The Freedom March

 A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Palm Sunday, 2nd April 2023

Matthew 21.1-17

A couple of weeks ago, in her sermon on the wise and foolish bridesmaids,

            Dawn made reference to the song by Curtis Mayfield, ‘People Get Ready’,

and she asked the question of whether we were ready for the long fight for justice,

            whether our oil was sufficient to keep the light of hope and justice burning

            through the long night of darkness ahead.

 

The song, ‘People get ready’ was a kind of unofficial anthem

             of the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s,

with Martin Luther King Jr. often using the song to get people marching.

 

Well, today is Palm Sunday,

            and today the gospel moves the story from waiting to marching.

Today is the day for marching on Jerusalem, for entering the Temple,

            for turning the tables on those who hold power

            over others to exploit and exclude.

 

And so today let’s begin by remembering the story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s

             March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

 

It’s August 28^th, 1963, and about a quarter of a million people

            are marching into Washington DC

to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans.

 

Martin Luther King is about to delivery his historic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech

            in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

 

After centuries of oppression,

            and despite various attempts at widening representation,

America in the 1960s was still a deeply divided society,

            with the Southern States passing constitutions and laws

            that disenfranchised most black people and many poor white people,

                        excluding them from the political system:

            they were kept out because of who they were.

 

Interracial marriage was prohibited in 21 states,

            and the Jim Crow laws enforced continued segregation in public spaces,

            with many black people the victim of regular violence.

 

Billie Holiday’s well known performances of the song ‘Strange Fruit’,

            which describes the lynching of black men being hung from trees,

is a truly heart-breaking evocation of that time in American history.

 

It was against this backdrop of oppression

            that a group of people who had all become associated

            with the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee

decided to use the techniques of community organising that they had been learning,

            to organise what became one of the largest political rallies for human rights

            in United States history.

 

Interestingly, the work of the Highlander Folk School

            can be directly traced to the current work of London Citizens

            that many of us here at Bloomsbury have become involved with.

 

And so A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin,

            and others including Martin Luther King Jr,

gathered an alliance of churches and other organisations

            to march under the banner of ‘Jobs and Freedom’,

            as a decisive act of nonviolent direct action.

 

They were careful to position the march as a peaceful demonstration,

            and not an act of revolution or revolt.

and it is credited with propelling the US government into action,

            such that within a couple years the Civil Rights Act

            and the Voting Rights Act were passed.

 

Sometimes, marching for freedom

            is the only way to end the long years of waiting.

And I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this,

            when I invite you now to step back, not sixty years, but two millennia,

            to Jesus’ march on Jerusalem.

 

The situation of first century Palestine

            was also a world of exclusion, violence, and oppression.

 

The Romans were oppressing the Jews,

            as they oppressed all the nations they conquered.

And the Jewish population harboured their hopes of nationalism and freedom,

            with their religiously inspired hopes for a messiah

            who would usher in a new golden age of self-determination.

 

But the Jews, or at least their religious and political elite,

            were also themselves enacting exclusion on others:

their temple, the dwelling place of God on earth,

            the place where humans could go to encounter the presence of the divine,

was off limits to women, to foreigners,

            and to any others who were marked out as unclean

            because of their identity or behaviour.

 

And it is in this context of oppression and exclusion

            that Jesus and his disciples march on Jerusalem.

 

In contrast to the hundreds of thousands who marched on Washington,

            the march to Jerusalem was enacted by only a handful of people.

But we shouldn’t diminish it for this:

            the symbolic significance of the moment

            is spelled out in the text for us all to see. [1]

 

Jesus and the disciples draw near to Jerusalem,

            pausing a short walk away on the Mount of Olives,

            just the other side of the valley.

 

Even today this is where you get the best views of the city,

            and it was the place Jesus chose as the staging area

            for what would be the final enactment of his march on the city.

 

In ancient times, particularly in the Roman and Greek cultures,

            a returning King or successful warrior

            would be welcomed to their home city with what was known as a ‘Triumph’

                        - a triumphal entry into the city,

                        where everyone turned out to welcome the conquering hero.

 

You can imagine it: the flags, the waving, the cheering;

            probably bunting and street parties…

            well… maybe not the last two, but you get the idea.

 

And Jesus marches on Jerusalem

            in what become known as his ‘Triumphal Entry’,

but which is in fact a parody

            of what people had come to expect.

 

In place of a war horse, he rides an ass;

            in place of band of heroes,

                        he is accompanied by a motley crew of fishermen and nobodies;

            in place of a sword he holds aloft his empty hands.

 

Jesus’ Triumphal Entry is not a Roman ‘Triumph’

            - it’s something else entirely.

 

And because we don’t know our Hebrew Bible as well as we perhaps should,

            we need Matthew to spell it all out for us.

Jesus may be mimicking a Roman Imperial Triumph,

            but he’s doing it to evoke some very specific parts

            of the Jewish prophetic tradition.

 

So Matthew gives us a quote from the prophet Zechariah (9.9),

            quoting from a section celebrating God’s defeat of Israel’s enemies

            and the establishment of God’s reign on the earth.

 

Jesus may be subverting the Roman ideal of a Military Triumph,

            but he’s still entering as a reigning King:

            he is the King of heaven on his way to victory.

 

And the crowds certainly greet him as a king

            - spreading their cloaks on the road

            and cutting branches from the trees to prepare his way;

and as they do so Matthew has them shouting

            words of praise drawn from Psalm 118:

 

‘Hosanna to the Son of David!

    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

 

The crowds, in fact the whole city responds to his arrival

            - some with joy and others with confusion or consternation.

 

The fact that people are hailing him as ‘Son of David’

            tells us what they think is going on

- this is King David’s rightful heir,

            coming to re-establish his kingdom by overthrowing the Romans

            and restoring Israel’s independence and status.

 

Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem

            is a deeply, unmistakeably political act.

 

He has come to be acknowledged as King,

            and he is hailed as the son of David, the one long-expected,

            who is coming to free Jerusalem from foreign domination.

 

Yet things are not quite what they seem.

            Remember, there’s no sword, no war horse, no band of warriors.

 

This king is going to triumph not through violent revolt,

            but by non-violently turning the tables

                        and raising up the downtrodden and the broken,

            by drawing into God’s presence those who have been excluded.

 

There’s a revolution here, but it’s not a violent one.

 

And so Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem

            is celebrated by those who are not in power,

            and feared by those who are.

 

There’s a change coming,

            and the powerful are going to have to give up some of their privilege

            if the poor are to be raised up.

 

And the thing the disciples are about to discover

            is something we know well

- which is that the powerful don’t like

            to see the empowerment of the disempowered,

and they don’t give up power without a fight.

 

And so Jesus enters Jerusalem and goes straight to the temple

             - the building that defines the city:

            it’s religious and political centre.

 

These days, western society tends to espouse a mantra

            of the separation of religion and politics,

although the fact that our new monarch

            will be crowned by the Archbishop rather belies this somewhat,

as does the presence of Anglican Bishops in the House of Lords.

 

But setting these anomalies aside for a moment,

            I think that on the whole most people are of the opinion

            that there is a dividing line between the church and the state.

 

The church might still have some influence,

            but it doesn’t actually get to write the laws of the land.

 

As an aside, did you see the story a few months ago

            where an MP suggested that bishops

            shouldn’t be “using their pulpits to preach from”?

 

It turns out Jonathan Gullis MP was upset that senior members of the clergy

            had published a letter critical of the UK government’s policy

            of moving the processing of asylum seekers “offshore” to Rwanda . [2]

 

I do very much think that there is a role for people of faith

            to have a voice in national life,

and am glad for the opportunity to do so myself on occasions.

 

The calling for the people of God to speak truth to power

            is an important prophetic duty,

and it’s one the prophets of the Hebrew Bible took seriously.

 

But by the time of Jesus,

            the politics and power dynamics of the Roman occupation

                        and the ruling elite of Israel

            meant that the role of religion in Jewish society

                        had become more about keeping the people subservient,

            than about challenging the powers of oppression.

 

And at the heart of this project was the great Temple,

            rebuilt only a few decades previously by Herod the Great

            as a symbol of the power of religion to dominate and control the population.

 

Herod was an ally of Rome, a puppet-king of Israel,

            and he had constructed his Temple and its associated hierarchies

            to protect his power.

 

And so Jesus marched on Jerusalem and went to the temple.

 

This is all political, it’s all about power.

            And the reference Matthew gives us to the prophet Zechariah

                        tells us that Jesus is not going to allow Rome to determine

                        what counts or does not count for politics.

 

No first century equivalent of an angry MP

            is going to tell Jesus that Messiah’s should stick to theology.

 

Politics and faith, for Jesus, are about power.

 

But the power that Jesus exercises

            is power which is life-giving,

drawing as it does on the very source of life itself.

 

And so Jesus enters the temple,

            driving out those who were selling and buying.

He overturns the tables and seats of those profaning the temple

            by making it just another place of commerce.

 

Symbolically and in reality,

            Jesus assumes the mantle of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah,

by condemning those who buy and sell,

            telling them that the temple is to be a house of prayer.

 

The politics that Jesus has come to proclaim

            is a politics grounded in prayer, in worship,

in a recognition that above all earthly power, above all human rulers,

            there is a God whose desire is for people to be released from captivity,

            set free from oppression,

                        and freed to worship in spirit and in truth.

 

And so Jesus proclaims that the temple is to be a house of prayer,

            not just for the righteous, not just for the men,

                        not just for the ritually clean, but for all people.

 

The blind, the lame, the children

            - all those who were normally excluded,

are welcomed into the presence of God by Jesus,

            and they find healing through acceptance and belonging

            as they enter the courts of God’s house (cf. 2 Sam 5.8; Lev 21.17).

 

The politics of Jesus is a politics of inclusion not exclusion,

            and it is a politics that originates in God’s love for all people.

 

Jesus here is enacting the prophecy of Isaiah

            - written initially to those whose task it was to rebuild the temple

            after the time of the Babylonian exile.

 

Listen to what Isaiah said to them,

            and hear it echoing into Jesus’ actions in the temple:

 

The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,

    to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,

    and to be his servants…

these I will bring to my holy mountain

    and make them joyful in my house of prayer…

Thus says the Lord God,

    who gathers the outcasts of Israel:

I will gather others to them

    besides those already gathered.

 

Jesus acts as the prophets have often acted,

            making God’s word present through action.

 

And there is no mandate here for violent action.

 

The truth known and lived by Martin Luther King Jr.

            and those who organised the Freedom March on Washington

            is also here in Jesus’ march on Jerusalem.

 

True, Godly politics, must be nonviolent politics.

 

Jesus’ cleansing of the temple

            was the overturning not only of the tables of the moneychangers,

            but of the established order of exclusion,

as he invited into God’s presence

            those who had been kept away.

 

There’s a key theological principle

            that lies behind what Jesus was doing in the temple:

he was enacting the year of Jubilee

            - the resetting and restoring, of human relationships

            between people and before God.

 

Not only are the blind and the lame welcomed into Jesus’ cleansed temple,

            but so are the poor.

 

Those who sold doves in the temple precincts

            did so because the book of Leviticus (5.7)

                        had included a provision for the poor

            to substitute doves or pigeons for their sacrifice

                        if they could not afford sheep.

 

But that provision had become just another way to exploit the poor

            - as these supposedly ‘free’ birds were sold to the poor at extortionate prices.

 

Jesus was not only cleansing the temple,

            he was starting a revolutionary celebration,

as the people, even the children, who had been excluded from the temple,

            excluded from worship, excluded from the presence of God,

were suddenly able to sing the words of the Psalmist:

            ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’.

 

But this is not simply worship:

            these are political words.

 

As we have seen, the ‘son of David’ was, within the Jewish tradition,

            the heir to the throne of David;

and consequently the one who would restore David’s throne and kingdom.

 

But if you look through Matthew’s gospel,

            you find that it is only ever those talking about Jesus

                        who call him the ‘son of David’.

Whenever he refers to himself and his own ministry,

            he calls himself the ‘son of Man’.

 

The point is clear:

            the kingdom that Jesus has come to establish is not David’s kingdom,

                        it is not a nationalistic or parochial kingdom with borders that exclude.

 

The people of God is not a closed-set with border to be patrolled and controlled,

            it is not a holy elite from whose company the unclean must be repelled.

 

Rather it is a kingdom for all human kind,

            for all those who are sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.

 

Jesus’ kingdom is marked by a politics

            of welcome, inclusion, healing and peace.

 

And this is why Bishops must object to inhuman border policies.

 

It is why all Christians are called to take their stand against exclusion,

            it is why we must resist any power that destroys,

            and it is why we must renew our commitment to nonviolence.

 

This is the kingdom of heaven

            that Jesus marches to Israel to establish.

 

And it is not fully known yet on the earth,

            but we catch glimpses of it.

 

It came nearer the day those people marched on Washington in 1963,

            and it drew nearer just this last week

                        when some of us went to stand outside a Healthcare trust in Marylebone

                                    with others from London Citizens,

                        challenging them to pay a living wage to their staff.

 

We are called to the freedom march, in the name of Christ.

            Can you hear the call?

            Will you join the march?

 

There is a hymn we sing sometimes at Communion.

 

We’re not singing it today,

            but I’d like to read you the words to conclude this sermon.

 

It’s written by Chris Ellis, who used to be my minister:

 

Passover God, we remember your faithfulness,

God of the exodus, friend of the poor;

people bowed down with the burden of powerlessness,

sin in its ruthlessness making them slaves.

 

Still people shrivel, imprisoned in bitterness,

hemmed in by fear and diminished by hate;

tormented prisoners and perishing hungry ones,

broken humanity calls for your aid.

 

You summoned Moses to work for the freedom march,

you called the slaves to be people of hope;

set free from Egypt, you led them through desert lands,

loving commands gave them justice and truth.

 

You gave the travellers bread in the wilderness;

strengthen us now with the bread that we share:

bread for the struggle and wine for rejoicing;

in Christ you free us and teach us to care.

 

We are your people, still called to a promised land,

called for a purpose with Christ as the way;

grant us commitment to wholeness and liberty,

strength for the journey and grace for each day.

            Christopher Ellis (b. 1949)

 

[1] What follows draws on Stanley Hauerwas’s commentary on Matthew.

[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jonathan-gullis-tory-mp-bishops-using-the-pulpit-to-preach-from_uk_63a0babbe4b03e2cc502d073