This is the first time since 1928 that Palm Sunday has coincided with All Fools Day, something that will happen only twice again in this century.i
Our friends from the Restored Church of God are no doubt uncomfortable with this quirk of the calendar. "Foolishness is sin," their website declares. "Christians…must separate themselves from all pagan traditions… including April Fools' Day!"ii
For me, on the contrary, the rare conjunction seems auspicious. I am qualified to preach this morning's sermon at least by my long history of foolish choices, if not by faith or reason.
Moreover, one of my central topics today, in fact, is folly - the folly of David, a king who failed to plan. My other is that wonderfully puzzling Palm Sunday donkey-ride of Jesus, a king of a different sort, who seems to have planned to fail.
I have been pondering these stories, thinking about our desires for power and triumph in this world and for resurrection in the next, and wondering whether I might persuade you that both of these desires divert us from the love, the indignation, and the laughter that might revive our nearly moribund souls.
This morning's reading from II Samuel is a sad story of kingship and rebellion. We feel the terrible grief in David's lament, "Oh my son Absalom. Oh Absalom, my son. Would I had died for thee." But the story suggests also that this royal son's impatience and disloyalty had among its causes his father's foolish fondness.
David in his way was as clueless as King Lear. He was besotted with Absalom, who of all his sons was most like David's own young self - compellingly attractive, loved by many. The king refused to see the menace in Absalom's evident ambition. Nor would he confirm his eldest son's expectations to be the future king. He had announced no plan of succession, thinking, it seems, to hang on to power until the end, but in fact making the heir presumptive more insecure, more dangerous.
Feeling at ease in his kingship, David had become less available for the daily tasks of judging the cases and controversies of his people. Absalom saw an opportunity to play the king's role as judge and win the loyalty of his subjects.
When the rebellion was announced and David fled toward the Jordan River, Absalom entered triumphantly into Jerusalem. To prove to his followers that he would settle for nothing but victory, he made himself odious to his father, as the Scripture says, by having public sex with all his father's concubines. A few days later, he led an army of Israelites against the forces loyal to his father. We're told that twenty thousand soldiers died.
Joab, that best and worst of henchmen, violated David's ban and killed the rebel son. He then insisted David leave his private grief to celebrate the victory in public with his people. The logic was compelling. David did what was needed, and won more years as king.
In many of its elements this is a familiar story about how power works when the institutions of law and civil society are weak or absent, and when allegiance is undermined by poor judgment at the top or a failure to meet the people's needs. The warriors fight for control, the surviving ordinary folks make what lives they can. A few of those in charge may bear some measure of the sorrows of the war. And those who get a second chance can sometimes rule more wisely and gain a measure of humility. But on the whole, what stands out for me is the numbers of souls destroyed, quite casually, by the folly and the narcissism of those who govern.
The first Palm Sunday came almost 1,000 years after Absalom's triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Jesus' decision to visit the city somehow became the occasion of a celebration by his followers, who seem to have been for the most part drawn from the lower strata of the Jewish population.
The procession from Bethany to Jerusalem was both playful and unusual. This teacher rode on a half-grown donkey requisitioned by his puzzled disciples. His followers strewed their threadbare clothes in front of the young donkey, all the while brandishing palm fronds instead of swords or lances. There were no guards, no horses, not even any royal mules.
There were a lot of people, a "multitude" Luke says, filled with mostly inchoate expectations. Their quite untraditional rabbi, the one who sided with the poor and talked with the sinners and the outcasts, was going to the great city. His good news would be heard there, that all the law and all the prophets hang on the great commandments of love, love for God, for other people, even for one's enemies.
Among these subjects of Roman imperial rule were many proud and restive spirits. Judas may have been among these. He may even have been a zealot, angry at the meekness of his master, perhaps pondering whether a martyr's death for Jesus might better serve the cause of Israel than this odd and seemingly inconsequential parody of power.
Everyone that day seems to have felt change coming. But what the change would be no one quite knew. Jesus didn't say. What was he doing on that donkey?
Some of the hymns capture the paradox: majesty is combined with meekness. There was no special climax, no throne to occupy, no public welcome from the authorities. If the "foal of an ass" recalled the prophecy of Zecharia, the followers were misled. Jesus was not the hoped for King of a militarily resurgent Israel.
After arriving in Jerusalem, Jesus went, as a faithful Jew should at Passover, to pray at the temple. There, apparently, something about the riches or the money he saw got his Irish up, and the already nervous authorities began to think that this odd rabbi might yet cause some trouble.
Luke adds an extra element to the story of the procession:
"And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out." Luke 19:39-40
No summary of the Holy Week story seems better than Richard Wilbur's poetry in this passage, from the perspective of Christmas Day, writing of Christ,
"This child through David's city
Shall ride in triumph by;
The palm shall strew its branches,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
Though heavy, dull and dumb,
And lie within the roadway
To pave his kingdom come.
Yet he shall be forsaken,
And yielded up to die;
The sky shall groan and darken,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
For stony hearts of men:
God's blood upon the spearhead,
God's love refused again."iii
Wilbur's promise and the Gospels' is that "at the ending," Easter, "the low is lifted high": the worlds will be reconciled. The Evangelists and the church tell us Christ will be enthroned in heaven; and death will lose its sting.
Others are not so sure. For many of us, there is no assurance, no indemnity. The world seems still in love with folly and ruled by foolish, selfish cruelty.
I grew up in California, buying my poetry at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights. Do any of you remember?
"Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hep
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad
And moreover
he adds
It's all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won't even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter
You're hot
they tell him
And they cool him
They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is the king cat
who's got to blow
or they can't quite make it
Only Him don't come down
from His Tree
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead"iv
This is a beat reading of the story, a downbeat reading. But we have to admit the strength of the evidence. Jesus's teaching and his passion have not saved the world from war, or violence, or genocide. Worse yet, Christians have spent their centuries warring fiercely against each other and assorted infidels. The great religions haven't cured the ills of the world: they often seem rather to be the pathogenic influences.
The blessed meek have been overpowered in most churches by the religious authorities. The strong prevail. Even the usual unreliable sources reveal the moral and human disasters of our time.
Yet something about that strange procession into Jerusalem won't go away. What was Jesus doing? Why inspire people to believe in you and in your teaching when you know you are going to be killed? Why the parody, the triumph with the donkey?
Absalom's rebellion deserved to fail. Christ's transforming teaching of love deserves to win. Even if the promise of eternal life seems implausible, the challenging and enigmatic figure and message of Jesus is still a critical presence calling for a better world.
So I am willing to begin this Palm Sunday right here, in the midst of all these doubts. What would it take to match the promise of the joy we sing and the hope that in spite of everything we feel? And where would we begin?
I don't believe in the afterlife, nor do I hunger for it, but I do believe in other kinds of resurrection:
The resurrection of our minds and hearts in every blessed day.
The recovery of consciousness, which will mean the restoration of conscience and of the memory of our teachers (among them, Socrates, Siddhartha, Jesus, Mrs. Roosevelt, my grandmother…).
The resurrection of love, that every day we might say it and receive it and remember it, carrying with us the memories of those who have mattered to us most.
The resurrection of hope, which is kindled by our recognition of injustice and strengthened by the outrage we can voice at all that is wrong and hurtful.
The rebirth of tears. Without weeping we deny the sufferings and losses that we know and feel. Without honesty about our sorrows, joy is likely to be hollow. But oddly, great joys make tears possible. Their height can help us find the measure of our deep sorrows.
The re-creation of community. Our shared sadness can bind us as tightly as our common hopes and dreams.
The rebirth of laughter. We need not only the sanity of mirth, but the recognition of absurdity, and the force of wit and satire against others' follies and our own.
The resurrection of wonder, that we might celebrate our days with art.
Yes, art. The great Russian director Meyerhold used to say "art is to life as wine is to the grapes." We hunger for food and art. We prize the intensity of flavors and the complexity and richness of sounds and stories. We hunger for the shapes and colors and teasing puzzlements the dancers and the painters give us.
If we cannot celebrate, if we cannot take the time for active joy, we betray own best hopes. We have to show, not just believe, that people ought to fulfill the gifts with which they're born.
Here at Judson, of course, on this subject, I am preaching to the choir.
Thank you for welcoming me to this amazing congregation. Your passions and commitments shine forth, inspiring and a challenging us all.
i I hope to be back here celebrating this excellent conjunction with you in five years. I don't expect any of us to make it for 2091.
ii From the Restored Church of God website, faithful to the teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong: http://www.thercg.org/articles/afh.html.
iii Richard Wilbur, "A Christmas Hymn."
iv "some time during eternity," from A Coney Island of the Mind, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1958.
