Palm Sunday: Sunday of the Passion, 2024
Today we need to blame someone…anyone! The investment bankers! The politicians! The business journalists! Celebrities, sports stars, or royalty from another country. Sooner or later, someone must take the blame!
When that person is found, apologies must be made. Standing in front of microphones and klieg lights, broadcast over television or the internet, some contrite person will say "Mistakes were made." And, “If anyone has been injured or offended by words or actions, then I am truly sorry.”
Sometimes the person being blamed with throw others under the bus with her or him, so as to perhaps feel less responsible.
Then the punishment begins. It might not be by jury trial or hearing; it may be through the media. Rehabilitation may or may not come. But you can be sure of one thing: when the next crisis comes along, blame must be placed.
As I said, it is a ritual. And it’s as old as the hills, only today it’s mediated through a variety of media, but we didn’t invent it. We might even take part thanks to social media, but it’s not new!
The odd thing about this ritual is that it never satisfies! We never feel better… not really. And we aren’t better people because of it. But is a ritual we follow nonetheless, even when we know deep in our hearts that it doesn’t work.
We are in another election season, and for the next eight months—as much as we might try to avoid it—attention will be paid to the horse race and reallybig conclusions will drawn from very small inferences.
A few years ago, I remember seeing a YouTube a video of an excerpt from a German film that depicted Adolf Hitler’s last hours in the bunker underneath Berlin as the capital fell to the Russian army. The clip shows him raving and moving from rage to self-pity, over to self-loathing and then demanding the death of the people he blamed for the failure of his own choices. A frightening performance. Except that on this YouTube video, some satirist changed the English sub-titles to make it appear that his ranting was because he lost everything in his investments and in real estate in that year’s most recent economic downturn.
The satirist was making a point: we often blame everyone else for both the choices we make and for the things we cannot control. This is actually not very new. It goes all the way back to Jonah. When something goes wrong, someone must be at fault. Someone must atone.
To be sure, there are times when people do things that deserve punishment. And there are times when we must hold people accountable for their actions. But sometimes the search for accountability stops being a search for truth and instead becomes a search for a Jonah or a scapegoat: someone on whom we can place all our troubles and who will take it far away from us.
When we scapegoat someone else, what we are doing is changing the subject. We are hoping that people will look more at the other person's failings than our own. We are hoping that our focus on the chosen victim will take our minds off other causes, other pain, other failings. Both institutional and personal. It tends to work because none of us can stand up to the fact that all of us are sinful, frail, limited, and self-serving. God made us one way, and we are another way and it far short of what God would have for us. But if we can make someone else take the rap, then maybe no one will notice.
Here is the ironic thing about Jesus’ condemnation and execution. The people made him into just that kind of scapegoat…and he willingly entered into it.
The thing is that what the people wanted to blame Jesus for and what Jesus was taking on were two entirely different things. People laid on Jesus the symptom. Jesus is addressing the source.
Jesus enters the city on the back of a small, not-quite-full-grown horse. Other Gospels say a donkey…whatever the case, it was not a mighty steed. He was greeted by throngs of ordinary people as a king, a deliverer. They called him “messiah” but for them this “messiah” would be the one to throw off Roman rule and end religious and class corruption and so restore Israel to greatness.
Jesus became for many a national figure on whom the national and economic hopes of an oppressed and struggling people rested. And when he failed to deliver…when his confrontation with the powers of both Jerusalem and Rome met with resistance, arrest, and failure…they dropped him like a hot potato! He became the one they blamed for all their troubles.
The Gospel of Mark goes to great lengths to describe the unfairness of the trial before Pilate: Mark says that the statements against Jesus did not agree with each other (14:56b); he says that some gave this false testimony against Jesus (14:57b) and but even the false testimony was inconsistent (14:59). Compared to the other Gospels, Mark emphasizes Jesus' silence by telling us "He gave no answer" (14:61), while only Mark has Jesus answer the question, "You, are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed?" with "I am" (14:61-62).
He is spit upon, heckled and beaten all the way to Golgotha, where is executed by slow torture in full view public. The entire process is meant to reinforce Roman power over the people… and to draw the people they ruled into taking part.
But Mark also describes something else: he tells us the most about Barabbas, which means ironically enough "son of God." It is Mark’s Gospel that tells us that was Barabbas both a murderer and part of the local rebellion against Roman rule. As part of the local intafada, Barabbas fit the bill much more closely than Jesus.
So in a stunning twist of popular approval the crowd was willing to free and forgive Barabbas, but unwilling to let Jesus go because he apparently failed the people’s misplaced expectations.
So why would Jesus willingly enter into this game? If he knew that people expected him to be a liberator when he was in fact preaching peace, faithfulness and repentance, then why didn’t he go the other way? Why would Jesus choose to go into a place where the cards would be so stacked against him?
Because what we blamed him for had nothing to do with what he was doing. The people killed Jesus because they wanted to blame Jesus and so avoid responsibility and continue to ignore the consequences of their sin. People killed Jesus for expediency. People sent him down the road to the cross so that others would live another day politically.
But Jesus chose this route because while we still live in our sin and denial, God is busy reconciling the world to Godself.
Try as we might, we cannot fully appreciate what Jesus did and who Jesus is without the cross.
Jesus always refers to himself as a “human being,” as “the son of man.” There are only a few times in the whole Gospel of Mark that the phrase “Son of God” appears. In the very beginning of the Gospel, once or twice when a demon blurts it out too soon, and then after he is crucified. When he has died on the cross, a centurion watching all this exclaims “"Truly this man was God's Son!" Mark’s Gospel shows us that the only way to really know Jesus is to know him crucified.
We’d love to avert our eyes, hold our breath as we drive around the cross. But to avoid or minimize the cross is to minimize the power of human sin. To minimize the cross is to take away the urgency with which God desires humanity and all creation to be healed and reconciled to God and to each other. To dodge the cross as something gruesome and distasteful (and it is!) is to dodge the weight and power of human sin.
Jesus goes the way of the cross because he is taking on the full weight of human sin. No scapegoats. No easy outs. No apologies in front of microphones or tearful admissions of failure. No phony mea culpas. Jesus, the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity in one person undiluted, will not skirt sin but walk straight into its full force and power. As he entered Jerusalem, he was about to was buried under a wave of the sum of human self-serving, responsibility dodging, scapegoating sin.
One summer when I was a young child, I learned to sail. I spent a whole summer learning the language and ritual of the sailboat. Eventually, it came time for me to pilot my own little catboat out in the open ocean.. well, a piece of Penobscot Bay, but it seemed pretty big to this 9 year old!
So while I had been taught this, I almost forgot it: The first time I saw a big wave coming my way, I wanted to turn the boat and get away! But my teacher reminded me, to navigate a big wave, turn your boat into it! It will seem scary at first. You will ride high, and it may seem like the wave will win, but it won’t. To do anything else is let the sea swamp, if not capsize, your boat.
Jesus is doing something sort of like this but much more so. We try to avoid the consequences of our sin and bad choices and our complicity with evil all the time. But when we try to skirt the wave, we inevitably get swamped. Jesus will instead face it and head right into it. He will turn into the wave.
The thing is, Jesus will die. Facing the full force of sin will result in his death. But here is what no one expected: By turning into the wave of sin and evil, and experiencing its full force, not only will Jesus die, but sin and all the separates us from God and each other and creation will also die on that cross right along with him. So until Jesus faces and turns into the full force of sin, we will never know life.
That is why we must also walk the way of the cross. Because instead of looking for someone to blame God in Christ walks with us to dark places we dare not go so that we can know life. He will show us the depth of love God has for us and fullness of our rescue from the power of sin, evil and death. But to know that, we also must go to the cross. We might want to dodge the bullet and go straight to Easter, or somehow avoid the hard truth of who and how we really are. But to know the truth, we have to go there: that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.
This week, come with us. Come and take part as we together walk the way of the cross. On Thursday, we will see Jesus serve his disciples one last time and then in agony face the depth, the darkness and power of human sin, he will break bread and share wine with him to tell us how his body will be broken and his blood poured out. He will also wash their feet to remind us that the fullness of God is here and serves… us! On Friday, we will go with him to the cross, where the power of sin will take him to his death. And on Easter Eve, we will sit in silence and ponder the dark moments where it seems as if God is absent but is actually healing us in the very places where death dwells. We’ll wait in darkness and discover on Easter the dazzling new light that when Christ is raised from the dead, sin, darkness, and evil are defeated once and for all.
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