Strange music

“Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Luke 19:38, NIV

The day Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time – the day that we call Palm Sunday – is a festive, exhilarating one for his followers. At long last (or, at least they thought) Messiah had come. To live to see the day where he entered the City of the Great King had to be a thrilling one indeed akin to how many African-Americans felt the night Barrack Obama was first elected President. But while the crowds are shouting their “Hosannas!” so loud that some of the local religious leaders demand Jesus put a stop to it, the man of the hour is not smiling and waving like a newly elected official. He is sobbing almost uncontrollably. His moment of triumph at last arrives and all he can do is weep?

All four Gospels record the people shouting portions of Psalm 118 that day, a messianic psalm declaring a blessing on God's chosen leader (to chant it was akin to thumbing their nose at Caesar.) But as Luke tells it, as he descends the Mount of Olives and approaches the city someone raises the cry, “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” The last time we read that in Luke's Gospel was the night that Jesus was born. It is what the angels sang to the shepherds in the fields that night, a song that has been put to a plethora of melodies ever since. But the only one in the crowd that day that would have known that little tidbit would have been his mother, Mary. By the time he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey at the beginning of one of the most important weeks of the Jewish calendar, Joseph is dead and those anonymous shepherds long returned to their reclusive life of tending their flocks. Only she is the repository of those incredible circumstances - angelic visitations and pronouncements, shepherds and seers prophetically speaking - surrounding her son's birth. And like any mother, she fiercely clutches these memories and gathers them up scrapbook-like keeping them poignantly alive within her.

Amid all the hoopla being raised at his arrival into Jerusalem that day did the song the angels sang at his nativity spring to mind and caught up in the moment she blurted out the tune she had not hummed to him since his childhood? Or was it a premonition of something far more dire unintentionally reminding him of the trial ahead of him a few days later? Luke tells us that Jesus wept that day outside of Jerusalem because despite three years of ministry among them the people missed the boat, as it were; they “didn't recognize and welcome God's personal visit” (Luke 19:44, Msg.) That seed of rejection would bear the bitter fruit of wanton slaughter and destruction by Roman general Titus and his soldiers within a generation. Which, that being the case, makes “peace in heaven and glory in the highest” a very odd anthem to sing at such an occasion. But I don't think Luke's intent here is satire. Rather, it is irony, the kind that John spoke of in the great prologue to his gospel - “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:11, NIV). He never looks like what we expect him to be but he's always what he is and, as John put it, “...to all who receive him, to those who believe in his name, he gives the right to become children of God” (John 1:13, NIV) and that is something worth singing a Hallelujah Chorus or two. 

For many years now, our local paper, The Chetek Alert, runs a Christmas insert entitled 'Tis the Season. Among many other items they place within it, they ask local pastors to contribute a short devotional thought entitled "From the pulpit" (yeah, hardly original). This is my contribution for the 2012 edition of 'Tis the Season.