Jesus' Last Week

This is my tenth Holy Week serving on the Bishop's staff as Canon to the Ordinary. For twenty years prior to that, first as an Associate Rector in Westport, Connecticut and then as Rector in Holden, Massachusetts, the week was like running a marathon. (To be very clear, I've never run a marathon; it's just a simile!)

Over these past ten years, I've participated more often than I had expected but never with the full array of liturgies. I've subbed in for clergy on sabbaticals or family leave; I've preached Maundy Thursday or offered a reflection on Good Friday. I've preached also at the Clergy Renewal of Vows/Chrism Mass on the Tuesday of Holy Week. In other words, I've had some connection or other. 

But this year is different. I'll be in the pews all week long. I'm ready for that. I'm also thinking about what I won't have a chance to say from the pulpit. This post replaces that as a panorama of the entire week. 

My own thinking about the meaning of the week and especially of Palm/Passion Sunday was transformed by reading The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem. I commend it to preachers and hearers of sermons alike. 

This is NOT a review of that book which, to be honest, I read a long time ago. Rather, what I remember/learned from that book may be helpful for this post, which is really about faith and politics. 

In my work, even more now than in the parish where I had pastoral relationships with members of my congregation, I hear (almost always from the right) that the Church needs to stay "out of politics." Then they mutter something about "separation of Church and State" which almost always leads me to believe they have no idea what they are talking about. What they really mean to be saying is they don't like the politics they perceive as "liberal" or progressive that characterizes the Episcopal Church these days. What they mean is that they don't want the Church to speak up about racial reconciliation, or gun violence, or discrimination against the LGBTQI population. What they almost always mean (even when they say "stick with Jesus") is that they wish we would speak against abortion and stand for "traditional family values." They see their issues as "moral" issues and label the moral issues of gun violence, systemic racism, climate change etc. as "political."

They are wrong. 

I'll save a post about how "in those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered" for some Christmas. I will just say here (as I've said many times before) that IS a political statement if ever there was one. Jesus wasn't born anywhere. He was born somewhere - and even on the edges of Roman Imperial Power it was in the air he breathed and the water he drank. 

What I'll say about Jesus' final days in Jerusalem is that they were also political. Borg and Crossan make the compelling case that Jesus' entry into Jerusalem was a counter-demonstration against Roman Imperial Power "on the other side of town." Whether or not they are right about that, the language of the day is filled with politics: David was a king, after all, so what might a Son of David be? Hosanna in the highest! 

The tension in Jerusalem is thick in Holy Week, as it still can be in the City of Salaam - of peace. Jesus appears before Pontius Pilate. Whatever one might claim about his guilt or innocence, it's a political trial. His death is on a cross as a dangerous rabble-rouser. Crucifixion is the preferred Roman method of enforcing the death penalty. Regardless of one's theology of the atonement (what does it mean that Jesus died for the sins of the world?) the reality which is not mutually exclusive is that he was killed for the same reason that people like Martin Luther King, Jr and Ghandi and Steven Biko were killed: by the powers-that-be. 

I'm weary of people who use and misuse theology to spiritualize the gospel of Jesus Christ. We can argue about the best political responses but saying Christian preachers need to "stick with Jesus" is, to put it in the most charitable possible words, "ill informed." You cannot talk about Jesus apart from the politics of his day. And ours. 

I invite readers of this post who, like me, will be sitting in the pews this next week to pay close attention to the readings and hear them again for the first time. Recall that the liturgical context for even being in Jerusalem was that it was Passover. Don't Christianize Passover - please! Instead find a Jewish friend who will invite you to their table to remember another story from another empire, Egypt, and another emperor, called Pharaoh. Hear the story again, for the first time as the drama unfolds and we hear the Passion read aloud, twice if we go to church on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. 

And if you are a preacher, be not afraid. Allow the texts to speak to our context. Most definitely make it about Jesus. But don't make Jesus disembodied from the time and place and circumstances that led to his death on a cross, so that when God raises Jesus from the dead and the tomb is empty, we will have a deeper appreciation for what that means in this time and place.