Rev'd Chris - A surprising Journey

PALM SUNDAY Mark 11. 1-11 : A SURPRISING JOURNEY The account is familiar enough to us. Jesus enters Jerusalem on a colt, having sent two of his disciples to find it and fetch it. The colt has never been ridden before. It is not broken in. Now I know very little about horses, but I know they don’t usually easily take to been ridden. My maternal grandfather had a knack for breaking in horses and was the one other farmers sent for when they were trying to get a young horse used to the strap round their neck and reins and break it in. In Mark’s account (and the gospels all have their distinctive flavour of this account) there seems to be a passionate concern that the colt a young foal of a donkey has never been ridden before. No other person has ever sat upon it. It is as if the colt has been saving itself, or its owners have, for this special divine mission. Only the purest animal will do for the task. Jesus is the first one to ride it. And so, it is surprising and amazing that he does so without it appearing to resist, it does not become a bucking bronco scenario and try to toss him off. He obviously had a way with the animal. He is calming, makes it feel at ease. It rather feels like this is its purpose, to transport Jesus into the city on that festival day. The crowd in a fit of excitement cut down branches and wave them, throw their cloaks on the ground to make a kind of royal road for Jesus to ride along, for they are welcoming their Messiah, the King, the one they are pinning their hopes on. And they shout “Hosanna”. Now hosanna means literally “save us”. I wonder what the crowd meant by that phrase. Probably different things. In our world today we are hoping the measures we have put in place about hand washing, social distancing, wearing face coverings and now the vaccine roll-out or all these things that together are going to save us from the pandemic of coronavirus. Jesus comes to save us but perhaps not in the ways the crowd were expecting, or by the means he endured later in the week. They could not possibly have foreseen the cross and his passion. They think he is coming to set things right, which he does of course, but not in the way they expect, they think he is coming as King to boot out the Romans, make their nation great again. Their minds are full of power, glory, politics, hopes, perhaps even revolution (lets not forget one of his followers was a zealot- Simon the zealot, a member of a revolutionary party or group), the people were hoping for a brighter future, pomp and circumstance, certainly not betrayal, pain, suffering and death. Many a time in history politicians have hailed their programme as something that is going to save the nation. And usually the idea comes a cropper out after a short time, because promises are undeliverable, as something does not go according to plan and another programme has to be created quickly, downgrading the previous extravagant hopes. In the crowd that first Palm Sunday, the folk are pinning their hopes on Jesus. Well, we know Jesus has saved us by his life, death and resurrection. We can confidently put our trust in him for this life and the next. He is the “Saviour of the world” as we proclaimed in the canticle we shared in with its repeated petition “save us and help us”, just like the crowd who cry “hosanna”. The crowd also cry out “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” words that have come into the liturgy of the Church at every eucharist in what we call the Sanctus and Benedictus in the middle of the prayer we say over the bread and wine, perhaps reminding us that each time we celebrate Holy Communion we gather for a festival as pilgrims, just as the crowd did that day Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem. Whether we always have the same degree of excitement is another matter! In Mark’s version of the incident there is a special focus on the coming kingdom of David. There is a very purposeful looking forward, and expectation, an intentional hopefulness. The crowd are kingdom focused and have an eye to the future. And Jesus does nothing to thwart their perceptions. He goes along with the sentiments, he laps it up. He seems to accept it, but whether he had other thoughts in his mind we do not know. I wonder whether we are always kingdom focused. And whether we always have an eye to the future. We can easily slip into only being concerned about the present, or even nostalgia for the past. In our worship and our life together in the Church we can easily become focused on the here are now or perhaps the past and restrict our thinking around our views, the views of those present and miss the thing that God is seeking to reveal to us about what God has planned around the corner- the new thing or things. Our perceptions can easily be limited by our smallness of vision. We might look around at the folk and miss the great cloud of witnesses with whom we join our prayers and praises. Perhaps part of the surprising journey is to realise the other folk who are also journeying. We do not journey alone. The crowd have a focus on what is coming next. It is not here yet, but it is on its way. Like the train we can hear but not yet see, pulling into the station. As we plan for some of our churches to re-open, we might be guilty of missing something really significant if we just think it is going to be as it was before. We need to realize we are in a different world now, that we are not returning to what was familiar. In stark terms what of all those in your community who have yet to hear the good news of the gospel, what are our plans for evangelising them? How do we share the good news of the gospel with them? And the account ends with a sting in the tail. Jesus goes into the Temple and he looks around, then leaves, as it was already late. He looks around. He takes it all in. He looks and sees, he takes notice- of what we are not told-but we can guess; the people, the systems, the furniture, the smell, the atmosphere, the traders, the animals, the worshippers…In some ways that should be what we have been doing for the last twelve months, looking at our churches and thinking through what has been going on, what God is calling us to do and to be in the future. I am not sure we have done enough looking around yet. We need to be getting on with that