After the Palms


Two weeks ago was Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter.  It was the celebration of the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.

Riding upon a donkey,

Modest, noble, glowing,

A carpet of palm fronds, straw and flowers

Were laid before him.

His triumphant progress was hailed by

The waving palms above his head.

He brought hope.

He received reverence.

This was to be but the beginning

Of a future never ending.

 Jesus’ short ministry had inspired thousands and now he was entering the center of the Jewish world, the navel of the universe, to proclaim his "Good News".  Palm Sunday was the celebration of Jesus, the human being.  Jesus, the human being, was not a Christian – only the resurrected Jesus is truly and solely a Christian. The human Jesus was unabashedly Jewish. Like Paul, who insisted that he was a "Hebrew born of Hebrews and as to the law, faultless" Jesus’ ministry was to Jews and he was informed by his Jewish heritage. Jesus did not seek to rebel from his Jewish tradition.  Like all Jews, he celebrated the Passover, and like all Jews he sought to celebrate it in the capital city of Jewish culture, Jerusalem.  Palm Sunday was the culmination of his journey.  At the table when Jesus sat down to celebrate the Passover Seder with his disciples was the lamb shank, the egg, the salt water and greens, the bitter herb and the charoset, each representing an important theme in the recounting of the story of the emancipation of the Jews from Egyptian bondage a thousand years before.  Laid out before him was the unleavened bread and the wine.  The Catholic Church has transformed them into the wafer and wine of the communion. 

 The traditional Unitarian understanding that Jesus was a human teacher and not divine would seem to indicate that the Sunday before Easter, Palm Sunday, should be considered UU Easter - Palm Sunday -  the celebration of the triumphant entry of Jesus the man, not Jesus the God, into Jerusalem. 

 Jesus taught a new understanding of the way that Jews should live their lives.  This was the genius of Jesus. His view of life was not an encyclopedia of Jewish wisdom literature but rather an imperative for how to live responsibly, ethically and religiously. Jesus was not, like Moses, a lawgiver. He did not chisel out ten phrases that people must obey. Rather, he provided a perspective on how one should live; a path, a way, a road to personal salvation.

 Personal salvation was his goal. In this he differed radically with his Jewish tradition. Jesus’ parables, the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes were, indeed, new.  They represented a true departure from Jesus’ Jewish tradition.  Personal salvation was not at all like the Jewish tradition which emphasized the triumph of a group, a nation, a religion.  Jesus sought to move human beings beyond their personal self-interest toward the recognition of an ideal society.

If the expectations of the followers of Jesus had been met following Palm Sunday there would be no Christianity as we know it. But what occurred after the triumphant entry of Jesus on Palm Sunday was not what was anticipated.  His short ministry was celebrated by an even shorter period of triumph.  Less than a week later, at the Passover Seder that Jesus had journeyed to Jerusalem to celebrate he was betrayed and then quickly tried by his adversaries and crucified. The followers of Jesus were stunned.  They pretended not to know him and did not come to his aid.  The period following was a period of chaos.  The promised land of the Kingdom of God seemed no longer possible. 

 Today commemorates the day when, following the betrayal, trial and execution of Jesus, Thomas refused to believe that the apparition that he saw was Jesus until he could verify it with his own hands.   

 John 20:24-28

But Thomas, one of the twelve, called the twin, was not with them when Jesus came.

 The other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord”.  But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

 And after eight days, when his disciples, were together again within, and Thomas with them, Jesus came and, the doors being shut, stood in their midst, and said, “Peace be unto you.”

 Then Jesus said to Thomas, “Reach here your finger, and behold my hands; and reach here your hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.”

Some consider this Sunday, proclaimed by the Catholic Church to be St. Thomas’ Day, to be “Skeptic’s Easter” (another UU Easter?). 

  If Jesus’ followers had paid better attention to the lesson of the Passover Seder they might have been better prepared for what occurred. 

The defeat of Pharaoh by Moses and the escape across the Red Sea had also produced a celebration a thousand years before.  The Israelites then celebrated the immanence of their passage to the “Promised Land” of “milk and honey”.  Yet soon the former slaves lost faith with their leader. 

Rabbi Kushner tells the story this way:  Moses tried.  He climbed up Mount Sinai to bring down instructions from God in the form of the Ten Commandments.  As he climbed down the tablets were heavy to the point of being unmanageable but Moses found the strength to carry them for he believed that the Israelites were waiting faithfully, steadfast in their belief that they were the “Chosen People”, the “Children of God”.   

 But as he descended he witnessed the Israelites worshiping a golden calf.  The energy drained from his body and the tablets slipped from his hands as he raised his arms in anger. The dream of a holy people, obedient to the word of God seemed to have been dashed.  So much for gratitude. Moses and the Israelites ended up wandering for forty years in the desert wilderness subsisting on the strange “manna” that could only be harvested at dawn and then had to last them through the day.  Forty years!  They yearned for the fish and vegetables that they had eaten as slaves.  Some promised land!  “Maybe we should have stayed in Egypt!”   So we see that Jesus’ disciples were not the first to become discouraged and betray their leader at the first setback.  The “Kingdom of God” like the “Promised Land” seemed to have been an illusion. 

 Abandoning the road leading to an untried and uncertain future seemed more reasonable.  When we find ourselves disappointed, in the midst of chaos, trying something new that seems to be turning sour, we often turn right back around and seek to return to the tried and true.  In fact, some are so sure that anything new will not work that they tenaciously hold on to what they know works.  That way they are sure of not failing and being inevitably disappointed. Like the disappointment experienced by Jesus and his followers after Palm Sunday, Moses and his followers experienced dismay not victory after crossing the Red Sea.  Yet, that is not the end of the story for either Jesus and his followers nor for Moses and his followers.  If it were we would all be depressingly relegated to the chaos and wilderness of disappointment.  The lesson would be “Don’t even try, it will only end badly.”  Alas, that is not the moral of either story.  The moral is what comes after - after the dream has failed.  The moral is that there is, in fact, a light at the end of the tunnel.  But that light may not be the same as the one that we were originally seeking. 

 My cousin, Carol, was a lovely bride.  There is a saying that “all brides are beautiful” and I can tell you, after having performed a few hundred weddings, that it is true.  I don’t know how it happens, but I have never yet seen a homely, sullen bride.  They are all full of life, full of joy, with anticipation of the new life that lies before them.  Grooms, on the other hand, are usually nervous and, though joyful, often quite out of sorts - just so with Carol and Joseph.  They couldn’t wait to start a family.  They had the dream of a beautiful suburban house, a couple of children, a dog and, perhaps, a tabby cat.  Carol had been teaching elementary school for several years and loved children.  Joe had graduated college and had found a job with the government.  But they just couldn’t seem to get pregnant.  They tried for a year and then two. They finally sought medical assistance. Then the disappointment turned to desperation. 

  After the long period spent in the wilderness of childlessness they did, in fact, conceive.  They were delighted at the news.  The joy, the jubilation, their dream of a loving family, was going to come true after all.  At Carol’s next exam, however, they discovered something unexpected.  They discovered that . . . there was not just one heartbeat!  Not just two.  Not just three. Not just four. There were, in fact, five heartbeats!  Carol was pregnant with quintuplets!  There was, of course, great joy.  But mixed with the joy was concern.  There was a great deal of concern for the health of Carol and the babies.  Carol had to stop working much earlier than anticipated and was placed on strict bed rest for several months before delivery. The infants were, indeed, born premature, and, although they were all apparently healthy, they were not all well enough to leave the hospital at the same time.  Two of the infants were quite weak and needed additional care before they could be released.  Alas, all five turned out to be healthy and the dream could now be realized. 

 But wait – not the same dream!  Five infants take a great deal more care than one; the two bedroom apartment was not nearly big enough even now much less as the children grew; the expense of raising five children is significant.  A new dream and many compromises were required.  Fortunately, Carol and Joe’s parents were able to help them buy a house that would be adequate for this growing family.  And, since there was a large extended family in the area, in addition to the grandparents, several aunts and uncles and cousins agreed to sign up for baby sitting duty on a regular basis.  Carol loved teaching but Joe was less than enthusiastic about his job so it was agreed that Carol would return to work and Joe would become a house husband.  In the mid eighties that was something quite novel. 

And the publicity!  In the last few decades quintuplets have become, if not common, at least not a unique event.  But, Carol and Joe’s children were born at the time when there were only one or two other sets of quintuplets in America!  News magazines and women’s magazines, newspapers and book publishers all wanted pictures, all the time.  We have seen the problems that Paparazzi cause for movie stars and politicians.  The five infants could not live anything approaching a normal life with photographers and reporters constantly around. 

 To preserve a normal life for the “quints” Carol and Joe made a rule.  Every year on their birthday the “quints” would be made available for pictures and stories but not at any other time. 

 The “quints” have now all graduated college and are beginning their careers and getting married.  They are living their own private lives.  Carol and Joe are moving on.  They have lived a dream life – not the one that they had planned on their wedding day – but they couldn’t be happier. 

 he Kingdom of God that the followers of Jesus sought was an earthly kingdom.  Rome would not allow such a thing.  But, a spiritual kingdom was out of the power of the Roman or Jewish establishment to prevent.  The matzo that, at the Seder represented the hurried way that the followers of Moses had to leave their homes, was transformed into the communion wafer representing the crucified body of Jesus.  The cup of wine set aside for Elijah at the Passover Seder became the communion wine representing the blood that Jesus spilled on the cross. The land of milk and honey promised by Moses turned out to be a land already occupied that required a different leader to conquer, a warrior not a prophet.

 The dreams needed to change, the goals needed to change, the expectations needed to change in order for the new vision to be fulfilled.  Could the new visions, the spiritual kingdom of the risen Christ or the very real hard fought for soil and stone of Jerusalem be inhabited without the earlier visions?  Could Peter and then Paul create the Christian world view without Jesus?  Could Joshua “fit the battle of Jericho” without Moses? 

 You may not remember, for it is seldom mentioned, that there were, in fact, two sets of tablets that Moses carried down from Mount Sinai.  The first, carved by God, were smashed when Moses, carrying them down the mountain, was shocked to see the Israelites worshiping a golden calf in his absence.  Moses, disappointed but undaunted, climbed back up the mountain and, this time in a collaborative effort with God, carved a second set.  When, later, an arc was built to contain these new tablets Moses gathered up the shattered pieces of the first ones and placed them into the arc as well.  The first vision, though unsuccessful, provided seeds, a learning, a prelude to the second, more enduring vision. 

Similarly, the disciples of Jesus, although they denied him at the trial, did not abandon him completely and, in fact, took up and continued his ministry after his crucifixion. In both cases the original dream might have been shattered.  But the pieces were gathered together, not to make them whole again but as a reminder of the promise and a lesson that another path is needed.  It has been said that no experience is a bad experience if one learns from it. 

 Victor Frankl, wrote a book “Man’s Search for Meaning” after having been captured by the Nazis in World War II and thrown into Auschwitz.  There he witnessed both desperately defeated and depressed people and others who were able to endure the most brutal treatment that one person can inflict upon another.  He concluded that “Everything can be taken from a man but the last of human freedoms, the right to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”  Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his new book, “Overcoming Life’s Disappointments”, interprets that to mean “what happens to you, no matter how hurtful or unfair, is ultimately less important than what you do about what happens to you.”  He continues, “When the real world turns out to be a lot less friendly than we dreamed it would be, do we give up and settle for what the world is willing to give us without a struggle?  Do we rail against God for the unfairness of life?  Or do we look deeply into ourselves and only then discover how resilient we are?”

 In this same book, Rabbi Kushner begins with a quote from Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred?  Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”  Rabbi Kushner comments: “In these lines, the poet Langston Hughes wonders what happens to dreams that don't come true. I wonder what happens to the dreamer. How do people cope with the realization, that important dimensions of their lives will not turn out as they hoped they would? . . . Many of us look at the world and see two groups of people, winners and losers: those who get what they want out of life and those who don't. But in reality, life is more complicated than that. Nobody gets everything he or she yearns for. I look at the world and see three sorts of people: those who dream boldly even as they realize that a lot of their dreams will not come true; those who dream more mod­estly and fear that even their modest dreams may not be real­ized; and those who are afraid to dream at all, lest they be disappointed. I would wish for more people who dreamed boldly and trusted their powers of resilience to see them through the inevitable disappointments.”

Overcoming life’s disappointments turns out not to be something that occurs to only us sad few.  Everyone, the world over, experiences disappointments not just once and not just about minor things.  It is, in fact, part of living, part of being human.  It is not our fault, it is not God’s fault, it is no anyone’s fault that lives turns out differently than our dreams.  It’s just life, in all its magnificent complexity.  As Victor Frankl wrote: “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” 

 the hopes and dreams that the followers of Jesus entertained as Jesus paraded under the waving palms had to be reoriented.  Yet the dreams that he brought, though changed, were significant and a necessary ingredient for what came after in the ever flowing events that constitute our living stream.

I have yet to meet a single person whose life turned out to be what he or she thought it would become – not necessarily better or worse, just different.  We all discover forks in the road when not actual road blocks.   Like Forest Gump said, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."  The measure of a person is, thus, not whether or not they have lived their dreams, but whether they have lived their life fully even when those dreams turn out to have been different.