“Dead Man Walking”
John 12:12-16
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
Maundy Thursday
4/2/15
A man straddles a borrowed, green-broke donkey. His dusty
toes dangle inches from the cloaks and leafy branches that a crowd has laid out
before him on the manure-choked road as a kind of pauper’s carpet. An ecstatic throng
sings the man’s praises in shouts and chants laden with messianic language.
They
are particularly excited because the man on the donkey has recently raised a
man named Lazarus from death. Lazarus had rested in the bosom of Abraham for
several days. Then this Nazarene, named Jesus, spoke new life into the dead
man. Lazarus, they say, has barely spoken or smiled since that day. They speculate
that he feels like someone’s toy, a pawn sacrificed in someone else’s war. He
was not asked if he wanted to return to the world with all its painful
messiness. He was not asked if he wanted to face death all over again. He was
told that he must. And so he does.
Dead man walking.
Now the heat is on Jesus. Ever since the Lazarus incident,
the Sanhedrin, the tightest and most powerful knot of Jewish leadership, has
bristled. They have never embraced this radical rabbi who teaches the Law and
the Prophets so differently from the ways that they had been taught for
generations. Jesus’ words and ways among the people challenge Jewish tradition
and identity to the core.
As
people begin to believe that Yahweh is speaking in some powerful new way, the
rules are changing. Jesus is singlehandedly opening doors to people whom the
Law specifically calls outsiders and unclean. He prays to Yahweh in the most scandalously
personal ways. If Jesus continues to lead good Jews down this path, all the safe
and well-defended arrangements will dissolve into chaos. To do nothing is to forfeit
control. The Sanhedrin refuses to surrender their lives and their power to the
likes of Jesus. And they know only one sure way to stop him.
Dead man walking.
The irony of Jesus’ Triumphal Entry is that virtually
everyone in Jerusalem, by his or her own ignorance, or hardness of heart, or even
misguided hope, is walking around dead. Even those who celebrate are unaware of
the glorious new day breaking into their midst, because this Messiah offers
something much more difficult to arrange and accept than freedom from Rome. He
offers fullness of life, here and now.
God’s
creation needs the new life revealed in the Christ, because in one way or another,
at one time or another, all of us have had the experience of walking around
dead.
A man walks alone through the forest. Bright, butter-colored
rays of early May sunshine angle down through the trees as if pouring from a
great pitcher of light. The woods are alive. They pulse with birdsong, with the
flutter of wings, and the chatter of squirrels. The new growth of spring spreads
out in the canopy above him. Boughs of hickory, sycamore, and oak ripple in the
breeze like a bright green river.
But this man, as
he walks, completely misses the glorious celebration at work and at play around
him. A well-nursed darkness blinds him and numbs him. The forest is simply the
route he must travel between one obligation and the next. So he keeps his head
bent forward and his eyes glued to the narrow trail, lest one of the malicious roots
arching up out of the earth like the gnarled fingers of subterranean trolls grab
his toe and send him crashing to the ground.
It
is not entirely his fault, but where the earth offers beauty and grace, the man
sees the sinister conspiracy of all things against him.
Dead man walking. I bet you have seen him.
Sometimes the death in which we live is most evident in our
celebrations of the holiest days and seasons of the year. I’d bet the farm that
everyone in this room has uttered at least one lament about how, in our greedy
materialism, we have reduced Christmas from a season of thanksgiving and praise
to a high-stress, economic event. But when we groan the loudest, we are often
in some store going broke on things without which we can’t “have Christmas.”
One Holy Week I went shopping for supplies for an upcoming
mission trip. As I walked into the store, I had to walk around a display of
some 150-200 Easter baskets. Now, these Easter baskets stood three feet high. They
were wrapped in brightly-colored cellophane, and they came pre-stuffed with
everything from gum drops, and chocolate Easter eggs, to tennis racquets and
baseball bats.
“Praise the Lord! Christ is risen!”
Time
to play ball, rot our teeth, and loosen our belts!
Maybe I make too much of all this. Materialism is an all-too-easy
target. Maybe we’re doing the best we can. Maybe our traditions of exchanging
gifts, of Christmas parties and Easter egg hunts are an understandable attempt
to keep our religious celebrations alive. I mean, we have been proclaiming the
same urgent message for two thousand
years, haven’t we? After two millennia, how do we maintain excitement and
expectation? How do we recapture the terror and wonder of the first Easter
morning? How do we celebrate this good news in such a way that the celebration
remains interesting and compelling? How are we transformed from dead men and
women walking into living and lively human beings who celebrate, serve, and give
thanks?
The message of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday is that our
Palm Sunday expectations must die. For them to die, though, something within us
must die, and it is not a welcome death. To experience this death may look and feel
like the triumph of evil, not good. But Friday is about the wrath of green-eyed
Caesar’s and of fearful religions who meet threat with force. It is not about
the wrath of some angry god getting revenge on sinners and their sins. Friday
reveals the perpetual impotence of violence, and the ultimate eternity of Love.
Still, the path of resurrection passes through – and it necessarily passes through – the
confusion of Thursday, the agony of Friday, and the speechless grief of
Saturday. If we try to circumvent the death of our happy Palm Sunday
expectations, our celebrations will be empty. We will have to put them on
life-support. We will intubate them with eggnog and credit card debt, with
plastic grass and marshmallow bunnies.
Our
call is not to be dead humans walking and waiting to find heaven after being embalmed or cremated and
tucked away in memories and graves. Our call is to be a lively, God-bearing
humanity at work and at play in the rich and eternal grace of the kingdom of Heaven,
which is as much a gift of this creation as it is of whatever may lie beyond
our knowing.
We all have our have our traditions for Easter Day. I hope
you enjoy yours. I mean that. And between this evening and that morning, may
you truly die to all that would reduce those celebrations to fancy grave
clothes. And may we as a church die to whatever selfish fears keep us from
being a place in and through which all
whom God loves may see, hear, and follow the Risen Christ.
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