If it seems a little odd to you to put Mark 11 and Philippians 2 together, you might find it interesting that the folks who put the lectionary together would agree with you. The fact is, I’m playing mix-and-match with the lectionary this morning. Today is Palm Sunday, but it’s also called Passion Sunday, especially in churches which don’t have services for Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. The lectionary deals with this by offering two tracks: the “Liturgy of the Palms,” with Psalm 118 and Mark 11, and the “Liturgy of the Passion,” with Mark 14 and Philippians 2. There’s a tension here, and the lectionary opts to avoid it with this separation. I believe—and this is very much in keeping with what this congregation has always been—we need to lean into the tension and see what it has to teach us.
To do that, we need to pay careful attention to the context. Strictly speaking, the lectionary passage from Philippians 2 is just verses 5-11, but it’s dangerous to take those verses in isolation. It’s very easy to treat them as a pure abstraction, and then to spiritualize and theologize away to our heart’s content (and many have done just that over the years). Thing is, Paul didn’t write this because he got up one day and felt like saying something pretty about Jesus—he’s going somewhere in this letter, and our passage this morning is a piece of his argument.
So, OK, we’ve included verses 1-4 as the immediate context for the next seven; but then 2:1 begins, “Therefore . . .” There’s a piece of wisdom I heard many times growing up, and maybe you’ve heard this, too: “When you see a ‘therefore,’ you need to see what it’s there for.” It’s good advice, and one of the things that has anchored me in understanding the Bible; therefore tells us this is because of that, and thus where that sends us. Back up a few more verses, then, and, we can see the church in Philippi is going through tough times. They’re facing opposition, and they’re struggling. Paul compares their situation to his own—and he’s in prison, facing possible execution and contemplating his mortality. But while that possibility, to borrow from Samuel Johnson, has concentrated his mind wonderfully, it’s having the opposite effect on the Christians in Philippi: their community is fracturing and dividing under the stress.
Paul’s challenge to them, in the midst of conflict, in the face of their growing disunity, is to live in a way worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He calls them to hold fast to Jesus, standing firm in the face of opposition—which means, which has to mean, standing firm together. To face resistance and hostility and not back down, they must be united in harmony with one another. Therefore, Paul says—because they need to stand firm, and because standing firm requires unity—instead of valuing getting their own way, taking care of themselves, and winning whatever the argument of the day is, they need to value humility and selfless care for each other.
That mindset, Paul says, should frame all their thoughts and attitudes and actions toward one another, because it is the mindset of Jesus. That statement confounds all reasonable expectation, as human beings define “reasonable.” Jesus was, as the NIV renders it, “in very nature God.” He was entirely God, he was essentially God, he lacked nothing of being God, he was God to his core—not a created being who had been deified—he was in every respect and every degree God. And yet, he willingly became entirely human, essentially human, lacking nothing which is essential to being human or to the human experience. Which is something you wouldn’t expect any self-respecting God to do. But if one did, if you had a human being who was God, the God, the one who spun the universe on his pinky finger, what mindset would you expect of that person? What would you expect them to be on about?
Honestly, I think we would expect someone much closer to what the crowds in Mark 11 were expecting. They welcome and celebrate Jesus with the words of Psalm 118—which were at the top of their collective mind, since that was the concluding psalm of the Passover celebration, but were loaded all the same. Psalm 118 is a triumph song celebrating a victory in battle which was beyond human hope—one which was God’s doing from first to last, which inspired amazement as well as rejoicing. It depicts the king leading a procession into the city and through the streets to the temple to offer his sacrifice of thanksgiving to God; the people would have been laying palm branches, symbolizing victory, before him on his way.
The crowds take the language of the psalm to acclaim Jesus as the one coming in the name of the Lord, and to cry out “Hosanna!”—which means, “Save us!” They know their situation—conquered by Rome, no heir of David on the throne in Jerusalem—they know that God has always been their deliverer, they’ve decided Jesus is the anointed heir to David whom God has sent, and so they think they know where the sentence goes next: therefore, Jesus is the conquering hero who will drive out the Romans and restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations.
They had everything right up to the “therefore,” and everything wrong from there. Jesus was all that and more, but it didn’t mean seizing whatever he wanted, or could use to his own advantage. It didn’t mean hanging on tight to all the benefits and prerogatives that come with being the God of the universe who made everything that is. It didn’t mean holding fast to his rights and insisting on getting everything he deserved. Instead, Jesus held all those things with open hands. He who was in every way God became in every way a servant; he was God’s anointed one, the long-promised deliverer, therefore he was sentenced to execution by a travesty of justice and tortured to death with a pair of thieves. Only then, Paul says, comes the turn: because Jesus did all this willingly, therefore God raised him up to the highest place.
Jesus, of course, was God and thus could know the meaning and purpose of everything that happened. We aren’t, and can’t, but unfortuately that doesn’t stop us from trying. When something exciting, or potentially exciting, happens, we think we can figure out what it means, and thus discover what’s coming next. Our focus shifts from what’s in front of us to what could be—and unfortunately, the temptation to wishcasting is both strong and insidious, and our ability to justify believing what we want to believe seems effectively limitless. We end up forming our judgments about our circumstances and the choices we face based not on what is but on what we think might be, and what we want to see happen. Left to our own devices, we end up looking a lot like Yoda’s description of Luke Skywalker: “All of his life has he . . . looked away–to the future; to the horizon . . . never his mind on where he was–what he was doing!”
The problem with therefore is it’s terribly easy to be far too sure of it, and thus to put far too much weight on it. When we evaluate life by therefore, we set ourselves up for trouble and grief. We forget the truth of the observation that “making predictions is hard, especially about the future.” We think we see something good coming, and we grab hold with both hands. We let ourselves believe it’s bound to happen because this and this and that happened, not realizing—or not admitting to ourselves—that our hope is no more solid than a pipe dream and no more stable than a will o’the wisp. When it fails us and fades away, where are we then?
When we base our view of God on therefore, we make it harder to have faith, and easier to lose hope. Often, when people talk about putting their faith in God, what they really mean is this: there is some thing out there in which they want to put their faith—a career opportunity, a new relationship, a financial windfall—and they are putting their faith in God to give them that thing so they can put their faith in it instead of in him. When this is our approach to God, we end up judging his faithfulness to us not by what he actually promised but by what we wanted those promises to mean. God not doing what we want becomes reason to question his goodness, his power, or both, and we assume if we feel defeated, so does God.
Scripture gives us an antidote, I believe, to this dependence on therefore; it’s a little psalm I’ve loved for many years now, and I’m grateful to Emily for reminding me of it last week. Let me read it to you—this is Psalm 131:
Eugene Peterson called this a “maintenance psalm,” designed to prune away certain sins in our lives, and I think he was on to something. In the first verse, David disavows the sins of pride—“My heart is not haughty, Lord; I don’t look down my nose at others”—and of overreaching, declaring, “I don’t walk in matters too great and too marvelous for me.” Instead of pursuing things he shouldn’t be getting into, he is willing to accept that there are limits both to what he can do and to what he should do, and to leave everything beyond those limits to God.
He follows that with a luminous image: “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” The idea behind the image seems to be that a child that hasn’t been weaned sees Mommy first and foremost as food source, and thus won’t sit quietly for long without turning to nurse, while a weaned child will be content to sit quietly on her mother’s lap. David pictures himself like that child—not asserting his independence or importance, not reaching out to play with things too big for him, not demanding things of God, but simply resting contentedly on God’s lap.
I suspect many of us have our own images called up by David’s words; I know I do. Lydia was born with a birth defect in her throat—the same one Lennon Sell had, in fact. It wasn’t diagnosed until she was a day old, because the hospital staff didn’t take our concern all that seriously at first, but its effects were noticeable from the beginning. When she breathed, she purred like a kitten, and when she got upset, she struggled to get air. That first night, she wasn’t settling down very well, so I laid her on my shoulder and leaned back in a chair as best I could; she burrowed into my neck, and I sang her to sleep. That memory, sitting there in that hospital room with my newborn daughter sleeping on my shoulder, will be with me until the day I die. There are many reasons for that, but not the least of them is this: no one in my life to that point had ever trusted me that much.
That’s part of what David’s on about. Small children don’t sit quietly in your lap, or fall asleep on your shoulder, unless they trust you, and unless they’re absolutely certain everything’s fine and their needs are met, and will be met. So too for us: we can’t let go of therefore, we can’t hold the future with open hands, unless we trust God that what we truly need will be in our hands when we need it.
Which may seem like a lot to ask, probably because it is; but God goes gently with us, even if it doesn’t necessarily look like it. Ask me how I know . . . Palm Sunday of 2015—which was March 31 that year—was my last official Sunday pastoring the church in Winona, though I had spent the month taking my unused time off and hadn’t set foot in the building for weeks. The Session meeting at which I agreed to step down had been Ash Wednesday of that year. That was the beginning of my long Lent, nine years and counting. I don’t just call it that as a chronological coincidence, for this has truly been a Lenten season of God pruning and purifying me—even if his priorities there have not been the ones I would have chosen.
Among other things, he has been relentlessly carving away therefore, teaching me that this moment is this moment, meaningful and valuable for itself. The opportunities God puts in my way are to take for their own sake, nothing else; whatever he may be on about will show itself in his good time. I’ve been learning—slowly, it seems to me—to do the thing for the sake of the doing of the thing, because the thing is worth doing in itself, not because of the benefit I hope to get from doing it. This also means, of course, that if the thing is not worth doing in itself, don’t do it, regardless of what reward it may promise.
There is a downside here, in that this outlook on life can easily be badly misunderstood by others. We live in a highly future-oriented culture, and all our language reflects that reality. If you talk about living in the moment, there will be people who will judge you as irresponsible, flighty, unambitious, lacking goals, unable or unwilling to make plans—or to follow through on plans . . . the list goes on and on. Ask me how I know . . . Some of those people will likely be interviewing you for potential job opportunities, if my own experience is any guide. All we can do is leave that to the Lord and keep doing what comes to hand this day, letting him carry the weight of what comes next. As T. S. Eliot put it in “East Coker,” one of his Four Quartets, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
To be clear, I’m not saying we should be irresponsible, with no aspirations, lacking goals, refusing to make plans. The point isn’t that we shouldn’t plan anything, that we shouldn’t care about the results of our actions (or inactions), or that it’s wrong to have hopes and dreams. The point is, again, simply, that we should hold all these things lightly, hands open. Follow Jesus today, for this day; take this step because it’s the next step we see; trust he is guiding our feet even when we can’t feel it, and trust him for the rest. We can release the anxiety that we need to make life work for ourselves. We can release the fear that if life doesn’t work the way we want, it means we’ve failed. We can even release our hopes, trusting that he will hold them better than we can, for he truly knows us, what we need, and what’s good for us better than we ever could. Our hopes are usually too small because our vision is too small; his is perfect.
Will this be easy? No. We follow the Crucified One, and if we’re following him and that’s the road he walked . . . well, you can do the math. We cling to our ideas of the future not just because we want pleasure and success but also because we want to avoid pain and loss and failure; releasing our grip means admitting those things will come, and accepting that they are part of God’s plan for us. Our hope is that the Crucified One is also the Risen Lord, and that resurrection is at the center of his purpose. We can trust him for the dark road, and the valley of the shadow of death. We can trust him for the low points, the times we fail, and the times we fall. We can trust him because when those times come, he’s already there with us, and he will never leave us nor forsake us.
I learned this lesson some years ago from a blogger named Andrea Parunak, writing about a time when she nearly died of a sudden, severe illness. Reflecting on the experience, she wrote this—some of you who were here when we started coming may remember this quote:
When we are simply imagining chilling scenarios, we are facing the horrible emotions without any of God’s sustaining grace. Every time we imagine something, we put ourselves through agony of a kind we will never have to go through in real life. Because when awful things are actually happening, God walks with us through them and gives us His grace and strength. The peace of God’s presence through a trial is something I can never conjure up in my imagination, and something that only comes with real trials, not the pretend ones I make up while driving. Now I know the difference.*
In the best times to come, Jesus will be there with us; and in the worst times that lie ahead—the ones that will actually happen, not the ones we conjure up—Jesus will be there, too. Indeed, he is already there, however low we may go, and he will raise us up.
Photo: Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross. © 2009 Damian Gadal. Image cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.