Sermon: Keeping The Peace (Part 1)

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When Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we can imagine that the sun was out and the mood was celebratory. His assistants had just stolen a donkey for him, just like that, explaining that the lord needed it to ride into the city. They had put their own cloaks down on the donkey’s back to make the ride cushier. Others were throwing their cloaks and palm fronds on the ground, making a royal carpet for him as he rode along. Crowds of peasants were lining the sides of the road to Jerusalem, cheering and shouting, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven.” This was the text of the Benedictus we heard earlier, except they shouted it in Aramaic, not Latin. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. The crowd was raucous and excited and it was, by all appearances, a good day for Jesus.

 

And yet, on this day, Jesus ended up crying. Because the Pharisees, who were the wealthy elite Jews in cahoots with the Roman occupiers, did not like all the unruly commotion. As far as they were concerned, this was a flash mob of the unwashed masses. They were nervous about the people calling this guy a king, when the only king was supposed to be Caesar. And so as Jesus rode by on his donkey, they approached him sternly and said, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” And Jesus answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

 

He sounded confident, I imagine, when he said it, but it was all bluster. Because the very next passage in the book of Luke says this: “As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying ‘If you, even you, had recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will …crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.’ “

 

So as Jesus was standing there looking at the city of Jerusalem, he was already despairing. The Pharisees comment to him — their attempt to keep the peace by telling him to make his disciples stop making so much noise — showed him that they were not even close to ready to hear his message. “If you had recognized the things that make for peace…” he said. But they did not recognize the things that make for real peace. Their version of peace was crowd control. Social order. Preservation of institutions. The Pharisees’ version of “peace” was obsequious compliance with power, in this case the Roman Empire because, after all, it was the Roman Empire — they held all the cards. Best to just keep quiet and reap whatever social rewards might come your way.

 

And so Jesus wept for his people, seeing how far they had strayed, how corrupt they had become, how they couldn’t recognize a message or a messenger from God if it was staring them in the face. He knew that this kind of shortsighted, immediate keeping of the peace would make for a long-term disaster with no peace at all. He described the disaster, in the tradition of the ancient Hebrew prophets before him, as being vanquished by one’s enemies, the whole people crushed with not one stone of the city’s buildings left standing. This was the fate that he foresaw for Jerusalem and it made him weep. Its people – his people – would trade the possibility of long-term “Peace” with an upper case “p” for short-term “peace” with a lower-case “P.”

 

Jesus’ relationship to peace is ambiguous in the Scriptures. In the famous Palm Sunday scene, the animal he rides into Jerusalem is a donkey, which is considered an animal of peace, as opposed to a horse, which is an animal of war. A triumphant king in that culture would have ridden into town on a warhorse. In the book of Mark, Jesus is said to ride a donkey and a colt, the foal of a donkey. Was he really riding two animals? One commentator suggests that the point wasn’t that he was riding two animals but that he was riding the most unwarlike of animals – a nursing mother donkey with her little colt trotting along beside her. So clearly, this is not someone riding into battle.

 

And yet, the very first thing he does when he gets to Jerusalem, this donkey-riding peacenik, is to go into the courtyard of the temple – the one and only huge and opulent temple, the headquarters of institutional Judaism of the time – the very first thing he does is go in there and fly into a rage and start yelling and overturning the tables of the moneychangers. He says, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of robbers.” And he drives out everyone who is buying and selling there. If someone did that today, and made a huge scene and destroyed a store’s things and drove out all the customers, he or she would be arrested for, among other things, disturbing the peace.

 

And Jesus himself expresses some contempt for peace, at least with a lower-case “p.” In Matthew he is quoted as saying, “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.” And even more pointed, in the Luke he says to his disciples, “But now …let him who has no sword sell his robe and buy one.”

 

Next week in part two of this sermon I’ll talk more about what kind of “Peace” with a capital “P” Jesus may have had in mind when he wept and talked about “the things that make for peace.” But for now I think we can safely say that the kind of peace that simply maintains the social order was not a kind of peace that interested Jesus at all. And, oh my goodness, how we could all stand to learn from that.

 

I think most of us know the power of inertia. We know how tempting it is to not rock the boat in our lives, even when we know that boat isn’t carrying us where we want to go. In our families we sometimes try to keep the peace, have a pleasant dinner, just for today, and put off raising the hard issues for another time. And that other time never comes. Same thing at work. You get unfairly passed over for a promotion or don’t get the benefits you deserve or, most seriously, you get harassed, and there is so much pressure to keep the peace by staying quiet. It’s hard to raise the ruckus and make your life a lot worse in the short run for the possibility of making life better for yourself and others in the long run. I’ve heard parenting described this way as a battle between the days and the years. If your concern were just about the day, you would of course give your kid that ice cream cone she’s throwing a tantrum for, just to keep the peace. But if your concern is for the years, you know that approach will teach a kid to throw tantrums and the years will be worse. Yet how many of us have never given in just this once to make the day more pleasant?

 

The Pharisees tell Jesus to shut his people up and then Jesus weeps over their shortsightedness and the disasters that will ensue. Of course, the epic, grand-scale reading of this story for today is our cultural response to global warming.  The “Pharisees” of this country are working overtime right now trying to keep the peace and silence the crowds that are acclaiming the arrival of a new way of thinking. Even when that new way of thinking comes humbly, riding on a donkey, it is unspeakably threatening. Just like the Pharisees and the Romans in Jesus’ day, the institutions of power today desperately want to keep things just the way they are – keep the economy growing, keep jobs in the sectors we now have them, use the technology we have available to extract more and more from the earth. Keep everyone quiet and subdued in the moment.

 

By contrast the changes that the small band of rebels represent would bring short-term upheaval and real loss to the current generation. In this sense they – or we – are not coming to bring peace, but a sword. We know that things are going to have to get worse before they can get better. We know that if we don’t make the sacrifices now and change our ways, the future looks bleak indeed. Jesus described it as being vanquished by an enemy. In our case the enemy is simply the dispassionate law of cause and effect – the destruction of the natural world that will collapse on us through floods and droughts and famine until, in Jesus’ words, not one stone is left upon the other. Like Jesus, we can stand outside the city, look at that future, and weep.

 

Or we can do something about it. We can learn from the lessons of history and the teachings of our prophets. When so much is at stake, let’s not resign ourselves to a peace with a lower case “p.” Not in our personal lives – our social lives, our work lives, our family lives – and not in our communal life together on this earth. Let’s welcome the new ways of seeing, the messages of positive transformation and all the messengers who bring them as gifts from God or the universe. Let’s wave our palm fronds and lay our cloaks down and sing a chorus of welcome for all those who come riding into town, embodying the light of truth.

 

Next week on Easter I’ll be talking about Jesus’ promise of “Peace” with a capital “P.” When he said that the Pharisees don’t “recognize the things that make for peace,” what was the peace that he had in mind? In the meantime, I want to give us all an assignment. This week between Palm Sunday and Easter, I invite you to take a little time each day and meditate on the difference between the small peace of social order in your own life and the greater peace that you might achieve if you were prepared to give that up. What ways are you, and are we as a culture, playing it safe, not rocking the boat, for fear of losing what we have? And in what ways can we all let ourselves be inspired by the spring holidays – really all of them stories of liberation – to break out of that fear in the name of a true, lasting peace for our lives and our world.