What A Difference A Week Makes

 

 

“The crowds going ahead of Him, and those who followed, were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David, Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest!” When He had entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, “Who is this?” And the crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee.”” (Matthew 21:9 – 11).

 

“But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to put Jesus to death. But the governor said to them, “Which of the two do you want me to release for you?” And they said, “Barabbas.” Pilate said to them, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?” They all said, “Crucify Him!” And he said, “Why, what evil has He done?” But they kept shouting all the more, saying, “Crucify Him!”” (Matthew 27:20 – 23).

 

What a difference a week makes; the crowds shouting “Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday are shouting “Crucify Him!” on Good Friday.

 

Early in Jesus’ ministry we read, “Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name, observing His signs which He was doing. But Jesus, on His part, was not entrusting Himself to them, for He knew all men, and because He did not need anyone to testify concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man.” (John 2:23 – 25).

 

After all these years, when I hear people talk about how the people of the United States turned to God after 9/11, I still wonder that we don’t see the superficiality of it all – I wondered when it was happening, and I continue to wonder. At best we are like ancient Israel and Judah who cry out to God for help while we continue to worship idols and reject His commandments.

 

The crowd is seldom right; even when the crowd is right it is usually wrong. The same crowd that was praising Jesus early in His ministry during Passover in John Chapter 2, and the same crowd which was praising Him on the Palm Sunday leading up to Passover in Matthew chapter 21, is the same crowd shouting “Crucify Him!” It is the same crowd that cries for Barabbas the insurrectionist and murderer.

 

Is it any wonder that so many professing Christians justify insurrection, including the insurrection of January 6? Are they not Christians of the crowd? Christians who functionally cry out, “Give us political leaders but crucify Jesus!” Just as the Jewish leaders feared for their own positions, just as they feared how the Romans might respond should Jesus continue to proclaim the Kingdom of God; so professing Christian leaders fear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they fear a Gospel in which God’s love and mercy embrace the world, in which we are taught to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness first, in which Christ’s disciples are citizens of heaven first, and in which there are no borders to us serving mankind – no political, no national, no ethnic or racial, not cultural or social or educational or economic.

 

We may cry “Hosanna!” for an hour or two on Sunday, but the rest of the week we are conservatives, or liberals, or moderates, or a number of other different flavors and primary identities in various contexts. We bring our hammers and nails out into the world, including the religious world, and when we find a Jesus who doesn’t look like us (see Matthew 25:31 – 46) we crown Him with thorns of hatred and we crucify Him.

 

We crucify Him in prisons, in our “justice” system, in education (in is inequity and in its teaching our students to reject the image of God, to desecrate it both within themselves and within others), in our political system, in economics, at our borders, in entertainment and sports (which instead of being about re-creation is about destroying our souls which God created), in economics (if you want to see God’s economic plan for His People, read 2 Corinthians chapters 8 – 9, a plan that transcends borders and ethnicity; do we have the courage to teach obedience to these chapters? Of course not, we will take verses of out context to teach “giving” and “stewardship,” but we will not teach these chapters – too many pastors would find themselves crucified with Jesus, on His left and His right).

 

When we read about cleansing the Temple it is always “those other people” that we think about, do we ever see our own hearts and minds as needing cleansing? Do we ever visualize our own agendas needing cleansing? Do we really want the blind and lame coming to us? Do we really want the untidy reality of humanity to interfere with our comfortable religion?

 

As for the children shouting in the Temple (Matthew 21:14 – 16), we will quiet them down and soon make them into our image, we’ll make them little conservatives, little liberals, little humanists, little Pharisees, little insurrectionists – we will humor them and then control them and if we can’t control them then we’ll cast them out. (Consider the Jesus People of the 1960s and early 70s; they are now either part of the Babylonian system or they have been cast out – we will not tolerate new wine in new wineskins).

 

God has not chosen us to choose the lesser of two or more evils, He has called us to be holy as He is holy (1 Peter 1:13ff). How can we stand the hypocrisy of celebrating Palm Sunday and “Holy Week” when, should we pass through a metal detector during the week, we will be found carrying a hammer and nails?  

 

O Holy God, make us like Jesus!