The Kingdom is coming

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Provoking Faith, 5^th April 2020

Mark 11.1-11

Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/the-kingdom-is-coming

On Thursday night, at 8pm,people up and down the country

            turned out of their houses and went into the streets.

Keeping the appropriate distance from one another,

            they shouted, applauded, banged saucepans,

                        and in some cases set off fireworks.

It was, of course the mass demonstration

            of public support for carers and key workers.

On Friday morning, on the Breakfast news,

            BBC reporter Dan Johnson said the following:

‘Someone once said that the NHS

            is the closest we have to our own religion.

If so, this is our new regular act of worship.’

A bit of Googling on my part revealed that he was quoting Nigel Lawson,

            former Chancellor of the Exchequer for the Conservative party,

who actually said,

            ‘the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion’.

And I don’t want to get overly party political,

            but I do observe the irony

in the fact that the current national emergency

            has made the National Health Service an unassailable deity for these days;

demanding such unambiguous and ubiquitous adoration and sacrificial investment,

            that even our Prime Minister rose from his bed of sickness

            to stand alone on the steps of No.10 applauding the NHS.

Whereas the last ten years of political decisions

            about health spending and privatisation

might have led one to conclude that the NHS had become a golden calf

            in need of breaking up and melting down for profit.

How times change.

And I wonder, will they change again,

            when the current crisis is past?

Will we end up with future manifestos

            moving us once more towards a privatised and reduced National Health Service?

I hope not.

But people are fickle,

            and can turn from adulation to anathema in a matter of days.

Just ask Jesus,

            applauded and adored as he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday,

            only to be hated and scapegoated by the end of the week.

Crowd mentality can turn on a dime,

            particularly when people are scared, hurting, and desperate.

And Jesus’ triumphal entry to Jerusalem

            was a carefully staged exercise in ‘messianic street theatre’ (Ched Myers),

designed to tap into the public desperation

            for release from the tyranny of the Roman Empire

            that had dominated their lives for decades.

The people of Judea were longing for a messiah,

            someone who would save them from the hostile occupation

            that was taking their money, their liberty, and their freedom of worship.

The Jewish scriptures offered a hope for such a figure,

            who was often held to be a so-called ‘son of David’,

                        a rightful heir to David’s mythologised kingdom;

            someone who would restore Israel’s political borders,

                        and bring freedom and dignity

                        to those currently living in fear, pain, and desperation.

There had been messianic uprisings before,

            most notably the Maccabean revolt

                        a Jewish rebellion, lasting from 167 to 160 BC,

            led by the Maccabees family against the Hellenistic empire

                        that had ruled Israel before the Romans.

You can read about it in the book of 1 Maccabees,

            which is in the apocrypha section of our church Bibles,

and if you do you’ll discover that one of the key revolutionaries,

            a man named, rather pleasingly, Simon,

laid siege to Jerusalem, and when he had taken the city for the rebels,

            staged a triumphal entry into the city.

Here’s the quote:

1Maccabees 13.51-52

On the twenty-third day of the second month,

            in the one hundred seventy-first year,

the Jews entered [Jerusalem] with praise and palm branches,

            and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments,

                        and with hymns and songs,

            because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel.

Simon decreed that every year they should celebrate this day with rejoicing.

It turns out that Simon Maccabaeus knew exactly what he was doing

            when he staged his triumphal entry,

because he knew the book of Zechariah in the Hebrew Scriptures

            which indicated that the day of Jerusalem’s messianic liberation

                        would be signalled by a victorious leader entering the city in triumph,

                        like a general returning from battle.

Zechariah 9.9

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

            Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he,

            humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

If you were going to be a revolutionary Jewish messiah,

            there was, it seems, a template to follow:

and Jesus followed it to the letter,

            carefully combining elements of both Zechariah and Maccabees.

Then if you throw in a reference to Psalm 118,

            you’ve got the complete package,

and we see this as the crowd welcoming Jesus

            quote from the messianic psalm, shouting:

Save us! [Hosanna]! … Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD.

(Psalm 118.25-26)

There’s no mistaking it,

            this is a triumphal entry setting up Jesus as the Jewish messiah.

It’s interesting, isn’t it,

            that almost half of the text of Mark’s narrative of the triumphal entry

                        is given over to the setup,

                        with the whole ‘find me a donkey’ cameo…

None of this is happening by accident,

            it’s a carefully staged piece of messianic street theatre,

designed to get the crowd cheering their messiah,

            who was entering Jerusalem

            in fulfilment of all their expectations of liberation.

But there’s a twist coming,

            because even as the crowd hail Jesus

                        as the one who will revive Great David’s kingdom,

            Jesus has already told his disciples that his revolution, his kingdom,

                        will not be a political restoration,

                        and it won’t even be a religious revival.

He’s not coming to fight,

            he’s not coming to re-establish Jewish freedom,

            he’s not coming to cleanse the temple of Roman occupation.

Jesus is marching on the city

            to do battle with the ideologies of nationalism and Zionism

            that perpetuate systems of violence.

He’s going to Jerusalem to defeat the deep forces of evil,

            not their temporary temporal manifestations.

His parody of a military insurgency

            is designed to highlight the problem, not the solution.

And the problem is this:

            The people are addicted to the culture of the quick fix.

They long for someone to ride into their lives in triumph,

            and offer them a way out of their problems.

They will stand in the streets and shout and applaud

            anyone who seems to offer them hope in their darkness.

And Jesus is coming to give them a message that they don’t want to hear,

            which is that sometimes the path to the new world

            involves a long and difficult journey

            through a time of suffering, death, and isolation.

And, as we will discover over the course of the next week,

            the crowd will not learn this lesson easily.

In fact they will change their allegiance from Jesus to Barabbas,

            continuing to cheer the violent revolutionary

            in place of the ‘dissident of meekness’ (Martyn Joseph).

And as we consider our response,

            as we make own journeys

            through this time of suffering, death, and isolation,

I wonder, I wonder… what we are applauding today,

            that we will shout crucify at tomorrow?

Can we see through the culture of the quick fix?

            Can we find a way past our national obsession

                        with technology as the path to salvation?

Can we inhabit a commitment to a better and more sustainable way of being human,

            where we are kind to each other and our planet.

I wonder…

Can we discover in this time

            that Christ invites us to a deeper journey through life,

where we address the questions of what it means to be mortal,

            and where we discover grace in the midst of human frailty?

Can we encounter the community of love even as we live in isolation,

            and realise that what binds us to one other

            is far more than what might divide us?

Can we recognise how easily we scapegoat others,

            and learn to reject narratives of ‘me and mine’,

in favour of a commitment to the love of neighbour,

            and of care for those who are vulnerable?

I wonder, in essence,

            whether we can recognise the Kingdom that Jesus proclaims?

Or will we end up being seduced once again

            by the kingdoms of power and violence,

that feed our addiction to the quick fix,

            but starve us of deep love and communion.

The Kingdom of Christ knows no boundaries,

            it loves all, embraces all,

and invites us to live the love of God into being in our daily lives,

            as we live lives of sacrifice,

taking up our own crosses, and following Jesus.