Thomas Kleinert
Palm Sunday is like standing on the rim of a canyon. It’s a good day, a day of joyous welcome and celebration, the sun is smiling on the crowd waving palm branches and on the curious king riding through the gate of the city on a borrowed donkey. It’s a good day, a very good day, and the arrangers of the sound track have called for fanfares of bright trumpets and happy trombones weaving through wavy layers of laughter, cheering, and applause. It’s a good day, you can see all the way across the canyon to the other rim, and there the kingdom shines in peace and glory.
It’s a good day, but you know there won’t be a crew of angels to build a soaring bridge of light across the depth. You know Jesus won’t just ride on over to the other side. He’ll walk, all the way down into the lonesome valley. The fanfare was fantastic while you watched him coming up the hill toward the city gate, but now he’s inside the wall, and the clip-clop is fading, and you’re not sure what song belongs to this moment.
We heard two poetic texts just now, one from Isaiah, the other from Paul’s letter to the Philippians; the first one is often referred to as one of Isaiah’s four ‘servant songs,’ and the passage from Paul’s letter, as a ‘Christ hymn.’[1] They are like lyrics waiting for a tune to tie the fanfare of the entry to the minor keys and somber silence of Friday.
The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning [God] wakens,
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
There’s a saying in Italian, “Traduttore, traditore” – meaning “The translator is a traitor.” It sounds harsh, but things do indeed get lost in translation, and the Bible is no exception. An earlier revision of the King James Bible, called the Revised Standard Version, translated the opening line:
The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught.
In the New Revised Standard Version, the one we use in worship, this became the tongue of a teacher. I wish the committee in charge had just left that line alone.
The Lord God has given me
the tongue of those who are taught,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning [God] wakens,
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
Both the servant’s attentive ear and skilled tongue are shaped in a community of learners who are taught. The prophet speaks in the first person, and it can be frustrating to try and determine if he is speaking about himself or someone else, or if he refers to an individual, the community of exiles, or the people of Israel as a whole.[2] All of the above seems like a good solution to the dilemma to me, because the role of the servant belongs to the whole community of learners as well as to those individuals who, like the prophet, remind this community of its true identity as God’s covenant people. The prophet speaks poetically about ‘the servant’ not to remind people who he is, but who they are: a community of learners who listen attentively to God who, morning by morning, wakens their ear, and who are given, because they listen attentively, tongues that allow them to sustain the weary with a word. And perhaps that’s the point of being ‘the servant’: knowing how to sustain the weary with a word, how to take some of the weight off their shoulders, how to speak of comfort and the promise of home when long years of exile have only brought grief and compromise after compromise with the demands of the Babylonian empire. The poet continues,
The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious;
I did not turn backward.
I hear confidence in those lines, and courage. This is the voice of one who has kept the faith, and in these lines individual experience comes into view. Some in the community of exiles hear what may sustain the weary, but they don’t want to hear it. They may think the prophet and others whose ears God opened are just stirring up trouble with their talk of making the long journey home when to them, for quite some time, exile hasn’t felt like exile at all. They’re quite comfortable, thank you very much.
I imagine a moment like March 7, 1965, when John Lewis and Rev. Hosea Williams headed out of Selma on U.S. Hwy 80. They were leading some 500-600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, all of them tired of exile, many of them knowing how to sustain the weary with a word, and all of them pointing toward home. You know what awaited them on that Bloody Sunday, and they probably did too. The poet writes,
I gave my back to those who struck me
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face
from insult and spitting.
This is painfully specific language, as painfully specific as
Troopers, with gas masks affixed to their faces and clubs at the ready, advanced and knocked the marchers to the ground. … Clouds of tear gas mixed with the screams of terrified marchers and the cheers of reveling bystanders. Deputies on horseback charged ahead and chased the gasping men, women and children back over the bridge as they swung clubs, whips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire.[3]
The language is painfully specific like ‘a crown of thorns.’ The poet continues,
The Lord God helps me;
therefore I have not been disgraced;
therefore I have set my face like flint,
and I know that I shall not be put to shame;
[God] who vindicates me is near.
The Lord God who has opened the ear and spoken and taught the word that sustains the weary, has instructed the servant’s heart in trust, resilience and resolve. Since soon after Easter, Christians have seen Jesus in this portrait, and perhaps Jesus likewise saw himself.[4] In my imagination, he walks and talks and stands like one who knows this poetry to be true.
Who will contend with me?
Let us stand in court together.
Who are my adversaries?
Let them confront me.
It is the Lord God who helps me;
who will declare me guilty?
Again, it’s no stretch to imagine Jesus asking these questions, confident that though council, judge, mob, governor, and the whole sin-sick world might accuse and condemn him, God would vindicate him. Jesus lived and proclaimed the advent of the kingdom of God, and only moments ago we welcomed him to the city, shouting,
“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!”
Where do we find ourselves in the story as it unfolds this week? Will we walk with him? Will we eat and drink with him? Will we stand with him? Will we pray with him?
Morning by morning [God] wakens,
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
Morning by morning, and sometimes before morning, God rouses our ears to listen — to be attentive as those who are taught, and to let the word we hear sink in and do its work in our starved, stubborn and fearful hearts. Which brings me to the lovely hymn Paul quotes in his letter to the saints in Philippi.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.
The last time we heard these words in this setting was on the Sunday after the Covenant shooting, Palm Sunday a year ago. Since then, we have celebrated Easter, and we have heard proposals from members of our General Assembly to further harden our schools with heavier steel doors and other building modifications, and to arm teachers. Common sense regulations like save storage laws and measures to keep fire arms out of the hands of mentally unstable persons—though having strong bi-partisan support from over 70% of Tennesseans—still have a long way to go. We still have a long way to go. Some of the work we have to do is just unrelenting, old-fashioned, county-level organizing across the entire state.
But there’s more that needs doing. The world is filled with fantasies of a god that are inevitably entwined with fantasies about power. Fantasies that have more in common with the master over a plantation than with the humble God who died a slave’s death on the cross—“in great agony, without regard, without mercy, and without help.” But this week is the culmination of “[God’s struggle] against our bad imagining of God,” as Willie James Jennings has put it so very well.[5] Paul’s song lyrics helps us remember as we make our way through the dark valley how the living God has toppled our fantasies of domination and vindicated the humble way of Jesus. To the untrained imagination, Jesus’ exaltation is the rise of the ultimate ruler who, in a surprise move, claims the throne of thrones. Those who follow Jesus on the way of the cross, though, will recognize his exaltation as “the drawing up of the humiliated, the despised, and all those ground down under the weight of the world.”[6] To them, his exaltation is the leveling up of the whole system to where love alone reigns supreme
[1] The passages commonly referred to as ‘servant songs’ are Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13–53:12
[2] See the Ethiopian official’s question in Acts 8:34, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”
[3] https://www.history.com/news/selma-bloody-sunday-attack-civil-rights-movement
[4] Richard Floyd, Feasting, 160.
[5] Willie James Jennings, Connections, 127, 129.
[6] Ibid., 129.