Text: Luke 19:28-48
Speaker: Joel Miller
What are you waiting for?
That’s what we say to someone when we’re trying to say they shouldn’t wait.
What are you waiting for? Take the trip you’ve been talking about for years.
What are you waiting for? Ask the girl out.
What are you waiting for? Apply for the dream job. Make the phone call. Quit the soul-sucking job. Declutter the things that don’t spark joy.
You only go around once. If you don’t do it now you may never do it. Do the thing. What are you waiting for?
Now that we’re all slightly more anxious about what we’re doing with our lives – or aren’t doing…. There’s another way those same words can be used.
What are you waiting for? Waiting is a regular part of life. We are constantly waiting on something. We’ve been talking about this. You mix up the bread dough, you wait for it to rise. You layer and turn the compost pile, you wait for it to break down. You have the surgery, you wait for it to heal. You plant the seed, you wait for it to grow. Waiting well is an essential practice for a healthy life. We wait for the letter, or email to arrive. We wait for the test results. We wait to be old enough to drive, and then, since a lot of other people had the same idea, we wait in traffic. Everyone is waiting for something.
What are you waiting for?
It’s maybe an unexpected question to bring to the reading this morning. Luke’s descriptions of the events surrounding Palm Sunday, as we call it, are full of emotion and action. Not exactly the stuff of patient waiting. Not some backyard compost pile where you need a microscope to confirm there’s something going on in there. Here the activity is very much on the surface. And here, just below the surface, just like us, everyone is waiting.
Jesus and his companions have made the long journey from Galilee. Now, they’re just outside Jerusalem, their destination, near the little village of Bethany. Jesus pulls two of his fellow travelers aside. He tells them to go and find a colt tied up just as they enter the village. They are to untie it and bring it back. Jesus tells them what to say if and when anyone asks what they’re doing with the donkey. “The master needs it.”
This is often interpreted as some kind of royal imminent domain. Jesus alone, master of his fate, is orchestrating his grand entrance into Jerusalem. He decides he needs a donkey, so he searches his all-knowing mind to find the closest one, and sends a couple helpers out to get it.
Maybe.
It’s also possible, and, I think, more plausible and interesting, for Jesus and his companions to have been planning this for weeks, with the locals in on the plan. Someone goes ahead, days before the party arrives and works things out with some friends in Bethany, code words and all. Here’s where you tie the colt, at the village entrance. Wait here. It will be the ones who come and say “the master needs it.” Let them take it. They’ll bring it back to us.
The set up for this raucous Palm Sunday parade could very well be hush-hush, winks and secret handshakes, a little conspiracy between the traveling pilgrims from Galilee and the Bethany sympathizers near Jerusalem who know how to get their hands on a trustworthy colt that doesn’t mind a crowd.
A few people who are willing to wait.
Those in Bethany have received the instructions. They know they’re part of something bigger than they understand, and they’re pleased to play a small role. Something they can do. On the appointed day, they bring their colt to the entrance of the village. They tie it to a post. And they wait. They glance at people leaving and entering their little town. It’s the busiest time of year with the approaching Passover. Pilgrims are pouring in from all around the empire. Who, of all these, are the kindred spirits they’ve been promised will come? When will they come, say those words they’ve all memorized, and lead their donkey away to be used by the master teacher and healer from Galilee? They don’t know. But they’re willing to wait, even if they’re not sure who or what they’re waiting for.
Well, the hand off goes as planned. The helpers bring the colt to Jesus. They throw some cloaks on it. They set Jesus on the back of the donkey. And they all move together, slowly, approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives. And suddenly, it’s getting loud. As Luke writes: “the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven.’”
There’s nothing unusual about these words. It’s the traditional Passover hymn, Psalm 118, proclaimed every year by pilgrims as they approach Jerusalem. “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” Only, this year feels different. Something, maybe the thing, feels eminent, like never before. Peace in heaven. Justice on the earth. Is this it? Is this dusty, cloak-covered path toward the holy city where the kingdom of God breaks in?
Everyone is waiting.
Can you feel the viral exuberance, as Jesus and company pull off the double whammy –- enacting the words of the prophet Zechariah: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, shout aloud O daughter of Jerusalem, see, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9). Enacting the words of the prophet and playfully mocking the very institution of kingship with all its self-important high drama, as Rome’s appointee Pilate rides into Jerusalem at a similar time on his military-trained war-horse, surrounded by his armed security entourage to keep the peace during this Jewish festival that celebrates, of all things, liberation from empire, the Hebrew slaves’ deliverance from ancient Egypt, the Passover. And here comes Jesus on his little donkey surrounded by his haphazard entourage.
Can you feel the electric charge in the air? Everyone is waiting. And it’s getting a little out of hand. And so the Pharisees, who are also eagerly waiting, by the way, ask Jesus to tell everyone to tone it down. But it’s not the time for caution, or quiet waiting. Jesus says “if these were silent, even the stones would shout out.”
The humans are finally catching on to the vocation of all creation –astonishment and praise at the wonder of existence. Waiting for something so beautiful, so real, you can’t help but already see it right in front of you. Here it is, right now. And Jesus and the crowds and even the stones, and let’s say even the donkey, can’t contain the joy.
Everyone is waiting.
Everyone is waiting.
But not everyone can see the beautiful vision right in front of their eyes.
And not everyone is waiting for the same thing. Not yet.
Just as the volume of Hosannas reaches its loudest, there’s another sudden turn.
Back to Luke’s words: “As Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now it is hidden from your eyes’” (19:41-42).
There are only two times in the gospels when Jesus weeps. There’s that verse in John that’s the shortest in the Bible and easiest to memorize, after Jesus’ friend Lazarus dies. “Jesus wept.” And here, in Luke, when Jesus can see the beloved city of his people laid out before him. And that’s not all Jesus sees. He sees the violence it will bear. Jesus laments that Jerusalem will one day soon be surrounded by its enemies who will crush it and the people within it to the ground. Those same stones that were about to shout out in praise, will be toppled. Not one stone left on another.
In other words, Jesus alerts those around him that there is something else to be waiting for. The destruction of something they dearly love is going to happen. It’s the collapse of the symbolic center of their world. The end of the world as they know it. A true apocalypse.
This is exactly what happened in the year 70 CE when the Romans, led by general Titus destroyed the city and its temple. They scattered the inhabitants, the lucky ones who survived, and they carried all the wealth from the Jerusalem temple back to Rome. That wealth, incidentally, is how Rome financed the construction of the Colosseum which is still a symbol of that city’s historic glory.
But not yet. Now, everyone is waiting.
Everyone is waiting for something. I wonder if our lives and actions are especially marked by what it is we’re waiting for. And how we wait. And who we wait with. In his life, and in his death, Jesus opens up a space for his companions, even all these centuries later, to hold all this waiting in such as way that it is contained within a larger story.
It’s almost a joke these days that we’re all waiting for end of the world, or at least the world as we know it. There’s this collective sense that the systems we depend on – cultural and natural – have become so fragile they could collapse any time. Jesus cared about his world so deeply it brought him to tears. It’s good and holy to join in that grief and lament for the world we love. We can be compassionate hospice chaplains for what is dying. Waiting and singing by the bedside.
The larger story is that the kingdom of God is always and already present among us. It is not a contradiction to grieve for the world and to shout praises for the glory and wonder of existence. If you see even a hint of the beautiful vision, if you catch a glimpse of the things that make for peace, you can and you must shout out. If we don’t, the stones and donkeys and microbes in the compost pile will do it for us. Peace in heaven, justice on earth, and joyful loud hosannas for the gift of the beloved community, that is always on its way into existence, coming strong down a dusty path near you.
And if that’s a little too removed from the day to day – the waiting for apocalypse, and the waiting for the fuller realization of the kingdom of God, then we wait like those in the village of Bethany, there on the outskirts, hardly a blip on the demographic map. We’re part of something bigger than we can understand, but we can each do a small part. We can do donkey duty, aka, offer our small gift in the larger drama of Divine reconciliation and healing.
And so we wait at the of the village. Part of this little conspiracy of the things that make for peace. Looking for kindred spirits. Joining with the master from Galilee in his glorious little procession toward the beloved community.