What Happens When We Assume?

Mark 11:1-11    

Something kind of funny happened this week. At the sermon roundtable we shared our thoughts about this passage. And in the discussion, it came up how surprised we were that after the big procession into the city with all the pomp and circumstance, when Jesus entered the temple, all he did was look around and leave. Because it was getting late. And this was surprising to us. Is that what he came for?

So there was that – and then later in the week I was looking at some notes from a few years ago when we last looked at this particular passage. And this is the funny thing: three years ago, we had the exact same reaction. We were so surprised that after the big parade, all Jesus did was look around the temple and then leave. Because it was late. And we thought, what was the point of that? Is that what he came for?

I guess consistency is a good thing. But isn’t it funny that it continues to surprise us? especially when we know the story already? Where do these expectations come from? Why do we assume something different will happen?

Not only do we assume something different will happen, but I think Jesus’ disciples who were with him that day also assumed something different would happen – something different than what did happen. Entering the royal city in a royal procession suggests strongly that something else will happen.

Some people expected him to begin the overthrow of the Roman Empire in Palestine. Rome was extraordinarily powerful and threatening and oppressive. Rome was going to be especially threatening this week.

They were entering Jerusalem at the time of the Passover, when tensions would run very high. Think about it: the Passover is the remembrance of the time when God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, and led them to the promised land, a land which they would call their own, this same land that Rome now occupied, where Roman soldiers made an intimidating presence, threatening death by crucifixion for anything that they considered a threat to their power.

The Roman governor of the region, Pontius Pilate, traveled to Jerusalem every year for the Passover week, just to keep an eye on things. He didn’t seem to be particularly fond of Jerusalem. Pilate preferred to stay in Caesarea, because the seaside town was more pleasant for him. But during the Passover his job required him to be in Jerusalem, where he stayed at Herod’s Palace.

And so, we need to recognize the possibility that on that very day when Jesus was leading a procession into the city of Jerusalem from the East, there was another procession coming in from the West – an imperial procession with Pilate at the head, followed by a column of Roman soldiers in armor with weapons.

The contrast would have been striking. The tension would have been great. And it would have been natural for the people to desperately want the kind of savior who would overthrow the bullies from Rome.

Rome ruled by violence. Their strategy was to overwhelm and intimidate. They strove to maintain what they called the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. But the peace of Rome was nothing other than keeping the inhabitants of the land cowed by an unrelenting threat of violence. And they tried to balance this threat with just enough goodies to keep the populace somewhat content. Bread and circuses.

The film I watched this past week was Gladiator, to get the sense of the violent power of the Roman Empire. Gladiator takes place more than a hundred years after Jesus rode into Jerusalem, but things had not changed all that much. Rome was still dominating a huge chunk of the world. Their army was still projecting power as they rode through the streets, and they were still crucifying anyone who appeared to be a threat to their supremacy.

During our midweek Lent study last week, someone raised a very interesting question. Is it possible that the more violence we are exposed to, the greater becomes our taste for violence? I thought about that while I was watching Gladiator. Because among the great entertainments of the Roman empire were the gladiatorial games, where slaves were sent into the arena to fight and die a gruesome death – just for spectacle.

There is a scene in the film when this group of new gladiators are getting ready for their first time in the arena. The man who bought them and trained them, Proximo, gives them a sort of pep talk.

Proximo tells them: We are all dead men, ultimately. There is no choice about if or how we die. But we do get to choose how we meet our ends and how we will be remembered. In this world of the gladiators, clearly, the preferred choice is to go violently.

The expectation of violence is an interesting thing. As long as we are presented only with violent alternatives, it seems like it’s hard for us to imagine any other kind of alternative. Because, we think, isn’t this just the way the world is?

And wasn’t Jesus addressing that expectation directly when he arrived in Jerusalem that day? In his choices, wasn’t he addressing these expectations?

The choice to ride in on a donkey.

The choice to go directly to the temple – and then walk away from it.

It was a time of high tension in Jerusalem in those days. Consider all the assumptions that were in play: The Roman Empire assumed that there would be violent rebellion, and they intended to quash it. The Jewish zealots assumed that Jesus would lead just such a rebellion, and they intended to be a part of it. The Pharisees and Sadducees assumed he wanted to strip them of their authority, and they intended to prevent it.

I imagine that the crowds who greeted him and followed him into the city assumed he would go into the temple and take his rightful place as the head of this earthly kingdom. And they would have embraced that. But all these assumptions were wrong.

What did Jesus come for? He came to usher in a new kind of kingdom. He came to bring forth a new kind of covenant – a covenant that found its strength not by rule of law, not by rewards and punishments, but by service, by generosity, by sacrifice. And, of course, this covenant was powered by love. This is God’s covenant of grace.

We will see, as the events of the week unfold, just what this entailed for Jesus. This covenant would require great sacrifice from him and the power of that sacrifice to transform people – both friend and enemy – was something no one, apparently, had assumed.

Proximo said, We all die; there is no choice about that. But we do get to choose how we meet our ends and how we will be remembered. Think about what Jesus chose. Think about how he chose to be remembered. Think about what message it holds for us.

As we reach the end of our Lenten examination of God’s covenant, can we perhaps begin to see it in a new way? Can we allow ourselves to imagine that God’s covenant with us, with the world, is different from the world’s ways? And can we imagine that God’s way, a way of love and grace and peace, is an alternative to the world’s way of brutality and violence?

Can we imagine that God is at work in the world, and is calling us to be God’s partners?

What happens when we assume all this is true?

 Photo: Gladiators from the Zilten mosaic, c. 200AD

Marriage Vows

Jeremiah 31:31-34

For this whole season of Lent we have been talking about covenants. It’s a good biblical word, a theological word. But it is not a common, everyday word. We rarely use the word covenant in our daily life. We talk about contracts. We understand contracts much better than we understand covenants. You might say that the language of contract is a language we understand, while covenant language is a different kind of language.

The only exception that comes to mind is marriage. In the church, at least, marriage is spoken of as a covenant between two individuals in the presence of God. Where a contract might be easily nullified if one party breaks it, a covenant involves love and forgiveness. It is not as easy to break a covenant as it is to break a contract. It is not as easy to break a marriage as it is to break a simple contract.

Although we all know it is much easier to be divorced now than it used to be. We talked about this at the roundtable. We felt that it is so different now than it was when we were younger. There is less social stigma attached to it. It is easier for a woman than it was in the old days when she was, in a sense helpless and defenseless without a husband. And, just from a legal perspective, divorce is “no-fault” now, meaning you don’t have to establish that one party was somehow at fault. Usually you only need one of the parties to want a divorce to make it happen.

The laws of divorce differ from state to state, but there are a few states that stand apart in one particular way. They offer a distinct kind of marriage called covenant marriage, where the couple voluntarily put certain restrictions on their future rights to divorce, such as mandatory counseling, a waiting period, or establishment of certain facts. A couple who enters into a covenant marriage is, you might say, making a decision to go against the grain of the culture. They are asking the state to help them handle their marriage in the best way possible. I don’t know how well it works, but I have read that there are very few couples who avail themselves of this option.

Whatever else you might say, I think we can probably agree that marriage is complicated. It is often hard. When marriages last, it is not because it was easy. And when marriages end, they rarely end easily. And it is interesting that God so often compares God’s relationship with Israel to a marriage.

In the book of Jeremiah, it seems at first that there will be a divorce. And this is not a modern no-fault divorce. The word of the Lord comes to the young prophet Jeremiah, laying out the case against Israel – the faithless wife. As a faithless wife leaves her husband, so you have been faithless to me.

At first, the Lord urges the faithless wife to return. Return; I will not look on you with anger, I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt. God wants to reconcile.

But soon the tone changes. A few chapters later: How can I pardon you? asks the Lord. You have committed adultery.

And then: I am full of the wrath of the Lord, says Jeremiah, and I am weary of holding it in. For the Lord says, ‘I will stretch out my hand against the inhabitants of the land.’

It is looking more and more like God will, indeed, divorce Israel. And, I imagine it was feeling more and more like that to Israel. Jeremiah was prophesying during a very difficult time in the life of Israel. The kingdom had long ago been divided in two – a kind of divorce in itself – so there was the kingdom of Israel in the north and the kingdom of Judah in the south. Both kingdoms suffered the sieges of other kingdoms – Assyria, the superpower nation, came down from the north and annihilated the kingdom of Israel. Watching Israel go down, Judah desperately tried to avoid that same fate by entering into a relationship with the Assyrians to appease them. Then along comes Babylon from the east, to overpower Assyria and then come knocking on Judah’s door. Judah turns to Egypt in the south, hoping for some protection, but of course Egypt had designs of her own, which didn’t really involve the welfare of Judah. Things were not going well for Judah. Most certainly, Judah – the people of Israel – felt as if the Lord was finally abandoning them.

And Jeremiah wants them to know: it is because you have broken every covenant the Lord has made with you. You have been faithless. And now you will know what it is like to be a woman without a husband; defenseless, without the protection of the Lord.

Thinking about marriage, both literal and metaphorical, the film I watched this past week was The End of the Affair. It’s based on a novel by Graham Greene. It is about a marriage between Sarah and Henry that seems to be a marriage in name only. There is no real love between them, but it is merely habit, convenience. And Sarah falls in love with another man, Maurice. And so there is a sort of love triangle filled with jealousy and resentment and regret.

You realize that Sarah and Henry want to remain faithful to their marriage vows but they don’t seem to know how to work this legal arrangement into their hearts. Each of them wants to do well, to do right by the other, but they cannot seem to. Henry turns to his work, and Sarah turns to Maurice.

It is during the Second World War. And the bombs are falling all over London, it seems. One day while Sarah is with Maurice they are rocked by an explosion and Maurice is blown across the room and falls down a flight of stairs. Sarah goes to him as he lies on the floor covered in blood. She tries to revive him but he appears to be dead. She then does something unusual for her: she falls on her knees in prayer, begging God to bring him back. She promises that she will stop seeing him if God will let him live. Then she hears Maurice call her name and she knows God has heard her prayer – and her promise.

She stops seeing Maurice, never explaining why because he wouldn’t understand. A couple of years later Maurice learns the story of what had happened. He tries to see her again, but she is resistant. There is a scene where he is literally chasing her from one place to another. When he finally chases her into a church Sarah sits beside him in a pew and tries to explain everything to him.

“I have made two promises in my life – to marry Henry and to stop seeing you – and I am too weak to keep either of them,” Sarah tells Maurice. She speaks a sort of universal truth here. We make and break promises so often because our hearts are seeking something that we aren’t quite sure how to find. We make and break promises because we are afraid of losing something we might not have ever really had. We make and break promises because we never let them be written on our hearts.

And I wonder: does Sarah think that if she breaks this promise she made, God will abandon her?

I know that the people of Israel had to have felt that God abandoned them. The Northern Kingdom had been obliterated and now the Southern Kingdom was on the verge of destruction as well. The people were dying or being dragged away from their home. The temple was destroyed. The life they knew so well was being taken from them.

Everything they had been promised was being taken from them, or so it seemed.

Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will be different from the old covenant, for this time it will not be written on tablets of stone. It will be written on their hearts. And I will remember their sin no more.

So. Do we get this? It isn’t especially easy. I think we get this when we understand how completely forgiven we are. We get this when we know how fully and unconditionally God loves us. We get this when we realize that God wants to be intimately involved in every part of our lives. When we really and truly let God into our hearts, let God engrave his promises on our hearts. Then we get it. All thanks be to God.