Out Our Way:

Mark 11: 7 - 11

Out our way, we don't expect cows to be overly smart. I knew a rancher who had a prairie fire take out a large part of his summer pasture. He had to move his herd back down to the winter pasture. But the pasture had not yet had time to fully recover and was in danger of being badly overgrazed, so he loaded up his pickup and took extra hay and feed out to the livestock. Before long, the cattle got the idea that a truck meant food and would start following the pickup even when he was merely fixing fence and only carrying barbed wire and extra fence posts.

As Goliath has observed to me more than once with that smug look of his, a lot of people are no smarter than cows, and today's text is a favorite illustration of that point.

In the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on an ass, we saw last week that Jesus was making a clear statement - that he was the Messiah - and that he came to bring peace, not war. As we saw last week, the ass (and again, not the donkey or burro of so many misrepresentations) was a noble beast which kings rode instead of a war horse, to demonstrate that their purpose was to bring peace. It was the olive branch rather than the sword that was extended.

But the people did not want peace; they wanted vengeance. One hundred-fifty years prior to Jesus, a man by the name of Judas Maccabeus led a revolt against the Syrian king Antiochus, who had conquered Jerusalem. The feast of Hannukah is a celebration of his victory over the Syrians and the re-establishment of Jewish independence. When he entered the city in triumph as the conquering general, palms were thrown before him as symbols of his military victory.

Though He rode into the city on an ass and declared the Gopel of Peace (wholeness and healing) to humanity and love for neighbor, the popular view was still that the Messiah would be a conquerer and a warrior king who would destroy Israel's enemies and establish Israel as the new dominant over the world. As Jesus rode into the city, the victory palms were waved and thrown before Him, and shouts of Hosanna - Save us now! - sounded throughout the crowd.   

"Hosanna" is not a word of praise as we commonly think of it, but a demand for God to destroy Israel's enemies and restore the golden age of the nation when it ruled and dominated the region. The people did not want Jesus to save them from their sins - but from the Romans - and from all other people who were not Jews. They wanted a new Judas Maccabeus to lead a military revolt that would cast out the Romans and establish a new world order with them at the top.

They didn't want to love their enemies; they wanted to destroy them. And they demanded that the Messiah do just that. It didn't matter that that is not what the scriptures said, nor what the prophets had declared, nor what Jesus Himself taught. And as Jesus knew, some of the same voices that acclaimed Him king on Sunday would demand His death by Friday when they discovered that He didn't fit their preconceived notions of what the Messiah ought to be.

Cows and people don't change much, do they? There are still many who insist Jesus must be as they want Him to be rather than as He is. Like the crowd they will praise the idea of Him as long as they can control it and keep Him in the box. But the moment the real and living Christ bursts out of the confines they have created, they reject Him and turn against Him and those who follow Him. Any student of history sees this pattern repeating itself over and over again.

We still cry "Hosanna!" - Lord, save us! - for a different reason, not to save us from our enemies, but from ourselves.

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John Bruington and Goliath serve the Kingdom of God and minister at First Presbyterian Church of Havre. Their book, "Out Our Way: Theology Under Saddle" is availlable at Amazon.com.