First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Luke 19

“By Virtue of the Absurd”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

April 1, 2007

Mount Olivet is the place to start. When you go to Israel and begin your tour, the Mount of Olives is the first stop. I can remember being struck by this when the tour guide said, we were starting on the Mt. of Olives.

The Mt. of Olives, the site of the Palm Sunday entrance, the garden prayers, and the arrest of Jesus has always marked the end for me, not the beginning. When you read Luke through from start to finish our passage today is the beginning of the end. This is the opening scene of the fifth and final act of the play. And true to form to great literature, the final scene seems to embody the whole.

All of the Gospels have their own way of telling the story. Each one has an ax to grind, a point of view, and a particular way of portraying Jesus. The Lukan account of Jesus is all about motion, a pushing kind of momentum. His gospel is part restlessness and part travelogue curiosity. It is as if Luke is seeing all of this for the first time and taking notes as fast as he can.

Some scholars attribute Luke’s gospel to the influence of the Apostle Paul and since his time was always spent on the move from church to church, from prison to shipwreck to prison, Luke’s gospel seems to be infused with a sense of motion and even wanderlust.

Another part of this is that Luke seems to record his gospel as an outsider who is on a tour. Instead of the Sea of Galilee he calls it Lake Gennaseret as it was known to an outsider. Instead of skipping over Samaria as the cultural no man’s land it was, Luke records Jesus as walking from village to village as if any place where Jesus stood was important.

***

Getting off the bus in 1999 and standing at the edge of the Mount of Olives I was struck by the view of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, they are literally right before you. The Mount of Olives descends into the Kidron valley and then rises up the other side literally to the door of the temple. In terms of dramatic view it’s all there. Yet, in a short order I sensed something much more profound than a good view of the city. I was standing where Jesus stood.

There is a legend that when St. Helena tried to build the Church of the Ascension on or near the spot where the tour buses make their first stop, her contractors ran into a strange phenomenon. They couldn’t put a stone on top of the spot where Jesus stood at his ascension. Every time they would seek to cover the ground the heavy slab of granite would push back and away like magnets with reversed polarity. It was as if the ground had become sacred and to cover it like the rest of the area was blasphemy.

I am not a big proponent of fantastic legends, but I am usually in awe of the way they capture an experience that defies a kind of common explanation. Instead of looking at the temple mount I found myself looking at my feet. There was a kind of burning and yet binding sensation. This is where Jesus stood. Although I stood in many places where tradition attributes the presence of Jesus, Mount Olivet was and is something different for me.

Walking down the valley to the Church of All Nations I got caught up in the momentum. It’s not an easy descent; it’s steep. You almost get the sense of being propelled. Without going into the Greek itself, trust me when I say the verb of choice which Luke uses was purposefully chosen to convey a kind of compelling, continuous forward movement and this embodies the descent.

This is Luke’s deal, his Gospel. In Mark this is about the kingdom of God- Jesus is the messiah come to rule; in the same way, Matthew wants you to see the Old Testament is being fulfilled- Jesus is the Son of David coming to restore Israel. Yet, in Luke Jesus is not so much about being a king, but being a pilgrim; his is not a fulfillment of the old, but a new beginning, a new world of meaning and purpose.

And for this reason I see the disciples as caught up in a kind of taking of the city, a kind of rebellion and protest in praise. It is as if they are storming the castle, marching on Washington, and starting a riot all in one. And the Pharisees point to this last one. They beg Jesus to calm down the crowd, to quiet the chaos; they were entering a holy place with other pilgrims and they should conduct themselves with a sense of decorum.

Luke also says that the disciples were caught up in the miracles performed along the way, as if this was a kind of culmination. The young horse embodies this. In Matthew and Mark the colt seems to be an intentional fulfillment of the prophecies of Zechariah. But in Luke the colt embodies a moment where it is as if the rules of life have been suspended- decorum and normalcy was put aside. Just tell them the lord needs it. A riot or melee has this component, especially one born of protest. It is as if one law being rejected makes all laws vulnerable. Jesus caps this by rejecting the complaint of the Pharisees by saying, if they didn’t shout the stones would take up the cry.

***

There is a strange bit of trivia for Bob Dylan fans regarding Dr. King’s March on Washington. On the day he spoke on the reflecting pond with the crowds stretching as far as the eye could see, when he cried out his famous dream of one day our children will stand hand and hand without thought of color or division or race, on this day the person who warmed up the microphone just before him was Bob Dylan.

It’s one of those moments where you say, naw. I don’t think I would have believed it had I not seen the footage. There he was at the podium crooning with his guitar about times changing and wondering how many times the cannon balls will fly just before Dr. King took the stage.

There is an interesting connection between the two of them and Luke’s account of the Palm Sunday passage. I’ll start with Dylan. It wasn’t long after this that he put aside what fans consider “protest” music. When asked he said he never meant to protest anything. He was a folk singer. And the difference is intriguing. A protest song tells you someone and something is wrong; a folk song says what is good, bad, what is beautiful and ugly about us all. There were many who felt betrayed when Bob Dylan seemed to grow silent during Vietnam and the anti-war movement. Yet, in a way that suggests I’ve listened to too much music, it was as if he wrote folk songs about how much good there was in protest, which is not much.

And for Dr. King there is a similar distinction. For the million who marched and sang and wept down Pennsylvania Avenue this was a kind of momentum and change and protest. This was standing up for something important, something that needed to be said. And the words that Dr. King offered on to the crowd, to the nation, and to generations to come where prophetic and empowering. For everyone who marched on Washington that day this was a protest that changed everything. Yet for King though it wasn’t a protest; it was a walk into the Kidron Valley. It wasn’t so much a moment of protest, but sacrifice. What were words that needed to be heard for the crowd became the unfolding of his life being given for others.

***

When Luke describes the momentum and excitement and the taking of Jerusalem, he is also quietly setting the stage that this was a moment of sacrifice. I believe this is the reason why he changed the story of the colt. I believe he was pointing to a moment of sacrifice, a moment where a sacrifice was provided along the way.

On the hillside where Jesus rode the colt to the temple, legend has it that on that mount there was a father and a son named Abraham and Isaac. And when put to the test, when pushed to the limit of an absurd obedience, God told Abraham not to offer his son and instead there was a ram caught in the thicket. This was the one who would be sacrificed instead of Isaac the angel said. It was toward this place Jesus was being led by the crowd. And it was unto the offering of his life which he felt propelled.

Walking down the Mt. of Olives feeling the weight of the incline I understood the reason for lingering in the garden and praying for another way. Kierkegaard was ever referring to this absurdity as the cross we must carry if we follow Christ. By absurdity he means the way we cannot reconcile this act, the meaning of this sacrifice, with anything else.

And this was the quiet message of Luke in the colt, this was the reason why Dr. King’s march on Washington wasn’t protest but sacrifice, and in a strange way, I think this is why Bob Dylan never wrote a “protest” song. True change, truth and justice that rolls down like water, is not born of protest but sacrifice- real folk giving their life so that others may live.

On Palm Sunday Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God. Matthew and Mark are right. But Luke, Luke knows that great things are not born of consensus or protest or being right; great things are born of sacrifice. As I walked up the other side of the Kidron valley and looked back at the Mount of Olives I was mindful of where Jesus was heading. And the absurdity of the sacrifice, the irreconcilable nature of my sin and God perfection, the gulf between what was and what should be, the distance between justice and mercy, all these things seemed to be in the midst of the valley as I ascended to the Temple Mount.

On Palm Sunday the people sang and shouted too loud for the Pharisees. Oh I hope I am not a Pharisee. When Jesus came to the city he wept, he turned the tables over, he looked around, and he headed to Bethany, the city of the poor. Not quite the pageant we’ve come to ascribe to kings. As Kierkegaard would say, this we are by virtue of the absurd. For what else could reconcile our sin than a Galilean carpenter who made the blind see and the lame walk? Amen.