiles, abomination, etc. It is the same book that details the rituals of animal sacrifice.
In referring to the Pharisees, Jesus says, “every plant that my heavenly Abba has not planted will be uprooted.” (Mt: 15:13). Jesus’ demonstration against the Temple and the holiness schema promoted is deliberate. I cannot believe that it was an incidental target for starting an ACT UP style of demonstration. He made chords from ropes, overturned the tables and released the doves to be sold for sacrifice. Doves were sacrifices for the poor who could not afford a sheep. Jewish factory farms, similar to our own, were required to supply 140,000 doves a year for animal sacrifice. Jesus’ demonstration disrupts the whole Temple system of animal sacrifice and the whole system of categorizing and stigmatizing people and animals. Jesus’ intention was to disturb the heart of the Temple system with the God of compassionate love and peace-making.
Creating companionship for life: Companionship is created when we share food together. Jesus has already entered Jerusalem, publicly making the Romans an ass. He disturbed the Temple system; he challenged the Pharisee’s and their practice of making their home table celebration as exclusive as the Temple—excluding the defiled, the impure, and the sinner from their own table meals. Holiness companionship was based on exclusion. As a side note, how many Christian tables have exclusively functioned like the Temple or the Pharisaic tables.
There is no question that for Jesus the table had to be open and inclusive. I cannot accept the readings of the Last Supper as an exclusive meal. It goes against the very nature of who Jesus was. People from the highways and byways are to be invited into the meals. It was populated with a diversity of people: outcasts, prostitutes, abominable people, tax collectors, those folks that terrify Pharisees and Christians alike. He did not moralize, berate them how to change their lives, threaten them that could not share the table if they did not change their ways.
Jesus disrupted their normal behaviors in an oppressed world. He would assist them in the presence of Abba God to undo their defensive selves, centered on themselves and their own survival. In Christianity’s Dangerous Memory, Diarmuid O’Murchu describes Jesus’ parables, healings, and ministry. It is equally applicable to his meals and his to Last Supper:
They defy the criteria of normalcy and stretch creative imagination toward subversive, revolutionary engagement. They threaten major disruption for a familiar manageable world, and lure the hearer (participant) into a risky enterprise, but one that has promise and hope inscribed in every fiber of the dangerous endeavor.
Jesus’ meals were dangerous. There were no hierarchies at table, no one in charge or in power. There were only those who voluntarily served others, gladly washed the feet of their companions, who cheerfully assisted folks at table to heal from the years of religious abuse and oppression. Jesus encouraged them to dream a future with hope, with God with resources and the abundance of food created by the companions of the bread and the cup. Our moments at table undo our ordinary patterns and behaviors.
At the last meal, Jesus gave his companions, literally “bread sharers” a gift of life. Let me give you an example by tell a story. In an interview with a woman who survived Auschwitz was asked “Why did you survive when so many perished?” She was separated from her family, stripped by the guards, humiliated, shaved all her hair from her body, and given a concentration uniform. She was part of a group similarly humiliated and abused prisoners. Then a young girl broke ranks and placed a piece of bread in her hands. “At that moment”, she said, “I decided to live.” (Primavesi, Gaia and Climate Change).
Jesus gave his friends a similar gift, a piece of life-giving bread handed to them with love and unconditional forgiveness. It was an intense moment of self-giving of himself, his life and blood for them out of an excess of unconditional love—mirroring Abba God’s unconditional love and grace. A piece of bread and a cup of wine were given to them as the young girl gave a piece of bread to the survivor woman in Auschwitz. Jesus told them to live, for life would be given in his death the next day. He created a ritual of life in shared bread and a cup.
One of the ways I look at our communion lines is to remember how in our cities the poor line up for distribution of food. We, on Sunday, line up for an unconditional handout of grace, forgiveness, and love. We are all poor in need of God’s abundant grace. We should be so undone by God’s love for us as to break our self-centeredness for the revolutionary moments of self-giving and love to others.
Final Preparation in the Garden: Jesus finished the meal and invited disciples voluntarily to follow him to the Garden of Gethsemane. He knew it was only a short time before the Romans and the Temple police would find him and begin to punish him for defiance for God and God’s people. He was aware that he would be shortly betrayed by Judas, and Jesus sought some alone time in solitude with Abba God and asked a few disciples to stand nearby in prayer with him. Anyone standing close to death would feel the challenges that Jesus had that evening. Luke tells that he sweat drops of blood. Did these drops remind him of sharing the cup of his blood with disciples earlier? Would God’s vision of peace-making, nonviolence, bread empowerment around the inclusive table, his affirmation there are no divisions between God’s beloved children and that there is kinship with all life? Would they survive beyond his brutal death? Or did they remind of the blood sacrifices of the countless animals at the Temple? Would he be crucified and dead by the time that paschal lambs were slain for the Passover meals later in the day?
If Jesus is like most of us, he would find his mind adrift with these questions and the thoughts what was impending in an hour or just a few hours: humiliation, raped of his clothes, flogged nearly to death, mocked and abandoned, alone. In the moments of doubts and pain, he surrendered to God with his whole heart, and heart to heart met God in love and profound emotional suffering. As he tried to find his centeredness in Abba God, the noise of marching soldiers surrounding the garden to apprehend him, the ensuing clamor to arrest him broke his concentration. He would try to prevent any violence….
These are four window glimpses into Jesus the last few days of his life. He disturbed the world in Jerusalem with his love of God and God’s disturbing message. He would be turned over to Pilate by the Temple priests with the charges: “He perverted the nation. He was blasphemer. Jesus of Nazareth rebelled against the power and might of the Roman Empire. “
Jesus of Nazareth died as a no-body in a distant province of the Empire. But we know that God intended to disrupt the whole world on Easter Sunday when God acted up against all human sin and violence throughout all time! These are a few thoughts for us to think about as we enter the passion of Christ this week.