Grace and Peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
Many of you, I'm sure have seen the movie “My Fair Lady”. It's the story of a world class linguist and elocution professor who, on a whim and because of a bet takes on the challenge of taking a common, lower class, uneducated flower girl and by educating her, transforms her into a lady of high social rank and standing. He succeeds beyond his wildest dreams and is able to pass the poor flower girl off as a Hungarian Princess. He dresses her up in a tiara and rented finery and she becomes what everyone at the ball expects her to be.
Isn't it funny how our expectations actually shape what we see? Some thieves in Chicago dressed up as priests and robbed six banks and were never caught. People just didn't expect stealing behavior from priests. The visual cues and the white collars, the black shirts and black suits spoke "good" so loudly that the "bad" of these phony priests' behavior caught tellers and the police totally off guard. Sometime our expectations determine what we will see.
Today is Palm Sunday: the day of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He is hailed as a conqueror, a King, a deliverer. Word about him and his power had reached Jerusalem. Here was a man who could make the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear; he could cure lepers of incurable leprosy, and in Bethany, as we read last Sunday, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. The people were in expectation too. This prophet might indeed be the Messiah - all that he did pointed to his uniqueness. The people expected that the yoke of the Roman emperors would soon be lifted. The people expected that Jesus would call on an army of angels to rout the Romans and restore Israel to its rightful, prominent place among nations - they wanted to be first. The people expected a King they could understand. They were not ready for a King who said, "My Kingdom is not of this world." This was the only world they had or understood.
Jesus, frankly, failed to live up to their expectations and as a result they turned on him, they rejected him and they turned to Barabbas. He was the kind of deliverer they could understand. Maybe he couldn't cure people, calm storms or feed five thousand but he was certainly of this world and was on fire to fight for his freedom from Rome and theirs.
Jesus is still causing confusion isn't he? Like with his own disciples Peter, James and John, the phrase "whoever among you would be greatest must be the servant of all" sticks in our mouths and in our craw. We hate to hear about offering ourselves as a "ransom for many" as people of the cross are to do if we are to fulfill Jesus' expectations of us.
I was listening to NPR the other day about a recent documentary about Israel that has been several years in the making. The filmmakers have followed several young boys both Muslim and Jew to try and understand how the contagion of their disease of ethnic and race hatred spreads. What came through more than anything else was how little these two groups actually knew about the reality of the other. Their perceptions were colored by all the hype and stereotyping, all the media generated expectations that were their steady diet on the nightly news. The filmmakers premise was simple: if you could get these young boys talking, get them interacting on a human level they might realize that they were much more alike than they were different. It was fascinating because both the Arab and Jewish boys were astounded, once they got together, at how much they had in common. They loved soccer, they hated to lose, they enjoyed cartoons; they fought with their sisters. Gradually, trust began to emerge between them and they visited each other's homes. They talked about their terror at riding certain bus routes because of bombs that had exploded on buses on those routes. They shared openly of their longing to live in a world where fear of terrorism and violence were unknown. Their deepest hope was for peace.
Peace can only come though when there is forgiveness. The cycle of wanton violence only ends when someone pays the price for all the sin, the hatred, the mayhem and the bloodletting. The boys in the documentary believed that peace would ultimately come because escalating the violence could only end in their mutual annihilation and God would not allow it.
I found myself feeling so terribly sad and sorrowful that they couldn't understand that God had already paid the price for their people's sin, already in Christ.
Peace is within their grasp, if they might only believe and trust in God's power. That same peace is available to us through the blood of the Lamb - no matter who we happen to be at war with.
In Jesus' Name, Amen.
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