Luke 19: 39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”40 “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
“Do we have the sense that God gave rocks?” A rude question like that is not the way I would normally want to start a discussion with someone about something they did. But I can remember hearing people ask that question. Maybe it was the buddy in the back of the canoe, after we drew up onto the shore of the river, and I got out of the bow and started pulling the canoe up onto the beach, a rather steep beach…. while my buddy was still in the back of the canoe. When I heard the loud splash, that’s when I learned another new thing about canoeing. Maybe it was he who asked me, “Don’t you even have the sense that God gave rocks?”
Or maybe I heard it in the story that Garrison Keillor told on the radio show, Prairie Home Companion, in the news from Lake Woebegone, about a young man driving home from college, who saw the engine oil pressure light come on, and decided that he should drive home even faster before something bad happened. When Dad had to come pick him up on the roadside, next to the smoking car, maybe it was Dad who asked, “Don’t you even have the sense that God gave rocks?”
And that’s one way we might understand Jesus’ words to the Pharisees as Jesus and the crowds cheering him approach the gates of Jerusalem. “Teacher,” they say, “Rebuke your disciples.” “Tell them to pipe down, cool it, stifle it.”
To which Jesus replies, “If these people keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” In other words, “If you had the sense that God gave rocks, you would worship and sing for joy at the coming of the promised king. And if you don’t, then they’ll just have to do it for you.”
Now I don’t know how it is that rocks worship God, except maybe by just being rocks, being firm, steady and dependable like God is, and doing good things like holding the soil in place or bearing minerals that make our lives better. If rocks and stones relate to God any more than that, we are not given to know it, nor should we ask them, because if we should hear anything back, well, there’s a medical name for that condition.
Still, we read in the Psalms, “The LORD reigns, let the earth be glad; let the distant shores rejoice.” Or Psalm 148, “Praise God, you mountains and hills…” Rocky hills, of course. “Let all Creation rejoice, for he comes to judge the world in righteousness…and the nations in equity.” So if we don’t have the sense that God gave rocks to worship and rejoice at the coming of our Creator and his anointed king and Son, then the rest of Creation will just have to do it for us, including the rocks. However it is that they praise the Lord.
Now, what would keep us from having the sense that God gave rocks to join them and all Creation to worship, celebrate and praise our Creator? Sometimes, as Job put it, “our harps are tuned to mourning,” when circumstances and events in our lives mean that grief, sorrow, toil and tears must have their due. In such times, we must not compare ourselves with others in whom the energy and vibrancy of life are strong, because everything is going well for them. That only adds to grief and pain over losses in our lives more grief and pain, over the fact that we are grieving and in pain. Plus some guilt. How long do we want to keep that cycle going? That’s why there’s usually a box of Kleenex on the table in the study; it’s standard pastoral practice. I personally think of tears as markers of sacred moments.
Or if ever we have struggled with depression or anxiety, not only as a passing frame of mind but even a medical condition, then it doesn’t do to add to those conditions more undeserved guilt, shame and anxiety for feeling guilt, shame and anxiety. We need help and support, and there’s nothing to feel guilt, shame or anxiety for that.
Consider how over half the Psalms in the Old Testament are psalms of lament. In them, people’s words of sorrow, grief and even anger to God are now God’s words to us. Jesus was himself, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” When he insisted that the Palm Sunday celebration continue, he knew that his own death was coming. So he wasn’t urging a celebration so as to forget and to deny the existence of pain, death and impending loss. He was doing it, in part, fully aware of pain, death and impending loss, in the very face of them, to put them in their place, a lower, subordinate place. For as Hebrews 12:2 puts it, “It was for the joy set before him that he endured the cross, despising the shame….” You and me and the coming recreation and reconciliation of all Creation that lay beyond his coming death and resurrection, were among the things that Jesus was celebrating, however much the crowds understood it, or not. That made his Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem a consciously, intentionally death-defying act.
My hope and prayer for us is that, even in our own trials and toils, amidst our own sorrows and sufferings, there would yet be an undercurrent of hope and even, a still small voice of joy, like the voice that sometimes arises in the saddest Psalms of Lament that says, “Yet will I praise God.” Someday I shall, even if today my harp is tuned to mourning. And may we not be too proud, nor feel ourselves too responsible to accept that gift of joy and of hope whenever it does return.
What, then, would keep us from having the sense that God gave rocks, to accept the gifts of joy, hope and gratitude at the Lord’s coming to us, and to celebrate his coming? In the case of the Pharisees, telling Jesus and the crowds to can it, it’s not ignorance, like when the young man responded to the check engine oil light by pushing on the gas pedal even harder. It’s probably fear and shame. Fear, I suspect, of what the Roman soldiers in the fortress overlooking the gate to the city are thinking of this, and might do. This Palm Sunday celebration is a definite claim to kingship, and to them, Caesar alone is Lord. Fear also, I suspect, of what the high priest and the religious leaders are thinking of this. And some of them are hand-in-glove with their Roman overlords. Not only do they not believe that Jesus is the promised son of David, like this Triumphal Entry says, they don’t believe in a coming, promised son of David. This riotous, provocative, dramatic celebration is putting people on a collision course with the Romans and the ruling religious elite. Because of the dark and dreadful forces arrayed against them, frowning over this celebration, it’s just not right, nor responsible. It’s frivolous at best; at worst, irresponsible, even dangerous, they think.
I wonder, had they lived with this fear so long that it turned into shame? The shame of powerlessness relative to the Romans and the ruling elite, the shame of dependency upon the very hand that holds you down, the shame of always being the one who censors themselves whenever they hear blasphemous, outrageous things, the shame from being always the one who looks down and turns into the alleyway whenever the Romans are marching about with their idolatrous banners, singing their lewd songs and celebrating and exercising their power to make the conquered subjects do as they wish, as conquerors tend to do?
The link between fear, powerlessness and shame we know if ever we have been bullied at school or harassed, verbally, physically or sexually, at work. Much of what we call advertisement carries subtle digs and threats against us if we are not thin enough, young enough, rich enough, cool enough, popular enough, up-to-date enough, or have ever bought Brand X.
And having lived so long with this fear and shame, the Pharisees’ have become contagious agents of the fear and shame. Their response to someone who wants to straighten their back and lift up their head is to join the oppressor and the conqueror and try to bend that person’s back and force their head back down again, along with theirs. Jesus doesn’t fall for that, because he has a bigger perspective: heaven’s perspective. He knows who he is; he knows the greater cosmic picture of his Father’s work to redeem and recreate the world, and so liberate us from fear and shame. To Jesus, “the world is already full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” To him, all of creation, even the rocks, are not just silent, inert stuff; they bear witness to the power of God to create them, and to recreate them. At least they have the sense to worship and to celebrate, even in the face of death. In light of the big picture of God at work in the world, worship and celebration are the least they can do; they are the right and responsible thing to do.
And you never know what might happen when we face up to even the scariest, most disempowering things with the faith and the courage to do whatever we can. During the Nazi occupation of Russia, two Jewish women were picked up along the road by German soldiers and accused of being partisans, resistance fighters. They were, actually, though they didn’t confess to it, for they could be executed for it. The night before their interrogation, they were each given a bowl of watery soup with a few pieces of onions and fat in it. One of the women used her handkerchief to fish out a piece of fat, and with it began polishing her shoes.
“What are you doing that for?” the other woman asked. “Why would clean, shiny shoes even matter at a time like this?”
The other woman replied, “My father always taught me that, whenever you’re in a tight spot, you do whatever good and responsible thing you can do, something special that asserts your dignity and helps you feel better, even if it doesn’t seem like much. For me, having clean, polished shoes says who I am and helps me feel better. It’s the most I can do right now, so I’ll do it.”
The other woman started doing the same. That watery soup turned out to be good for something.
The next morning, as they were led into a room for interrogation, the interrogating officer called a soldier over and said, “You captured the wrong people. Those women are not resistance fighters. Look at their shoes. Partisans living in the forest do not have clean, shiny shoes like they do. Let them go.” And they did.
A pastor friend of mine had a sign on his desk that said, “I will not let the big things that I cannot do keep me from doing the little things that I can do.” There is always time to buckle down and work to make the world better, more godly, just and beautiful. But worship, celebration and the confession that God is God are no little things, either. They are reality, they are our responsibility, they are even our eternal destiny, unless we want to leave that to the rocks.
Worship is the winning side of history. Even the rocks have sense enough to know that.