Wouldn’t it be great not to
get involved? To be apart from the problems of life forever, to be detached and
not to worry – for ever? Let the world and its pain pass us by.
Most of you know I’ve
returned these past days from a week’s retreat on Holy Island – if you come to
Guild on Tuesday I’ll show you some pictures, including my latest set, Holy Island
in the fog and cold. How lovely it was to avoid stuff for a bit, to step away,
to sleep for 13 hours every night, to eat, walk, talk with companions, escape
with no television, no mobile phone signal, no e-mails, and no hassle. Wouldn’t
it be great to be like that permanently, to never have to bother with anything?
Of course, the Bible is full
of people who didn’t want to get involved with God’s call to be in the world
and who wanted to escape the world. Jeremiah is a good example. He is called by
God to deliver a message of doom to the people, to warn that disobedience will
mean years of exile. He is got at, and he turns on God and says blow this, deal
with these people, get angry with them, I’ve had enough. Moses is similar. He’s
called to lead the people to the Promised Land. He is stuck in the middle of
nowhere and he wants out. He turns on God and says basically God, you have done
nothing at all. Sort it! I can’t take any more. Elijah remember – well what
does he do? Facing pressure he runs into a cave and hides, hoping it will all
go away. That’s where Palm, Sunday begins really, with Jesus disciples wanting
not to be where Jesus wants them to be, with him – Jerusalem. They would rather
go anywhere but Jerusalem because Jerusalem meant trouble.
There’s evidence
of two processions that day in Jerusalem. Jesus’ was the
counter-procession, stealing the pomp from Pilate’s ceremonial procession. The
Roman battalion, solemnly advancing through the western Damascus Gate, on
the Syrian Road. Awesome stallions. Clanging hooves against the paving
stones.
Pilate was marching his men because the
Jewish Feast Days were beginning, and that stirred a restlessness in the
people. He was sending a message, any trouble would be crushed. The Pax
Romana, Caesar’s peace, would be enforced.
At the Beautiful Gate, on the opposite
side of town, coming in through an olive grove, rode Jesus, alone, sitting on a
donkey, one leg draped over her colt, someone’s old cloak under him. Laughter
and foolishness brought travellers together into a waving crowd, good naturedly
throwing palm branches in the rutted path. This was the gate legend held
was the one through which the Shekinah, the glory of God, brought the Sabbath
each Friday at sundown, and the gate through which the Messiah would one day
come.
It was
for this procession that they arrested him, scholars say. Whatever
trouble he made among the sellers at the Temple was a Jewish problem, not a
Roman one. But this counter-procession, this mockery of Pilate and Rome
that drew a huge throng and filled the city with laughter, was intolerable.
“Who is this?” The crowds asked. No wonder the disciples don’t want to
be there.
Why would
Jesus want to walk straight into trouble? Is Jesus saying in entering the city
we have to hit the world head on?
There was no turning back. He was determined to see it
through to the end, and trust it all into the hands of his Father in
heaven. Sheer determination, determination to love, determination to face
humanity and its selfishness, humanity and indifference to his message,
determination drove him on into the city of Jerusalem
I want to suggest to you we need the same
determination and steadfastness as Jesus today on this Palm Sunday to face our
Jerusalems. To get involved and not be detached and remote.
Our society is deficient in the kind of spiritual
drive that Jesus showed on that first Palm Sunday. There is a lamentable lack
of willingness to get involved. Instead we opt for easy answers or diversions.
We are not prepared to face misunderstanding, rejection and suffering.
Why is
this? Well, let me suggest three reasons using three stories we would rather
not get involved and stay out of trouble.
First, we
might get ignored. Who might care if we stand in the middle of people and give
our message? I was interested on Monday when I was in the driving wind and rain
of Edinburgh. I went into St Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile. I was
interested in how the cathedral was set out. The pulpit and the altar are in
the middle of the building, called The Crossing, with people either side of it.
There was a midday act of prayer and a preacher in the pulpit. The majority of
people ignored him, kept walking round, mobile phones going off, he simply kept
going, looking at the people. Some of us were listening, but most weren’t. The
word was in the middle of people, easily brushed by, but waiting for encounter.
But most of us won’t want to speak it in the middle of life for fear our effort
might be wasted.
Second,
we might get laughed at. And that’s not nice. Being laughed at. But we live in
a world that likes to laugh at what looks ridiculous. Read a tabloid newspaper.
We like it when a celebrity falls. Who is this? What sort of king is this? One
I can laugh at and reject – a donkey riding deluded false Messiah. It isn’t
easy to pick yourself up when people laugh at you. I struggled on Tuesday
afternoon with my luggage getting across London on the underground. I got on a
Northern Line train at Kings Cross. I got in the carriage and was pushed, I tripped
over my luggage and landed on my bum, on the floor. I was shaken up. And this
party of Americans opposite me looked at me, and burst into fits of laughter.
And I
gave them one of my ministerial glares and wasn’t very happy. Do we fix not
venturing into places we might trip to save face? Remember Jesus the Bible
tells us set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem.
Then I wonder
whether the real reason for not wanting to enter a trouble place is that we
might be persecuted. Perhaps not common persecution in Rye is it? But in some
places of the world it really is? Not easy to stick with Jesus. I’m doing some
work at the moment in my spare time on the spirituality of World War One, I
hope to do a series of talks and sermons later in the year. We know that many
people who saw the carnage of the battlefields lost their faith, but many did
not. The Bible Society are currently collecting stories of people who have
bibles that were in their ancestors possession during the war. Private William
James Duffy was a baker living in Toxteth with his wife Maggie and children
Edith and Harold when the war broke out.
It wasn’t until
1917 when the 28-year-old signed up and joined the King’s Liverpool Regiment.
Inside his brown
Soldier’s Bible he lists the 17 engagements in which he took part including
Ypres and Passchendaele.
He was given it
before he set sail for France in July 1917 by E Chapman, who wrote in it a
poignant verse from Ephesians, ‘For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.’
His grandson is
certain that this well-thumbed Bible was important to his grandfather.
‘Not only was he
carrying it, but he was using it to, and he knew it,’ he says. ‘I think it
would have meant an awful lot in terms of comfort and belief that what he was
doing was the right thing, and the belief that if you died it wasn’t the end of
it.’
Private Duffy
spent his war first in the trenches, and then close to the Hindenberg Line
where he and other members of the Liverpool Regiment fought in near
hand-to-hand combat between villages.
‘His faith
remained very strong,’ ‘One would imagine that it could have gone one of two
ways: either having been weakened if you thought, “How can there be a God with
this evil?”. But he must have had a sense of gratitude for his own survival.’
But it
must have been so easy to give up on God, encountering such evil. I think we
begin Holy Week with a need to remember that Jesus knew what was coming (and so
did his friends, hence their wanting anywhere but there, and their eventual
denial and fleeing and hiding.) Indifference, ridicule, torture, evil and
death. Not very nice things, but things that are part of the call. Sometimes we
are called to encounter them, not avoid them to be authentic as Christian
people. On the Sunday after Easter, we shall remember Thomas, the one who
doubted, but we forget it was Thomas who once said when Jesus mentioned where
he needed to go, “let us go with him that we might die with him.”
http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20140407JJ.shtml
I love
going on retreat, indeed I’ve booked to go back to Holy Island twice next year
because I think next year might be a bit busy for me, but you’ll notice I did
come back. Despite it being easy to stay away from things, from life, from
issues, from pain, from engagement with pain and suffering and real hurt in
people, there is no other way.
I hope we will renew
again our commitment to him and to the values of his Kingdom which are
sometimes not of this world and need to be stood up for. There was much wrong
in Jerusalem that day and there is in our world today. It is not an easy way,
but he promises never to leave us if we choose it. I know that. On Palm
Sunday then, will we hear him say to us, “Come follow me” and will we say
“Lord, I don’t want to get involved.”?
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