A Life Complete

Text: Mark 11:1-11 and 14:1-15:47

A weird thing about the church calendar is that it breaks one story into lots of little ones. And the lectionary, which divides the whole life of Jesus into 52 bite-sized chunks, sometimes makes our faith seem like the Highlights of Jesus Show. Christmas, some miracles, a few great speeches, then crucifixion and resurrection. It is especially so today, on this Sunday with two names. In about 90 minutes we go from triumph to despair. From Hooray for Jesus to Crucify Him. Today we will ponder that a bit, guided by the minister’s manual that says that on this day “a long sermon might not be desirable.”

What we should be doing in the year is reading the entire Gospel of Mark, or one of the other Gospels. The Gospels are not histories. In a sense they are in fact highlights of Jesus. Because even the earliest of them were written at least twenty years after the death of Jesus, and they probably were assembled from stories people told each other over and over again. Christianity for a long time was a word-of-mouth movement, not frozen yet in scripture. But because of that, the story of Jesus had to make sense as a whole. You cannot remember a long story if it is just little pieces. There has to be some coherent unity to it all. In short, the story of the palms and the story of the passion have to make sense together.

The triumph of the procession is not the whole story of Jesus, but it is part of the story. Jesus did not march into Jerusalem, which was in its day a combination of New York and Washington, DC, center of government and commerce—he did not march into Jerusalem and seize the throne. But folks thought he might. The people all sang “blessed is the coming of the kingdom.” They were right in their hopes. Jesus was not leading them to only a spiritual satisfaction. He had made a lot of enemies because what he did favored the unfavored and made fools of the proud and powerful. People felt that there were changes about to happen: the coming of the kingdom, in the most secular interpretation of that word.

But the crucifixion is not the whole story, either, though it is part of the story, too. It was nearly impossible to reconcile the hopes of the people with what then happened to Jesus. For us, in this compressed view of things, it seems like one of those horrible accidents. When suddenly the whole future changes. When you just wish you could rewind the clock and make what happened not have happened. When you don’t even wonder how it could have happened because it has not sunk in yet that it did.

But for Jesus, the trial was a natural outcome of the life he led and the life he preached. He did work miracles, but mostly for the sick, the hungry, the poor, and those who suffered. He did preach about a new realm, but one in which people loved their enemies, in which people did more than they had to to help others, in which people forgave each other, and in which people treated all people as if they were their own brothers or sisters (in a good way). None of what he said would have made him a candidate for a long and happy life. I don’t know if he was happy. He did not live long. He did not expect to.

Jesus lived the kind of life in which one thing led to another. And he was fine with that. He expected it, and he told his disciples about it. If they were surprised at what happened, it wasn’t because he hadn’t warned them.

We make much of the obedience of Jesus. In the first reading, we heard “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” That reading was no doubt picked for today because of that verse. Some people find that his obedience is a mechanism of salvation; for them it explains the machinery behind Jesus as savior. But in any case, the fact that Jesus went to the cross against what we might call his best interests is important. It is important, but it is important because of what it tells us about Jesus.

Unlike most of us, Jesus lived his whole life through. It seems to me that Jesus was a person without guile. He was the same on the inside as on the outside. He didn’t have a strange and secret core, as many of us have. He was the same substance, less like a peach and more like an apple, only more so. A friend says Jesus was transparent to God. That is God showed through him transparently. But he was transparent to himself, too.

The obedience we see in Jesus might better be called harmony. Or it could be acceptance, but I like harmony better, sounding less passive. Jesus fulfills his destiny. Not in following a plan that was known and drawn beforehand, but following to the end the life that was most his. Not swayed and distracted by all the things that sway and distract us. And not turned back at the end either by fear or by regret. When God created the universe and found it to be good, God used the word “tov,” a word that means harmonious and fitting. The life of Jesus was tov.

One reason we follow Jesus is that we long for our lives to be the same. The story of Jesus processing with the palms and the story of Jesus being judged for his life are not told to make Jesus seem greater and us seem smaller. We also have moments of triumph and moments of trial. We can see in Jesus is that it is possible to live both those moments in the same life, live both in alignment with the people we are. It is the way Jesus lived. And the life we pray for.