Death and Life on Palm Sunday

I’ve been mulling over one of those age-old questions for the last 24 hours. An atheist might frame it up this way–didn’t Jesus just commit some sort of ghastly suicide by going willingly up to death? Shouldn’t he have stopped it all, if he had the power to do so?

It is rather a timely question, good for me to think about. Especially last night when I finally worked up the nerve to read about Arnaud Beltrame, the French police officer who convinced a hostage taker to trade his last remaining hostage for Beltrame himself. She went free, and he was shot. He died of his wounds a little while later.

It was a heroic, self-sacrificing, essentially Christian thing to do. One might be willing to die for a friend, but for a stranger? But this man rushed in without thinking about it.

It’s the perfect lens to peer through as you rush off to church this morning, through the snow if you are unlucky as I am. Whatever kind of church you’re going to, you’ll probably hear something about the reason for the day. (I’ve already been reminded to tweet pictures using the hashtag ‘PalmSunday.’) Wherever you are, there will probably be palms in some kind of configuration. And there might be some marching around. You might hear a big chunk of the passion narrative read out.

At least the bit where Jesus rides into Jerusalem in triumph. The single moment where he is beloved, the crowd favorite. There won’t be any signs and bullhorn. No speeches. Although, if you look carefully you’ll see that whatever is going on is essentially political. The crowds have had enough. They are sick of the status quo. They want change. They want action. And they want Jesus to be the one to take it, to be the one to stand up to the powers and principalities of this world and finally bring about the vision they have of how life should be.

But when he arrives and climbs off his donkey, he just clears out the temple in a fury. The crowd, shocked and disappointed, dissapates, melting away into the highways and byways of that ancient and troubled city. There’s a feast to get ready for. There is a lamb to acquire. There are supplies to buy. There’s a ton of work and probably people to accommodate one way or another. Jesus goes back out to Bethany and makes his own plans. It’s the very definition of anticlimactic.

The trouble is, the plan is to die. That’s the plan. The plan isn’t to incite revolution. It’s not to enact a political cure. It’s not to collect some cash and make some promises, to tweet deep thoughts about how to effect change in the world. The plan is to die.

And so it’s never been very popular. This is not a saleable message–it is appointed for man once to die, come to church this morning to think more about it! The whole point is that we don’t want to die. We don’t want to die by shooting, or by disease, or by old age, or by accident. Death is the thing, of all things, to avoid.

Death and a loss of control. Death and helplessness. Sometimes the helplessness overtakes the death as the chief evil, and so to control something, even that great and terrible evil, death itself, some of us take the matter into our own hands. Perhaps then there will be some way of living on, of being remembered, or talked about, even badly.

So it’s curious to look at Jesus and know that he had all power and authority in his hand, that he could call down legions of angels to his defense, that he could speak and the weather would obey him, but that his choice was to put himself into the hands of evil men and to die.

This is the very opposite of the kind of thing I want God to do. The best thing would be for God to destroy my enemies, and make me safe. But I cannot have his safety, because I am my own worst enemy. If I were to march, to act, I must unhappily include myself as the thing I am marching against, as a part of the problem. One of the signs would have to be about my own evil, the trouble that lies at the core of who I am, an evil that is driving me inexorably to the grave. I am held hostage to sin. I am helpless. There is no way out. Nothing I say or do can remedy my own peril.

Only one who is stronger than death can come in and take my place. The death that I have to die is useless. But the death that he died overturns the cosmos. The only way for me to live, then, is to cling on to him.

And then the safety and security is for eternity. The relief and joy of no longer being in peril goes on forever and ever. But it is only bought by the cross. It is only available to the one picks it up and holds onto it for dear life.