St Katherine's Danish Church, Regent's Park, London
Sunday 28th November 2004
(Preached in Danish.)
Readings: Psalm 24; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 21: 1-9
Just over twenty years ago, my father and I spent a week in Jerusalem. For both of us, it was the first and only time. There were many different experiences that neither of us was able to forget. These weren’t about the religious sites, though they were important enough. I think it was just being there, and being part of a city that is both ancient and modern, with its strange mixture of history, different peoples, diverse cultures, and, of course, the sad divisions between different faiths and among Christians themselves. Being there was a bit like drinking a very rich cocktail, with different flavours (and strengths) vying for dominance in the memory.
What sticks in the mind more than anything else is the persistence of ancient ways of life, especially in the Old City. Having parked the hired car outside one of the main entrances, we routinely encountered a man riding a donkey up and down those narrow streets only a few moments later. Watching that process again and again made me realise just what a practical means of conveyance the donkey is. Shorter and more flexible than a horse (if not always more obedient!), these animals manoeuvred themselves here and there with their human cargo. The Old City was by no means infested with them – most people preferred to walk. But a man riding a donkey became part of the scene. And I can’t read this morning’s gospel without conjuring up in my mind those homely, practical scenes.
For centuries, Jesus’ entry in Jerusalem has been read from Matthew’s gospel on the First Sunday in Advent. It is such a unique scene that when the second series of liturgical text was put together in Denmark in 1892, a contrasting gospel was chosen – Jesus at the start of his ministry in the synagogue in Nazareth in Luke’s gospel (Lk. 4: 16-30). Both passages point to the future in very different ways. The Jerusalem scene, in spite of all its outward appearances, points to how Jesus’ life will end, whereas the Nazareth scene looks to his future ministry as yet to unfold, sounding a clear and cautious note in the hostile way in which his own people responded to him.
The outward appearances of the Jerusalem scene, however, do paint a slightly different picture. Jesus rides with his legs dangling down, on a donkey as a convenient way of transport, doubtless bumping along, holding the reins with his hands stretched outwards because of the size of the animal, and the uneven terrain. We may go on to regard the donkey as a symbol of humility, but it begins life here as no more than a kind of taxi. Then we have the people strewing their garments along the way – in order to make the journey easier. Jesus may have a less bumpy ride, but there is also a hint of honour being given to him. And the final touch is the cry – ‘Hosanna… Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord’. So the functional journey to get Jesus from the top of the Mount of Olives, right down the Kedron Valley, and then up the steep climb into Jerusalem itself, becomes something else when the people respond: ‘Hosanna’ means something like ‘come and save us’. It is a pilgrim’s song – short, repetitious; – very different from lots of verses of Grundtvig, and more like the roar of a football crowd, perhaps in Portsmouth!
There is so much in this short, rich passage. It is not about some separate ‘religious’ world. As John Donne, early seventeenth century Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, once said in a sermon, ‘the world is the theatre that represents God, and everywhere every man may, nay must, see God.’ (Sermons V111, 9) That functional journey becomes something else. But we know that whatever the crowd cried at that point in order to cheer on the northern Galilean’s arrival in the southern capital, only a few days later it becomes a somewhat different shout: not the encouraging acclamation of a saviour, but the angry demand for a criminal to be crucified.
We start the new Church year, we welcome its arrival, by implicitly facing our own ambivalence about ourselves, our world, and Christ himself. It is all so difficult to handle that, under the surface of our lives, there is a maelstrom of doubt and uncertainty. However easy or difficult we find it to acknowledge some kind of faith in Christ, it is probably his readiness to enter all these ambivalences that makes it that little bit easier for us to put our trust in him. He sits on that donkey – he takes that taxi. He enters the Holy City – he comes into the central arena of our lives, with all our hopes and fears. He lets us try to make that journey easier and less bumpy for him – and accepts our mob-acclaim. What a welcome into the human race, that he already knows only too well! The bumpy ride we wanted to deny him one moment becomes a harsher journey altogether – not being carried by the donkey into the city, but himself, bare-foot, carrying his own cross, outside the city, away from our favourite boundaries.
The scene is all about what we do to Jesus, and he says nothing. There are no hints of what we sometimes call in England ‘the royal wave to the crowd’, with a ‘fixed smile’. It is a silent, passive, hidden Jesus, who is at the centre of the stage. We have put him there ourselves, and we have no clue at all about what he feels or what he is thinking. But the sheer silence of Jesus we pass over at our peril: more convenient it may well be – and less threatening – to think of the silence of the babe of Bethlehem, even though he would have cried, as all newly-born children inevitably do. But the silence of God is a powerful silence. It challenges those of us who are in the talking-business to listen to its awesomeness. As a preacher in the early centuries (Hilary of Poitiers, On Matthew 2: 3) remarked, the crowd ‘were inadvertantly, and without willing it, pointing to heavenly things unfolding’. The functional journey becomes our superficial response, which in turn becomes a subtle drama about the determined silence of God to face out our world, with all our unresolved tensions, our questions, our insecurities. They are there. They always have been, in one form or another. The Advent hymns – whether by Weissel, Kingo, Ingemann, Brorson, Grundtvig – all tell us to be joyful. But they also speak of a God who refuses to do anything other than take on our whole human nature. Which is why St. Paul exalts us in the epistle to be awake, and not to sleep through the attractive superficial lull of the way we live our normal lives.
To know God is not about passing an exam, or buying the t-shirt, or holidaying somewhere just once. To know God is to live in depth – as well as laughter – to be ready both to be serious and to rejoice. To know God means being prepared to see him in our world, and to see the world as his theatre, and with us as his participants. In a few moments, the same greeting that the crowds gave Jesus will be given him at the altar – ‘Hosanna…Blessed is he…’ To know God is to accept that our knowledge will always be partial, hence our need – year in, year out - to hear his Word, and to meet him at the Lord’s table, where we can share together in our journey of faith, and our need for each other, in him. We can indeed greet him as he enters the Holy City of our innermost lives, and know that even if we do not – and cannot – always understand his works and his ways, he knows us better than we do ourselves; and that is what makes the Christian faith at the end of the day worthwhile.
Partial knowledge, of an eternal Saviour: in 1798, Henrik Kampmann, Vicar of Farum, in Sjaelland, wrote a hymn that celebrates that partial knowledge, that stumbling faith, and that eternal hope. These are the words of its final verse:
O Jesus, let me always belong to you!
Your spirit, your strength guide my steps,
to make sure that my walk goes on the path,
And reaches my goal, an eternal blessedness!
In you I believe, in you I hope,
For assuredly you hear anyone who in faith implores you.
(D.D.S. 693.4)
Henrik Kampmann 1798
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
