Hosanna, hosanna, let the good times roll!
… the whole multitude of his disciples began to praise God aloud with joy for all the mighty deeds they had seen. They proclaimed: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest.”
Our Sunday with palms starts on a high (Lk 19:28-40). But it doesn’t last. Within a few days Jesus is headed in the opposite direction, out of Jerusalem, carrying a cross, about to be executed.
So what went wrong. Was it all a sham? There really wasn’t any king coming, peace and glory weren’t just around the corner? It was fake news – to use our latest, most powerful, put-down?
Jesus didn’t seem to think it was fake. He accepted the spirit of the moment: “I tell you, if they keep silent, the stones will cry out!”. He accepted that the people needed this moment of hope, of uplift, of excitement. He knew that it wasn’t going to play out the way they maybe hoped or expected, but he didn’t pull the rug from under them.
So where was the disconnect? The disciples had certainly seen mighty deeds. They were right to consider Jesus a king, coming as representative of God. So where did it go wrong?
The thing is, it didn’t go wrong. What confuses us is our idea of what success looks like.
We know success. Success comes from effort, and training, and improvement, and from support. Support is important. Every sports team has its supporters, every player needs someone to build them up, to encourage her or him. The chants, the high-fives, the “go-get-ems”. Just like the crowd getting fired up by the supporting acts and finally arriving at the headliner, so the disciples were doing their thing, building Jesus up to his final success.
But for God, and therefore for Jesus, success doesn’t look like that. Isaiah understood it when he realized that anyone who spoke God’s words would be persecuted and attacked (Is 50:4-7). Paul got deeper when he understood that the divine being, the king who had arrived on earth, the perfect embodiment, the incarnation, of God, was not looking to top the bill, to be the most successful ever. Quite the opposite (Phil 2:6-11).
Jesus’ idea of greatness was to give all that away, to become the weakest of the weak, to be condemned and die the most abject of deaths just like slaves did (Lk 22:14—23:56). Jesus became one with the homeless bum, the drug addict, the rape victim, the child traumatized by the sights and sounds of war – because he knew there was no shame in that; that the most pathetic and damaged and worthless of people were not pathetic and damaged and worthless.
The disciples had it right, the king was coming. What they hadn’t understood, despite Isaiah’s warning, was that he would be beaten and spat at and ripped apart. And that was his glory, that was his act of redemption, that was when he demonstrated that all those pathetic and damaged and worthless people were perfect. That’s when he completed God’s plan and we could know him for what he was – God’s only son, His perfect presence in our world.