Culture's Liturgy & Crowning a New King

The beginning of April always includes several major sporting events. Tonight is the NCAA men’s basketball championship game between Florida and UCLA. Even though I didn’t pick either one to go this far, I expect to see Florida cutting the nets down on the front page of the paper tomorrow. The Masters starts Thursday down in Augusta. The weather looks like it is miserable down that direction right now. Yesterday was opening day of the Major League Baseball season. My favorite team, Cincinnati, opened up today – in the last report I heard, the Cubs were pounding Cincinnati. The season always begins filled with such hope and dreams of playing in October. There is always great ceremony around these opening games – celebrities throwing out the first pitches, the stands often filled with families, and kids who have cut class to go watch the first game of the season. But mostly it is adults that are the celebrants at such gatherings. It seems to me that around such sporting events we act out our cultural liturgy. With our rituals and officials on hand, we state through these celebrations our core beliefs as a society. Such times are always filled with such hopes and dreams – the promise that tomorrow will be better than today and all of the ideas like that.

In the church year, we stand on the cusp again of one such day in our life together as the church – Palm Sunday. It is a day when we in word and action retell the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, which initiates the telling of his passion story. As we act it out, we’ve always got the palm branches ready to wave. It is interesting that it is usually into the hands of our children that we place the palm fronds. I wonder if we do that because it is in them that we see hope. Hope for an end to the distress that the world always seems to live in the midst of? Hope that the story might turn out differently this time? Hope for something else? Why don't the adults pick up the palm fronds as well? Are our adults without such hope for themselves? Have we given up on this story? Is it because we know where it leads that we can no longer pick up the palm branches?

The lectionary readings for the day depend upon the year in which we live. In other words, the gospel readings rotate between the different versions of the story. But Psalm 118 is always included as a reading. Often entitled a psalm of victory, the feel of it to me is of an enthronement psalm. The victory psalm title comes from the description of the king, or some other national leader, facing some form of distress which is later described as being from the nations that surrounded him (vv. 10-11). He sings that it was a difficult trial but he survives (vv. 13-18). The part that strikes me as having to do with an enthronement is the part that we will read in worship this next Sunday – vv. 19-29. In these verses, the king leads a processional of people towards the city, maybe even around the city first, and then to the gate of the city where he knocks and calls for the gates to the city to be opened. We hear shouts of great praise for God as the processional moves towards the altar where the king ties the festal procession with branches to the horns of the altar. We find something similar with the coronation of King Jehu in 2 Kings 9:1-13 as well as with the success of the Maccabean revolt when they retake the citadel in Jerusalem (1 Maccabees 13:51) and the recovery and purification of the temple (2 Maccabees 10:6-7).

Are we to understand Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in the same manner? Was he re-enacting a coronation processional into Jerusalem? If we are to understand his triumphal entry into Jerusalem in such a manner, then we need to understand how the Romans would have been threatened by such an act. It would amount to an act of revolt and they would have responded quickly and decisively to squash it. We know ultimately that is exactly what they did. We’ll be telling that story all next week.

Again I wonder why it is that we only put palm branches in the hands of our children when most of those in attendance – at the RCA Dome this evening, in Augusta at the Masters later this week, in the baseball parks all across the country, and in our churches next Sunday – will be adults?