I t’s not exactly easy to square the activities of Jesus on the day we call Palm Sunday with the image that emerges from our two passages from Isaiah and Philippians. Isaiah speaks of a Suffering Servant who did not hide his face from insult or attack, while Paul in the letter to the Philippians quotes an early Christian hymn that speaks of Jesus emptying himself and taking the form of a slave. The image is of self-effacing, suffering humility. Yet in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus triumphantly enters Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowd, storms the Temple– sending the money-changers running for cover– and then directly confronts the Chief Priests and the Scribes on their own turf. If anything, Jesus’ actions during Holy Week were acts of bold self-assertion. The religious leaders did not conspire with the Romans to bring about Jesus’ death for silently slinking about in the shadows of the Temple, but because he directly and publically challenged their power and authority. They perceived him as a threat, and they were not wrong in their perceptions.

      If Jesus’ life models what it means to be humble, then most of us are going to have to redefine what we mean by that word. So in what way was Jesus humble? What does it mean when the Bible calls us to self-denial? For Jesus it meant a singular focus upon obedience to God and doing God’s will. Our culture often presents us with false alternatives. You are either focused on yourself in a selfish way, or you deny your self-worth entirely. Either way, the self is the focus. The Bible presents a third alternative, which is to focus not upon the self, but upon God. In this regard, Jesus’ life was rather remarkable. Unlike countless other religious leaders, before and since, Jesus rarely focused upon himself. In only a few occasions in the Gospels did Jesus ever refer to himself by any title whatsoever, and in most of those instances scholars think they go back not to Jesus’s own use, but to his disciples. His preferred title was to call himself “the Son of Man,” which means, simply, a human child, the “Human One.” As Paul’s hymn in Philippians so beautifully puts it, Jesus did not exalt himself, yet his life was exalted by God.

      Nevertheless, the result of Jesus’ singular devotion and obedience to God’s mission was suffering and death. Like Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, he did not fight back or call his followers to take up arms. As the hymn from Philippians puts it, he became obedient to the point of death– even death on a cross. Jesus’ mission, fulfilling Isaiah’s text, was to “sustain the weary with a word.” For the sake of that mission, he suffered death on the cross.

S o where was God? If Jesus was so singularly devoted to God’s mission, shouldn’t God have been equally devoted to Jesus? It seems as if at the moment of Jesus’ greatest need, God is nowhere to be seen. Not only does the fickle crowd abandon Jesus, shouting “hosanna” one moment and “crucify him!” the next, but God seems to abandon Jesus as well. Surely to those around Jesus, both friend and foe alike, the sure conclusion of Jesus’ way in the world is that he had been defeated, and that he among all the people was the most God forsaken of all.

      The late Alan Lewis, in his book Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, which we wrestled through in our Sunday morning Adult Education class during Lent, writes,

      It is not unknown for men and women to feel abandoned and forsaken, certain that God has departed, if ever present in the first place. But the very person who has called God “Father” and who has staked his life on the promise that the Lord has sent and loved him, and was a God of steadfast grace and flowing mercy? For him to die abandoned and rejected, forsaken by the loving God to whose will he had sacrificed his all, surely meant wretchedness unlimited, shattering disillusionment, and hellishness unknown.

W ere it not for what we will gather to celebrate next Sunday morning, this would indeed be the end of the story. In fact, were it not for the celebration eight days hence, there would likely be no story to be told. The bold assertion of the Christian faith is that God does not abandon Jesus, but instead goes with Jesus to the cross and grave. At the moment when Jesus dies so utterly alone, our faith asserts, that is the very moment where God is most fully present.

      This means not only will we have to abandon all previous understandings of the word humility, we will have to abandon all notions of failure and victory as well. The God we discover in this holiest of weeks is not the convenient God we call to in times of war and calamity who will vanquish our enemies and make sure everything works out alright in the end. This God is the same God we first met on Christmas morning– the God who comes among us in vulnerable love, who will not overcome evil with evil, but will overcome evil with good.

      Lewis reflects on what it means to enter Holy Week, to hear again the story of Good Friday, the story of the cross, knowing already that Easter is on the way. He writes:

      Hearing the story the second time around, and every time thereafter, we encounter a grave standing at the boundary where defeat and victory are intimately juxtaposed. This time, on the second day, we are privileged to know already that after yesterday’s defeat, victory tomorrow is secure. Yet we are compelled to know, too, that it is the finally victorious one who even now lies decaying in defeat; and we must face the shocking truth that the seeds of victory lies in the grave’s defeat and nowhere else, that the only flower of victory is one which germinates and grows in the darkness of a tomb.

S o this week, this holiest of weeks, we are invited to reflect upon two realities. Not only does the cross reveal the depths of human depravity, that displayed such inhumanity to this one who lived so humanely, but it also reveals God’s way in the world, the way Jesus followed in obedience all the way to the cross. Jesus aggressively confronted the powers of this world without stooping to their tactics. We assume that the only way to overcome violence is with an even greater show of force. But this is not God’s way in the world. God in Christ succumbed to the world’s violence in order to expose it and in so doing, to absorb it. Thus in a world forever at war in which each side claims to have God on their side, the Christian faith makes this startling assertion: God is not on the side of the victorious; God is on the side of the victims.

      There will be other days, other weeks, other Sundays to celebrate God’s victory over the power of death; this is the week to remember that God enters it fully. So it is not so much that God was with us when we advocated for the homeless here on Wednesday night as that God sleeps with the homeless on our back porch. It’s not so much that God is with us when we protest the war in Iraq as that God is in the middle of the market square when the suicide bombers do their worst. It’s not that God is on one side or another in the endless conflict in the land of Jesus’ birth, so much as that God is the one detained at the check-point, God is the one cut off and waiting for the next meal in Gaza, God is one of the Yeshiva students shot down in the prime of life. This is the scandal of the cross, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles: That God, the creator of heaven and earth, was not just born in the flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, but entered cross and grave.

      It is on this basis that we can affirm with the Apostle Paul, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39).                                     ✞

© 2008 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel