Mark 11:1-11
“Foolishness”
April 1, 2012 - Palm Sunday

         This is the second time in five years that Palm Sunday has fallen April 1, on April Fool’s Day. I went back and looked at my sermon for that morning in 2007 and discovered that I didn’t really address that coincidence at all. I skipped all the foolishness and went for a pretty serious message on the Atonement. Not that this one is going to be full of jokes, but let’s see where a little fooling takes us.

         Well, how about one funny story, anyway. Five year old Johnny had a sore throat and stayed home from church with his mother on Palm Sunday while the rest of the family went to worship. When dad and his brother and sister came home carrying their palms, he asked what they were for. Dad said, “People waved them in the air as Jesus came by.” Johnny cried “Oh no! The one Sunday I don’t go and Jesus shows up!”

         O.K., so we’d better move on to when Jesus really did show up there on the road to Jerusalem. As I shared with the children, it really was the set up for a classic April Fool’s sort of “Gotcha!” joke. Jesus came riding in on that donkey in a processional that pretended to be something like the triumphant entry of a great king or military leader arriving at home in his capital. It was only later in the week, beginning with His arrest early Friday morning, that Jesus’ followers discovered they had been fools and that His plan was nothing like they expected. He wasn’t going to take a throne in the palace or lead them out against their enemies. He was going to die. April Fool.

         Yet it’s not just the switch from triumphal entry on Sunday to shameful death on Friday that marks this day with foolishness. There is something pretty silly about the whole arrangement. Just imagine a full-grown man riding on a donkey, especially as Jesus says in verse 2, a colt, a young donkey no else had ever ridden. Here’s a small, untamed, unruly creature, sat upon by a man whose feet will drag on the ground if He doesn’t deliberately hold them up in the air. That sight has all the makings of comedy.

         It was also generally expected that pilgrims coming to Jerusalem for Passover would walk into the city. If they could not travel on their own legs, then they were excused by religious custom from making the pilgrimage. So Jesus was fooling around with that tradition, making a spectacle of Himself just by choosing to ride.

         Then there is the whole business of obtaining that animal. Jesus had mysterious knowledge that it was there before He even arrived. He sent His disciples off with a kind of password to give to anyone who objected to their taking of the donkey. They were just to say, “The Lord needs it.”

         I don’t know about you, but if I saw someone trying to break in and steal a car and they turned to me and explained themselves by saying, “The Lord needs it,” I’d be just a little suspicious of that claim. Yet the bystanders who see the disciples taking the donkey are totally gullible. “The Lord needs it.” “Oh yeah, sure, go ahead, no problem.” It’s just crazy.

         The whole parade business is even crazier, more foolish. Jesus is sitting on a donkey, bouncing along up a dirt road, trying to keep His robe and His feet out of the dust, and the crowd decides to give Him the red carpet treatment. Some of them take their own cloaks off as it says in verse 8, and lay them in the dirt in front of the donkey. Now would you do that? For anyone? For the president? For the pope? For your own mother?

         And then the whole business of the palms. Mark just says they cut branches. It’s John who tells us they were palm branches. What would neighboring landowners have thought about this crowd of people who moved out from the road into the surrounding fields and started hacking on their trees? It was all pretty bizarre.

         Even the shouts of praise have an element of foolishness. It was traditional for Passover pilgrims to shout those words from Psalm 118, verses 25 and 26, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” But that was understood as a blessing on all pilgrims, on everyone who came into Jerusalem “in the name of the Lord,” for Passover. The word, “Hosanna,” which looking back we realize in Hebrew meant something like “Save us!” had lost all its meaning. The crowd that was crying “Hosanna!” to Jesus didn’t know they were asking Him to save them. It was just something fun to shout.

         So Palm Sunday on April Fool’s Day is kind of fitting. There’s a foolishness, a kind of joking atmosphere that pervades the whole deal. We can picture Jesus riding along with a  rueful smile on His face, appreciating the attention and praise, but groaning inside at just how little the crowd around Him really understands.

         Of course the biggest joke is still to come. It’s the trick that God played through Christ on Satan and on death. On Friday Jesus will be climbing a hill again, but then He will be walking, and carrying a Cross on His back. He will bleed and die and be buried in the ground. But come the next Sunday, “April Fool!” and He will rise again, alive and truly victorious over the enemies He actually came to fight.

         That all, of course, makes our faith serious business. We never want to make light of our Lord’s sacrifice and the miracle of the Resurrection. This past week a Catholic bishop in the Philippines warned his congregations against turning this Sunday into superstition and pagan pranks, losing sight of what Jesus came to do for us. That’s good advice. Jesus coming to Jerusalem to die for you and me was no joke. Yet this conjunction with April Fool’s Day can teach us something about our own worship.

         As I said last Sunday, worship is not meant to be productive. “Worship has no product, no net worth, no tangible result.” It all has a bit of pointlessness to it, a kind of foolishness. I bet some of you felt it like I did, just picking up that palm and waving it around this morning. You feel a little foolish. You wouldn’t be caught dead doing that at the grocery store or at work. Yet here in worship we let down our guard and do some silly things.

         Part of giving genuine praise to God, to Jesus Christ, is a willingness to set aside our dignity, to drop our pride for awhile, and just give ourselves up to a wild and, as I said last week, exultant praise. If we go home feeling a little foolish, not quite sure what we have to show for it, that’s perfectly all right. We’ve just had the experience of putting ourselves in the right relationship of humility toward God, toward Christ.

         This foolishness of Christian experience and worship is a theme which the apostle Paul understood deeply. Like that donkey ride and parade on the first Palm Sunday, truly following Jesus is going to makes us seem like fools at times. In I Corinthians 4:10, Paul said about himself and the other apostles who were going hungry, being mistreated, and living without homes that “We are fools for Christ.”

         Giving up a warm bed to go out in a cold rain and sit in an uncomfortable chair to sing and pray and listen to a sermon can feel pretty foolish some days. Yet Palm Sunday and Holy Week teach us that the joke is not really on us. God’s great April Fool joke is on all the real foolishness that plagues us. The truly awful foolishness on which the Lord Jesus Christ pulls the great prank of dying and rising is the foolishness of our sin, of all the pain and hurt we cause ourselves and each other. Our Lord’s huge and wonderful joke is that He can redeem us from all that tragic silliness and give us a new life like His.

         That first Palm Sunday was a pretty foolish spectacle. It didn’t really accomplish anything. Jesus is hailed as a king and a few days later is dying as a criminal. Yet if you join in that foolishness, if you shout or even fervently say, “Hosanna!” “Save us!” He will. Jesus will ride into your life and ride over all the ugly foolishness of sin to give you a new life, a new way of seeing what is foolish and what’s not.

         As we come to the Lord’s Table today and celebrate what Jesus has done for us, we may look like fools. We eat bread and drink a cup saying that they are the Body and Blood of our Lord. It sounds silly, crazy, maybe even insane. Yet in these gifts, in the gift Jesus gave us of His own life, we find truth and wisdom and our own real lives. As Paul said, “The foolishness of God is wiser than our wisdom.” I invite you to join in that foolishness today and for the rest of your life.

         Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj