When I went to Rome for the first time, over ten years ago, I spent many hours looking at the ancient Roman ruins in and around the Forum Romanum. Today, only fragments of the original buildings remain, and it is hard to picture what the area would have looked like in its glory days. And yet, once upon a time, those buildings were the heart of mighty Rome, the Empire that straddled much of the known world. The lives of millions in many lands were shaped in various ways by the decisions that were made in those ancient edifices. But today, so little remains. Tourists come and go, taking selfies or snapping pictures of the cute cats that roam the ruins. Those old stones are little more than just curiosities.
Contemplating the former glory of the Roman Empire makes me wonder about our own country. Will our magnificent government buildings in Washington, D.C., one day be nothing more than ruins where cats wander and tourists take pictures and buy souvenirs? Dystopian science-fiction stories often depict such scenarios, but hopefully nothing of the sort will happen for many centuries. But no country is permanent. No political oder is forever. Civilizations rise and fall, as the march of history goes on. That is also one of the lessons of Palm Sunday for us.
As we see in the first Gospel passage for this Sunday, Jesus rides into Jerusalem in triumph. The crowds recognize him as the Messiah and they are ready to crown him king. For centuries, the Old Testament prophecies had pointed to what we now know as the first century AD as the time for the arrival of the Messiah. Finally, the moment has come.
The expectation of the Jewish people was that the Messiah would liberate them from Roman oppression and restore the Davidic kingdom. In the 10th century BC, God had raised up David, who united the tribes and established a powerful kingdom, with Jerusalem as the capital. After David came Solomon, who forged a small empire and built the Temple in Jerusalem. Those were the glory days of the Israelites from a political and temporal perspective.
But after Solomon, things took a turn for the worse. The kingdom was split in two - the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah, the two soon becoming bitter rivals. In 722 BC, the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians. Then in 587 BC, Jerusalem was taken by the Babylonians, who destroyed the Temple and carried off the holy objects of the Jewish faith. They also deported a large section of the population of the Kingdom of Judah to Babylon, which was the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity.
But in 537 BC, the Persians defeated the Babylonians and they allowed the Israelites to return home and to rebuild the Temple. But the Jewish people still remained under foreign occupation. In the 4th century, the Greeks overcame the Persians in their turn and became the new occupiers of the Holy Land. They were cruel masters, who desecrated the Temple and sought to eradicate the observance of the Torah. The Israelites rebelled and were able to establish limited independence for a time under the Maccabees. But in 63 BC, the Romans arrived and conquered the whole area, once again bringing the Holy Land under foreign occupation.
But now, as the Gospel passage unfolds, we see Jesus riding into Jerusalem. The great moment has, it seems, arrived. What is more, Jesus is coming to Jerusalem for the celebration of the Passover, the feast that marked the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. What better time to overthrow the new oppressor? What better moment to restore the glory of the Jewish kingdom?
But Jesus does not do so. Instead, he allows himself to be arrested, tortured, and crucified. In doing so, he reformulates the Passover sacrifice. The Passover goes back to the time when the Israelites were captives in Egypt. After the Egyptian Pharaoh repeatedly refused to let the Israelites go, God sent the Angel of Death over the land of Egypt to strike down the firstborn male in every household. The Israelites could escape this punishment by sacrificing and eating a lamb and smearing its blood upon the doorframe of their homes. After the events of that night, Pharaoh finally let the Israelites go and God led them out of Egypt and in time into the Promised Land. To remember God's work in their midst, the Israelites were to celebrate the Passover feast each year.
Jesus also celebrates the feast. But at the culmination of his earthly ministry, Jesus reformulates the Passover by making himself the lamb to be sacrificed. He offers himself up upon the Cross on Good Friday. Instead of the flesh of the animal lamb, He gives us his Body and Blood to eat and drink in the Eucharist. Instead of being protected by the blood of the sacrificial lamb upon our doorframes, we are now saved by the Blood of Christ shed for us. His sacrifice saves us not from political oppression, but from the separation between humanity and God caused by our sinfulness. The reformulated Passover ritual continues today in the form of the Mass, which is a mystical participation in the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross.
After riding into Jerusalem, Jesus did not restore the Davidic kingdom in a temporal sense. Nor will he do so. As he told Pilate, his kingdom is not of this world. Instead, the kingdom lives on in the Church, which is open to Jews and Gentiles alike, to every member of the human race. Through the Church, the grace of God flows into the world to save us, cleanse us, transform us, and to call us to a whole new order of being, where God's love reigns completely.
In fact, the Church professes the social kingship of Christ. Christ is not the king of just one kingdom, but of all of society, of all lands, the whole human race, and indeed of the whole universe. A part of our mission as the Church is to establish the order of Christ in all of society. The Church is not tied to any one political system. The role of the Church is to influence all human systems to be ordered according to the kingship of Christ.
We should not put our faith in human constructs and institutions. Countries come and go in history. Civilizations begin and end. Empires rise and fall. Lands are conquered and lost. Nothing will endure in our human world.
But the reign of Christ is eternal. The Church in our temporal world is preparing the way for his eternal heavenly reign. When our world comes to an end, Christ will remake creation and bring about the New Jerusalem, where Christ will reign fully, his light, his love imbuing all beings and all things. That is our Promised Land. That is the kingdom we should hope for and work for. As we flit through this temporal world with our short lives, we will of course belong to and love a temporal country of our world. But our true home is the New Jerusalem, ruled over by Christ, the King of the Universe.
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The readings for the Palm Sunday, Cycle A, are:
Matthew 21:1-11
Isaiah 50:4-7
Psalm 22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 23-24
Philippians 2:6-11
Matthew 26:14—27:66
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: View of Jerusalem from the Kidron Valley by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2016.