Palm Sunday: Sunday of the Passion – The Mind of Christ

 Palm Sunday: Sunday of the Passion – The Mind of Christ

It seems complicated. Designed to give us whiplash. We barely get ourselves settled into recalling that fateful day that Jesus entered Jerusalem, and before we know it, we are listening to one of four versions of what we call The Passion: the events that lead up to his state ordered execution. Some “passion.” What drove the Roman Empire to execute this young man from Galilee was his passion for God, and for serving others. We are so used to calling Palm Sunday Jesus’s “Triumphal Entry” that we forget just how quickly everything really did go bad. He goes to the Temple and immediately causes a violent scene disrupting the Passover economy and disturbing the peace. He then departs out of the city to the home of Simon the Leper. To take a break? Or, to escape immediate incarceration? One notices that the crowd shouting “Hosannas,” waving branches of trees and strewing clothing all over the place mysteriously disappears from Mark’s telling of the story until that day later in the week we call Good Friday. 

One ought to wonder: was it really a Triumphal Entry at all? When we assign a title to this or any episode, we close it off to further interpretation. We freeze frame it. We place Jesus in a kind of box, a moment frozen in time. Take the crowd for instance. This crowd is made up primarily of Judeans and whatever Galileans had traveled with Jesus to Jerusalem. All the Judeans, we recall,  went out to be baptized by John, to repent and renew their hope that they might once again leverage God to intervene in the Roman occupation, just as God had long ago in Egypt and Babylon. Once Rome’s appointed “king of the Jews,” Herod, had John executed, Jesus, baptized by John, became the one in whom resided the hopes and dreams of a free Israel once again. 

And yet, it’s possible that once they saw Jesus mimic how Caesar and Pilate would enter Jerusalem mounted on towering, white war steeds, but instead on a young colt barely old enough to bear an adult, perhaps this crowd began to think of him as hopelessly naïve, or delusional, if not bordering on insane to think he and his crowd of rough speaking Galileans stood a ghost of a chance against a city secured by hundreds if not thousands of Roman Centurions. Were they cheering him on? Or, were they simply playing along, or even making fun of him? For as soon as he is in the city, the Judean crowd shouting “Hosannas” and waving branches and strewing garments all over the place disappears from Mark’s account, not to return until they demand that a robber and murderer named Barabbas be freed instead of, as Pilate calls Jesus, “the King of the Judeans.” Was Barabbas the one the crowd wanted released? Or, is it a case of mistaken identity? For Barabbas translates as, “Son of the Father.” And Jesus never claimed to be “King of the Judeans.” He has no pretension that there is any true king but God, his Father. And it is Mark who identifies him in verse one of chapter one as, “Jesus Christ the Son of God.”  Barabbas. Son of the Father. 

A word about Judeans. Southern Israel, and Jerusalem especially, was a diverse and extremely pluralistic region. Yes, there were Jews. But as we hear elsewhere in the book of Acts, there were still Canaanites, as well as Hittites, Jebusites, Mesopotamians, Greeks, Syrians, and peoples from all over the ancient world in and around Jerusalem. Especially during the octave, the eight days, of Passover. Our Greek New Testament texts describe the crowd as “Judeans,” not Jews specifically. Another case where our historical labeling in English translations “the Jews”  has caused much mischief. And worse, great and ongoing tragedy. 

On Palm Sunday St. Paul urges Christians throughout all time to, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” It was one thing in the first centuries of the Jesus Movement to have the mind of Christ while both Christians and Jews were victims of Roman persecutions. But once the Church became the Empire, after the conversion of Emperor Constantine, can one honestly say the church had “the same mind” that was in Christ Jesus? A church in which Medieval art work portrayed hammers in the hands of Jewish men nailing Jesus to the cross? Even though it was illegal for anyone other than Rome that could order and mete out state-sponsored capital punishment. Even the stories of the four evangelists tell us it was Roman Centurions who stripped, mocked, spit upon and nailed the Christ to the Cross. When the Church sent Crusaders to “take back” the Holy Land, did they have anything remotely like the “mind of Christ”? The Crusaders, who first slaughtered Muslims, then Jews, and then even other Christians they didn’t like, all of whom had lived together in Jerusalem peacefully? Did that in any way reflect the “mind of Christ” who teaches us to love our enemies? The German Christians who managed the concentration camps, who managed the “showers” of Zyklon-B gas and carbon monoxide to exterminate Jews and others, and then would go home and say grace at dinner, and prayers with their children at bedtime, and listen to the Bach B Minor Mass. Did these Christians, and the church officials who condoned their behavior, reflect the “mind of Christ”? Throughout the centuries, Christian preachers have urged, often during Holy Week, that Christians should chase, and beat up the local “Jewish Christ killers.” A practice that still is encouraged. A practice, like all the other Antisemitic speech, hatred and brutality must grieve The Mind of Christ. 

We may think, some seventy years after the Holocaust, that we have come a long way from such antisemitism. But if one looks closely at the window below Christ the Good Shepherd above our altar, one can see a section of stained-glass with a Star of David image. For Jesus was believed to be a direct descendent of King David. And we can see that there are sections of glass that do not match, and the leading is crooked and highly irregular. That is because sometime in the 1980’s someone, or some ones, threw a rock or a brick specifically through that emblem of the Jewish people and of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Though the perpetrator(s) were never brought to justice, it is believed it was done by members of a local Ku Klux Klan. 

Today it is estimated that there are over 550 white nationalist and Christian nationalist groups throughout the United States. Although these groups do not agree on everything, one belief is shared by every single one of them: a hatred of the Jewish people. We have seen mass shootings and violence against synagogues across the land such that today, synagogues in the greater Baltimore area are having to hire 24-hour security, and armed guards on Sabbath and holy days. 

This is all just one example of xenophobic hatred that is currently on the rise against Asians, LGBTQ+ people, women, the native peoples of the Americas, immigrants, and any other class of people who are not Christian and of white European descent. Why has Palm Sunday become The Sunday of the Passion? Because we need to remind ourselves at least once a year that the one we call Lord and Savior shares in the fate of all who have been discriminated against, threatened and even killed simply for being different; other; not like “us,” whomever us is. Jesus of Nazareth, the Jew, arms outstretched on the cross, still reaches out to all people, no matter who or from where, to be embraced in his arms of God’s love, remarkable as that may seem after centuries of failure to have “the same mind in us that was in Christ Jesus.” And so, we read The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to Mark, to remind us of just who we are and whose we are.