Keep Awake (Mark 14:32-42)

Peace be with you. My name is Danny Bradfield. My pronouns are he/him/his, and I’m the pastor of Bixby Knolls Christian Church.

Today is Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week. It is the most significant week of the year for Christians. Traditionally, today is a day to focus our attention on Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, so let me say just a word about that. 

In the ancient world, anytime a powerful leader arrived in a city like Jerusalem, there was a great procession. The leader arrived in a magnificent chariot pulled by the best warhorses, with a great entourage; and as many soldiers as could be rounded up lined the road leading into the city. The soldiers would raise their spears and swords in tribute as the great leader passed by.

It is said that on the day Jesus arrived in Jerusalem - over on the other side of town, Pilate or Herod also arrived, entering the city by another road; their procession would have been as I have described, with chariots and warhorses and soldiers and spears and swords.

It was all a show, of course. All propaganda. All part of the Roman cult that elevated Roman leaders to a god-like state, with the intention of making the people both proud and fearful of Roman might and power.

Jesus’ procession was a deliberate, intentional mockery of all this. 

In Jesus’ procession, there were no chariots, no warhorses, no soldiers, no spears, no swords. Instead of a warhorse, Jesus rode a donkey - a symbol of humility and meekness instead of power. And the people lining the roads raised and waved palm branches instead of spears and swords. Symbols of peace, instead of war.

It was all meant to mock the priorities of Rome, and to make the point that everything Jesus represents is the exact opposite of everything Rome represents.

From there, we move into the events of holy week. Confrontations with the authorities. (Inevitable confrontations…) Plots of betrayal. The Last Supper. The impending arrest that Jesus knows is coming, but which the disciples can’t seem to accept.

It is at this moment of heightened suspense that the scripture we just heard takes place. 

As readers and hearers of Mark’s story, we know that the plot to arrest and kill Jesus has already been put into place. 

We know that Judas - one of Jesus’ disciples - has agreed to betray Jesus, and hand him over to the authorities. 

We know what is coming - Jesus has told the disciples what is coming - but they are convinced that it can all still be avoided. Somehow.

After the Last Supper, Jesus and the disciples go out to the Garden of Gethsemane, and Jesus tells his disciples that he’s going off to pray. He takes Peter, James, and John with him - the three that he is closest to - and he confesses to them that he is deeply grieved. 

He’s troubled. Frightened. Filled with anxiety and dread… as any human would be. 

He needs his friends. 

He needs their presence. 

He doesn’t need them to say, “Don’t worry, Jesus; everything will be alright,” ...because everything will not be alright. Not this night.

He doesn’t need them to say, “Just be strong and have faith,” because Jesus is strong and does have faith - but that will not change what is about to happen.

He just needs them. Their presence. He needs to look into their eyes and see their love for him. He needs to know that they will be with him, no matter what.

Jesus throws himself on the ground and prays: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

Then Jesus turns, and looks, and behold: Peter, James, and John have fallen asleep. 

Jesus says to Peter: “Simon” - that’s Peter’s birth name, the name given to him by his mother and father - “Simon, are you asleep?! Could you not keep awake one hour? Please! I need you! Keep awake. Keep awake and pray - pray that you may not come into the time of trial…”

And Jesus turns and prays again; and then he turns back and sees that they have once again fallen asleep. 

Jesus prays some more - and they are still sleeping. 

Still sleeping when he needs them the most.

And already, before the cross is even in sight, Jesus feels abandoned. 

We read this - we hear this story - and we think: Oh, those disciples! They of little faith! 

We think: surely, if we had been there, we would have stayed awake! We wonder how anyone could sleep, with so much tension, so much anticipation, so much drama and suspense…

Maybe it was all the wine they had at dinner. 

If I had been there - if you had been there - we would have stayed awake. Wouldn’t we? We would have kept our eyes open… we would have been the friends Jesus needed us to be… Right?

Less than two weeks ago, a young white man in Atlanta killed eight people - six of them Asian-Americans. It was recognized that these killings were motivated, at least in part, by race.

Racism is - and has always been - a huge problem in the United States. It is one of the greatest evils that exists. It is so pervasive, yet so life-denying, and so contrary to everything Jesus taught.

The Atlanta shooter was a Christian. He grew up going to church. So Sarah Pulliam Bailey - a journalist with the Washington Post - went and spoke with the shooter’s youth pastor, to see if she could find some clues as to what might have motivated such a horrific event, or what could have been done to prevent it. 

She asked the shooter’s youth pastor about how often issues of race and racism were addressed in the church, in teaching and preaching. How often was racism labelled as “sin?” How often were church members encouraged to find ways to overcome racism in society and in their lives?

The youth pastor responded by saying: “I don’t recall any sermons dealing specifically with racism…”

I don’t recall any sermons dealing specifically with racism.

That church was asleep when it needed to be awake.

Jesus is present in the least of these. Jesus is present in the lives of those who, everyday, must deal with the fear, the horror, of racism. And Jesus needs us - the church - to stay awake, to keep our eyes open, to be aware of what’s going on, to be by his side and to have his back. 

But too often, the church has shut its eyes. Too often, the church has fallen asleep.

This week, a lifeguard tower here in Long Beach was set on fire, and burned to the ground. It was the one lifeguard tower painted in rainbow colors, in honor of Long Beach’s LGBTQ community. The torching of the lifeguard tower was an apparent act of hate.

Jesus is present in the least of these. Jesus is present in the lives of those who, every day, must deal with the fear, the horror, of anti-LGBTQ hate. And Jesus needs us - the church - to stay awake, to keep our eyes open, to be aware of what’s going on, to be by his side and have his back.

But too often, the church has shut its eyes. Too often, the church has fallen asleep.

But Jesus needs us to stand with him, to stand against hate. 

The disciples - Peter, James, and John - they couldn’t stay awake. And yeah, maybe it was because of the wine. Passover meals generally involve lots of wine. They may have been just a wee bit intoxicated.

And we are, too. We’re intoxicated. We’re more than a little drunk. 

We’re intoxicated by white supremacy. We’re intoxicated by heteronormativity. We’re intoxicated by U.S. exceptionalism and colonialism. We're intoxicated by guns. We’re intoxicated by the economy, and the importance of the stock market.

And, increasingly, we’re being intoxicated by conspiracy theories being spread everywhere from Facebook to Fox News.

And when it comes to people who are suffering - the true “least of these” - we’ve fallen asleep. We’ve shut our eyes, and fallen asleep.

Which I guess explains the lack of compassion we as a society have for children at the border, or people on the streets, or families without healthcare. And I guess it explains why we tolerate allowing billionaires and megacorporations to pay little or no tax while services to the poor are slashed. And I guess it explains why we shut our eyes to the ongoing oppression of people of color, and the hate directed toward the LGBTQ community.

We’ve become intoxicated by the narrative of the dominant culture. We’ve become enthralled by the hoopla surrounding Herod’s entry into Jerusalem, and have yawned at the little procession occurring over on the other side of town where peasants are waving palm branches.

Last week, leaders of our denomination - the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) - issued a statement in response to the recent rise in anti-Asian violence. 

“As members of the one body of Christ and the family of humanity, we join together to condemn the rise in overt anti-Asian violence in the United States.  We join with our Asian American siblings to call for an immediate end to xenophobic and racist rhetoric, hate crimes and violence against Asian Americans.  Thousands of incidents of racism against the Asian American community have been reported since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and many more have gone unreported.  The intentional use of such nomenclature for the COVID-19 virus such as “the China virus”, has been perpetuated and promoted by leaders in the US with impunity.  We denounce racist language against Black and brown communities, and we must insist that anti-Asian violence be called out and addressed as part of the systemic injustices laid bare in this time of global pandemic…

“In the context of such violence, the shooting at multiple spas in Georgia that resulted in the additional loss of Asian lives demands that we be vigilant in naming and eliminating the ongoing threats being faced by over 20 million Americans.  Whenever one human being is diminished, we are all diminished.  We cannot remain silent in the face of such violence and terrorism being visited upon our siblings…

“We say we are Disciples of Christ, a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.  We say we welcome all to the Lord’s table as God has welcomed us.  We say we are an anti-racist, pro-reconciling church.  We call each other as Disciples of Christ to do the work of being that church. Let us be the church we say we are.”

Friends: the church is starting to wake up. The church is starting to open its eyes. The church is starting to wean itself from its addiction to white supremacy and the powers of the dominant society.

But we still have a long way to go. Too many in the church are still asleep. 

Let us not be among them.

Let us never hear Jesus say to us, “are you asleep?! Could you not keep awake?”

Let us keep our eyes open, and let us be the church Jesus needs us to be.

"Parables About Jesus" (Mark 14:12-16 & John 19: 31-33, 40-42)

For the past several weeks my sermons have focused on the parables of scripture.  Using John Dominic Crossan’s book The Power of Parable as a guide, I have shown how parables in scripture were of three types, the most powerful being the challenge parable.  I mentioned that challenge parables were those which challenged the hearer’s prejudices and preconceived notions, and presented an entirely different worldview than that which is commonly held.  In other words, they turn things upside down.  I have presented the books of Ruth, Jonah, and Job as Old Testament examples of challenge parables, and have discussed a number of the parables Jesus told and showed how they employed this traditional type of storytelling.

Those who wrote about Jesus could not help but be impressed by the parables he told.  I’m talking specifically about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  In fact, the way they wrote about Jesus led John Dominic Crossan to say that, in many ways, what they did was write parables about Jesus.

I’ll explain that a little more in a few minutes.  But first, I want to tell you about how I spent my summers while I was in college.  Every summer, I would spend a couple of weeks on the staff of a camp for mentally disabled adults.  These campers were adults of all ages (but all over the age of 18) who had autism, downs syndrome, and other intellectual challenges. 

This experience followed several years in high school when I volunteered to help run a boy scout troop for a group of developmentally disabled scouts.  We ran meetings and took these scouts on outings, camping trips, and even camporees where they competed in events alongside scouts from many other units.  The support they received from their fellow scouts always amazed me.

Because of these experiences, when the movie Rain Man came out, people asked me how true it was.  In that movie, Dustin Hoffman plays an autistic savant named Charlie, who demonstrates a number of remarkable abilities.  People asked me if the story seemed true, if Dustin Hoffman’s character seemed true.

Well, I said, yes; I had met people who could do what Dustin Hoffman’s character did in Rain Man.  However, I hadn’t met one single person who could do all the things he could do.  It seemed to me that his character was a composite, incorporating the traits and abilities that any number of people might have.  However, a movie about “any number of people” would get tedious and confusing and boring.  So those “any number of people” were combined into one character.  And even though that one character does not exist in real life, the portrayal in the movie of people with autism is very, very true.

In other words, that character isn’t a literally true depiction of any one person in real life; and yet, it is a very true depiction of people with autism.

In fact, if the characteristics of that one character were divided up into multiple characters in order to be more accurate to real life, the meaning and deeper theme of the movie would be lost; and if the meaning and deeper theme were lost, then the movie would actually become less true, even though it is more accurate.

Make sense?

A few years after Rain Man, Dreamworks Animation produced the movie Prince of Egypt, an animated version of the story of Moses.  And in that movie, they made some changes to the story.  For example, the Bible says that the daughter of Pharaoh discovered baby Moses in a basket; but the movie changed it so that it was Pharaoh’s wife, not daughter, who discovered Moses.

According to the Bible, Moses was 80 years old when he returned to Egypt and confronted Pharaoh.  In the movie, I must say he looked remarkably good for 80.  And then, of course, he led the people through the wilderness for another 40 years before dying.

In the movie, he never looks older than perhaps mid 30s.

And the movie had a number of religious leaders serving as consultants.  And these religious leaders had no problems with the changes made by the moviemakers.  Why?  Because they recognized that the themes of the story were still present, and in fact, the changes made by the movie makers helped bring out the meaning of the story better than if they had strictly followed the Biblical account.  The way the story was told in the movie expressed the truth of the biblical story better than if it had followed exactly every detail that we read in the book of Exodus.

And besides, there is good reason to suspect that the book of Exodus itself was more concerned with bringing out the meaning of the story and its deeper truth, than with being accurate with all the details.  I mean, come on:  a man of 100 years old, 110, 120, leading people on a strenuous wilderness journey?

It’s possible that this story – the story of the exodus – could be considered a parable, and perhaps even a challenge parable since it conveyed a deep truth and featured the reordering of society.  But unlike many of the parables Jesus told, which were fictitious stories told to reveal truth, the story of the exodus, it seems, had its origins in historical events, even if everything in the story isn’t historically true. 

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true true.

Ernest Hemingway once said that “all good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.”  Does that make sense to you?  In the greatest literature of the world, stories of fiction have a way of conveying powerful, important truths in a way that historical accounts just can’t.

Someone once asked well-known Disciple preacher Fred Craddock, who has a reputation for weaving wonderful stories into his sermons, if all the stories he’s ever told were true.  And the answer Craddock gave was: “Of course they’re true; they happen every day.”

Then again, I’m not really sure that Craddock said that.  It could just be a story told about him.  But it’s true nevertheless.

So… the gospel writers – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – in writing about Jesus, they were inspired by how Jesus wove meaning and deep truth into the stories he told, and they did the same in the stories they told about Jesus.

This is why John Dominic Crossan divides his book into two sections.  The first section is titled, “Parables by Jesus.”  The second section is titled, “Parables About Jesus.”

The gospel writers wanted to convey actual historical events, but this was not their first concern.  Their first concern was to convey deeper meaning and truth. 

For example: we heard two scripture readings this morning, one from Mark, and one from John.  Did you notice how they contradict each other?

We heard a few verses from Mark’s depiction of the Last Supper.  Mark saw the Last Supper that Jesus had with his disciples as a new Passover meal.  He talked about the Passover, and how the disciples prepared for the Passover meal, and how Jesus added new meaning and significance to this Passover meal.  So obviously, what we call the Last Supper took place on the day of Passover.

John, on the other hand, saw Jesus as the paschal lamb, the lamb that is sacrificed for the sins of those present at the Passover meal.  On the cross, Jesus dies for the sins of the world.  So, in John’s gospel, it makes sense that it is the crucifixion that takes place on the day of Passover, not the Last Supper.  The Last Supper was the day before.

So which story is true?  Marks’ story of the Lord’s Supper being on Passover, or John’s story of the crucifixion being on Passover?

Some people try to reconcile the two stories.  But they can’t be reconciled.  The Lord’s Supper was one day, the crucifixion was the next day, and they both can’t be on the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the first day of Passover.

It’s possible that neither story is true as far as the history is concerned.  It’s possible that both Mark and John are wrong, that neither event actually took place on the day of the Passover meal.  Do we say, then, that neither story is true?

On the other hand, there is great truth in thinking of the Lord’s Supper as a sort of re-invented Passover meal.  This is a meaningful way of thinking of the Lord’s Supper, and therefore we can say that there is great truth present in Mark’s gospel.

And, there is great truth in thinking of Jesus’s death on the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, like the paschal lamb.  This is a meaningful way of thinking of the crucifixion, and therefore we can say that there is great truth present in John’s gospel.

For some Christians, it is a real challenge to think that either Mark or John – or both – are wrong, that there are errors in the Bible.  After all, it’s the Bible: God’s holy word.  Every word is true, is it not?

Well, if you want to talk history for a moment, the Bible was not interpreted literally for most of Christian history.  It wasn’t until the Enlightenment that some Christians began to look to the Bible for factual evidence. 

During the Enlightenment, in the period following the great scientific discoveries of people like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, “truth” came to be identified with actual facts.  People were fascinated with these discoveries about how the universe works, and began looking to the Bible for scientific facts as well.  They began to look for “factual truth” in the Bible.

  But up until that time, the stories of scripture were read more for their deeper truth and metaphorical meaning, with little attention or concern given to whether the stories in the Bible were “factual,” or whether certain events “actually happened.”  This way of reading scripture is actually quite recent in Christian history.

Now certainly, many things in scripture did “actually happen.”  There is no doubt among scholars that a man named Jesus actually existed, that he was raised in a small Galilean town called Nazareth, that he attracted a large following due to his teachings, that he was recognized as having a special connection to God, that he was seen as a threat to many of those in power, and that he was crucified by the Roman government.

But it is in these actual events that the gospel writers saw a deeper and profound truth at work, and their goal was to convey this deeper and profound truth to their readers.  Their goal was not to “get it right” concern all the facts of history. 

And that’s why, for example, Luke says that Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth, while Matthew says they were from Bethlehem.  Each has their own theological reason for saying so.  At least one of them has to be factually wrong; and yet, both are true because of the deeper symbolism involved.

Now, for Christians who have been influenced by the more recent centuries’ emphasis on reading the Bible as history, this is a whole different way of reading.  It’s reading for a different kind of truth, a truth that is deeper, more profound, and more meaningful.  But it is different, and for someone whose faith is based on a literal understanding of scripture, reading the Bible in this other way can turn their world upside down.  It challenges their understanding of basis of their faith. 

And being told that there’s a whole different way of seeing one’s faith really can make you go “Unh?” 

So that’s why John Dominic Crossan says that scripture contains not only parables by Jesus, but also parables about Jesus.  Because the stories about Jesus told by the gospel writers are told with the same purpose in mind that Jesus had when he told stories about good Samaritans, nameless rich people, and laborers who got paid the same whether they worked one hour or all day.

The stories about Jesus that we have in scripture challenge us to look at our world in a whole new way.  They have the power to change our lives and change our world.  It is what makes reading the Bible so meaningful to me, and why I treasure these stories so much, studying them daily to discover the truth they contain.

Next week: a comparison of the four gospels.  How each of them tells the story of Jesus challenges certain aspects in their society… And also, the way each gospel tells the story presents a challenge to the way the other gospels tell the story…