You know, each of the four of our canonical Gospels tells its own story of the Good News of Jesus as the Christ. Each has its own voice, its own intended audience, its own character, and I believe that we hear and understand best when we do not try to make some kind of Gospel soup by blending all of the ingredients of the four Gospels, seasoned by non-scriptural church tradition. So perhaps I’m like a young child trying to keep food separated on the plate! Today we have heard a large portion of the Gospel of Luke, beginning with the story in chapter 19, where Jesus heading into Jerusalem on a colt that’s never been ridden – which always sounds to me like kind of a wild, irreverent – even funny ride.  There is Jesus careening into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey in a hilarious way that both fulfilled the scriptures, and at the same time mocked the majestic horses of the Roman army which were probably parading into Jerusalem on the other side of the city with fearsome pomp and deadly circumstance. The Roman army would have greatly increased its numbers for the Passover holiday – all in the name of keeping the peace of course. (1) One of the Gospel of Luke’s peculiar details is that it’s not a crowd of bystanders that surrounds Jesus’ undisciplined, rowdy entry into Jerusalem. It is a gathering of his disciples.

I wonder if any of you noticed that this version of the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem doesn’t mention palm branches at all. My guess is that many did not notice that, since we call this day “Palm Sunday,” and we have piles of palm leaves getting blessed and passed around. I never noticed the omission before (and I’m a trained Bible observer)! In the comparable story in Matthew, Mark, and John, palm branches are mentioned, but in Luke, no. Palm branches were a sign of Jewish independence after Jewish rebels defeated Syrian oppressors in 141 BCE. We don’t know for sure, but Luke is thought to have been written in Antioch (which is in Syria) at the end of the first century. Maybe the omission is an attempt to indicate to the Roman government that Christians are not dangerous revolutionaries, or maybe the omission is because mentioning palm branches will not further the evangelist’s cause with his particular audience.
The discovery of such an essential element as palms missing from the Palm Sunday narrative, sent me on a search for other parts of the passion story that might not be in Luke. I found two others. In the other Gospels, after Jesus’ conviction, soldiers inside the palace place a purple robe and a crown of thorns on Jesus, mocking him with the words, “Hail, King of the Jews.” In Luke, they simply led him away. And in the other Gospels, names are given of the women looking at the gruesome sight of the crucifixion. The names vary, but always include Mary Magdalene. In this case, Luke just says, “all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.” Earlier in Luke, Mary Magdalene, Joanna (the wife of Herod’s steward) and Suzanna, are listed as women who are known to have travelled with Jesus and provided for his needs from their resources. But at the crucifixion they are not named.
I don’t know what to make of the absence of the purple robe, the crown of thorns, and the names of the women. I’m sure it’s not accidental. Reading what’s missing is hard. It reminds me of the story of the rabbinical student who complained to his professor about the large volume of reading assigned. In response, the professor said, “you are lucky that I am only assigning the words and not the spaces between the words.” I am always wondering about (and wandering about in) the spaces between the words, between the letters, between the ideas with the looming weekly deadline of Sunday morning that keeps me from getting lost in those spaces! The point is that the important part of the story is what is there and what is not there – both.

Perhaps the spaces were even more attractive to me than usual this week because the story is so hideous, so tragic. The procession from the Palms to the Passion, all in the same service, represents a pilgrimage from comedy into a tragedy of cosmic proportions. We tell again what happens when people are so afraid and ashamed, or arrogant and mean, that inconceivable levels of violence are perpetrated and tolerated. And, in the telling, more layers of violence get piled on. Luke’s account is part of a polemic that places blame for Jesus’ crucifixion, not on Pontius Pilate where it rightly belongs, but on the chief priests and the crowds. No matter how corrupt the puppet government of Herod and the temple authorities might have been, they had no power to crucify under Roman law, and they did not in any way represent the Jewish people. And the idea that Pilate declared Jesus innocent three times and then capitulated to the crowd would be nonsense if the retelling had not been so deadly for Jews ever since. Instead it is inflammatory and libelous. The misconceptions about the role of religious authorities and crowds, as Rabbi Howard Berman recently said, “are at the core of the centuries of hatred and bigotry, as well as the spiritual triumphalism, that have tragically separated our faith communities and have been at the center of the terrible suffering that has been the result.”

You know, one of the things that always baffles me is the way liberal and progressive Christians can understand that the Hebrew Bible is full of myth and metaphor, poetry and prose, and then read the Christian Testament as history, except for the miracles which are discounted or excised in a Jeffersonian approach to the narratives of the Gospels.  And of course, even accounts of history must always be reviewed for the biases they contain, and their assumptions challenged, and their authority checked.  

I guess the last thing I want to say (right now) is about the recent suggestion made by conservative commentator Glenn Beck, that somehow Christians must separate our spiritual well-being from social justice. He told his listeners to leave any church that teaches social justice, and to report its pastor to church authorities. (I would be so pleased to be reported for preaching and teaching social justice!) I understand the desire to gain some sanctuary from the madness of partisan politics, and from violence and the degradation of human dignity. I do. I understand the desire to refresh our spiritual health by drinking from the deep well of Holy Week. But if Jesus’ life and death -- if Jesus’ Passion -- was not about social justice, I don’t know what it was about at all! The idea that somehow the political should be (or even can be) separated from the spiritual disregards the whole of Jesus’ teaching, especially in the Gospel of Luke.

As we move into this most Holy of Weeks, let us listen carefully to what is there and what is not there in our sacred stories. Let us question the assumptions in the texts and our own assumptions. Let us understand that the Passion story is both political and spiritual.  And let us pray that we cease to be instruments of our own or anyone else’s oppression.