Dr. Jon Burnham preached this sermon from Philippians 2:1-13
on April 5, 2009 (Palm + Passion Sunday, Year B)
at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Houston
The last week of our Lord's earthly life and ministry was like a Hollywood movie. It was lights - cameras - action. The opening act of this dramatic week—the Palm Sunday parade—reminds me of a humorous story about the Hollywood actor, Francis X. Bushman.
Bushman, the first of the movie idols, started as a sculptor's model. He was working in 1915 for the Essanay studio in Chicago for $250 a week, but his agent David Freedman knew that in the gold-rush atmosphere that prevailed among the competing film studios, the sky was the limit for talent with a proven following. How to prove Bushman was such a talent was the problem, and Freedman conceived of a plan.
The agent instructed Bushman to take the train to New York. Freedman met him at Grand Central, carrying a large sack of pennies. The sack had a small hole, and as the two gold-diggers walked along forty-second street they were followed along the trail of pennies by a surging crowd. Of course, pennies were worth something back then. By the time Bushman and his agent arrived at the Broadway offices of the Metro Film Corporation, the movie executives looking out the window beheld such a mass of followers that they felt lucky to sign Bushman for a mere thousand dollars a week. (Peter Hay, Move Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) That was when a thousand dollars was a lot of money, too.
One would think that Jesus was leaving a trail of shekels, the way the crowds followed him on that first Palm Sunday. Jesus began the week as a hero. But before the week was over he would be crucified, dead and buried.
A mother and her young daughter were driving to the zoo during Lent. On their way, the little girl began counting out loud the crosses on various church steeples.
"Mom," she asked, interrupting her counting, "how many times did Jesus die?"
"One time, dear," her mother answered.
"Then why are there so many crosses?" the little girl asked.
"To help us remember how much Jesus loved us," her mother replied. "He died on the cross for us."
"Well," the child responded, "how could we forget something like that? (Malinda Fillingim Kentucky, The Upper Room, March/April 1996, p. 41.) How could we forget something like that? And yet we do, don't we?
This is the Sunday we celebrate not only Christ's victorious entry into Jerusalem but also his passion—his crucifixion and death upon the cross.
We get a foreshadowing of the crucifixion in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the garden, Jesus prayed, "If it is possible, take this cup from me." But, even as he prayed, Jesus knew what he must do. And thus he closed his prayer with these simple words, "Not my will, but thine be done." I wonder if it was the physical pain he dreaded as he knelt in the garden as much as it was the abject humiliation.
Philip Yancey in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, tells a heart-breaking story very much like Christ's humiliation. The story comes from a memoir by Pierre Van Paassen about the years before World War II. In this memoir Van Paassen tells of an act of humiliation by Nazi storm troopers who had seized an elderly Jewish rabbi and dragged him to headquarters. In the afar end of the same room, two colleagues were beating another Jew to death, but the captors of the rabbi decided to have some fun with him. They stripped him naked and commanded that he preach the sermon he had prepared for the coming Sabbath in the synagogue. The rabbi asked if he could wear his yarmulke, and the Nazis, grinning, agreed. It added to the joke. The trembling rabbi proceeded to deliver in a raspy voice his sermon on what it means to walk humbly before God, all the while being poked and prodded by the hooting Nazis, and all the while hearing the last cries of his neighbor at the end of the room.
"When I read the gospel accounts," says Yancey, "of the imprisonment, torture, and execution of Jesus, I think of that naked rabbi standing humiliated in a police station. Even after watching scores of movies on the subject, and reading the Gospels over and over, I still cannot fathom the indignity, the shame endured by God's Son on earth, stripped naked, flogged, spat on, struck in the face, garlanded with thorns." (Fred Smith, Ch. 16, Moving Beyond Belief, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993) One night the confirmation class watched a film version of the crucifixion of Jesus. One particularly striking scene was when the Roman soldier pushed the crown of thorns on Jesus head.
As the little girl said, "Who could forget something like that?" Jesus totally submitted himself to God's will.
When our Lord entered our world He modeled a different perspective on things. In coming and dying for our sins, He in essence said, "The way up....the way to life and fulfillment and joy is not to put self and personal needs first....NO....the way up is DOWN...the way to find happiness is to become a servant and put the needs of others first." And this is exactly opposite of the way our society tends to look at things. The vast majority of the people in our country tend to think that the way up is UP......the way to GAIN is to get. They would think that to do otherwise would be absurd.
I love this quote from Bill Hybel's book, Descending Into Greatness. He writes:
"In the vocabulary of our world "DOWN" is a word reserved for losers, cowards, and the bear market. It is a word to be avoided or ignored....it is a word that negatively colors whatever it touches. We say: DOWN and out, DOWNfall, DOWNscale, DOWNhearted and worst of all, DOWN under. And down's antonym is 'UP'— a word in our high-voltage society that has come to be cherished and worshiped....a word reserved to describe winners and heroes. Unlike the word, 'down,' 'up' positively colors whatever it touches. We say things like: UPscale, UP and coming, UPper class, and UPWARDLY MOBILE. We believe in ASCENDING to fame, money, power, comfort, and pleasure. In our society UP is clearly the direction of greatness. From the world's perspective, it is the only way to go ... just as a compass needle points north, the human needle points UP."
But you know, like a tidal wave, Jesus crashes into our worldly way of thinking and flips things. He turns everything upside down by teaching that if you truly want to be great, you must go down. You must descend into greatness. You see, according to Jesus' way of thinking, greatness is not a measure of self-will but self-abandonment. The more you give, the more you gain.
You probably know that John Newton wrote the words to the much-loved hymn, Amazing Grace. Well, Newton once speculated that if two angels in heaven were given assignments by God at the same instant, one of them to go and rule over the greatest nation on earth and the other to go sweep the streets of the dirtiest village. He said that if this happened each angel would be completely indifferent as to which one got which assignment.
It simply wouldn't matter to these angels because they know that the real joy lies not in the task itself but in simply being obedient to God. And Christian servants have likewise discovered that the important thing in life isn't what God has us doing. No, the truly important thing is that we're simply doing what God wants us to do.
The way up is down for in Jesus God indeed came down to our level. He put our needs above His own privileges. He humbled Himself and was obedient even to the point of death on the cross on our behalf. So may we do for others.
