Looking For Trouble

A Sermon for Palm Sunday

By Harry T. Cook

Whether or not the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem represents the actual facts of the matter is probably beside the point. Most First Century Palestinian Jews tried to get themselves to Jerusalem for the major festivals, and, according to all accounts, it was during the Feast of the Passover that Jesus deliberately walked right into the meat grinder – at a time when the Roman military would have been on highest alert for trouble brewing among their Judean wards, especially with so many of them gathered in the holy city.

If you had the reputation the gospels say Jesus had – much like his predecessors, the prophets, who were, some of them, known as “troublers of Israel” – you might think twice about making yourself obvious at such a time as Passover. People might even have advised Jesus not to go looking for trouble, knowing that trouble might find him anyway. The gospel accounts suggest that it was some of both.

I think it is fair to say that many of the historical advances in the human epoch have been made or at least moved along by people who went looking for trouble. The initiatives of the great global explorers of the 16th and 17th Centuries were not pleasure cruises on luxury ships, but gambles against terminal troubles. Galileo ground his lens, looked up at moons, planets and stars and steered himself into deep trouble with religious authorities who cared less for truth than control. Isaac Newton risked dismissal from Cambridge University by refusing to take Holy Orders because he could not summon up belief in the Trinity. Darwin risked the opprobrium of friends, neighbors and colleagues by publishing On The Origin of Species.

I can name heroes – military, political, academic and social – who perceived what they thought to be the truth or the right, and pursued it regardless of the risk. That is what we are supposed to think about Jesus today on Palm Sunday. – What truth did he perceive? What right did he pursue?

That is the central question of the Christian religion – not whether Jesus was God, not whether he was raised from the dead, not whether he ascended into heaven – but what made him walk knowingly right into trouble, unarmed and, at some level, apparently unafraid?

Does the truth Jesus perceived have to do with individual persons being centers of freedom? Is the right he pursued the guarantee of that freedom through the respect of every individual’s dignity? If so, then he was up against the principalities and powers of imperium, just as you and I are up against those same principalities and powers that make us numbers instead of names, supplicants instead of stakeholders – some of our brothers and sisters slaves instead of freedmen.

Not to mention the malign power of religious authority that attempts to suppress inquiry by insistence on orthodoxy. This culture of ours needs people who will knowingly walk into trouble for the sake of truth and right.

So drop that palm frond right now, if you’re not ready to walk into trouble. The palm is the age-old symbol of martyrs who walk knowingly into the meat grinder in witness to what they believe to be true and what they believe to be right. That’s why the palms proper to this day are often twisted into the cruciform shape.

Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.