Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's April 9, 2006 Sunday worship service.

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The Greek New Testament has two different words for “time.” The Greek word chronos means “time” in a quantitative sense, chronological, calendar time, time that you can divide into minutes and years, time as duration. It is the sense that we mean when we say, “What time is it?” or “How much time do I have? But in Greek there is also the word kairos, which also means “time” but time in a qualitative sense, the kind of time that can’t be measured, what you mean when you say “we’re having the time of our lives” or “the time is now ripe to make a decision and move forward,” or “the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.”

With its two words, the Greek is more precise than our English; the truth is that we live our lives in both kinds of time at once, chronos and kairos. But during Holy Week, we especially live in kairos time, extra-ordinary time, impossible-to-define-time, because although in one way it is a week like any other week with one day moving into another chronologically until this time next week the week is gone, in another way the kairos time of this week does not move at all, as though the ever-flowing stream of chronological time stops flowing, and we and all creation find ourselves kneeling in timeless wonder at the feet of Jesus, crucified and risen all at once and for all time.

It is a week when we are reminded that, though we live out our days trying to put our best foot forward, it’s the other foot that really needs our attention (William Sloan Coffin). Unlike we, who have the advantage of hindsight and history, the disciples had no idea what was coming in either chronos or kairos time as they approached Jerusalem and heard the strange request about a donkey. Sure, they had heard Jesus predict his suffering, death, and rising, but Mark’s Gospel is the one that makes clear they really hadn’t the foggiest what it all meant.

Just before that gloriously fateful entrance into Jerusalem on what we know as Palm Sunday, the disciples had been jockeying for advantage, angling for self-glory in the coming kingdom, arguing over who would be greatest. It is deliciously ironic that on this very public day of entrance into the city, a day of welcome with joyous hosannas and the wild waving of leafy branches, that the disciples find themselves on donkey detail, engaged in a most unromantic form of ministry, mucking around a stable, looking suspiciously like horse thieves, and trying to wrestle an untamed and no doubt balky animal toward the olive groves on the Mount of Olives. For this – donkey detail -- they left their fishing nets? (Tom Long, CC, 4/4/06)

In ordinary time, in whatever time of day or night it might be, we often find ourselves “up to our eyeballs” in the gritty details of everyday life, doing “donkey detail” chores for the Lord and for others. But, suddenly, we can also find ourselves in kairos time, the time when the past and future meet, such as the time in which Jesus found himself that week long ago.

Although nostalgia and liturgical tradition have created in our minds a Palm Sunday parade as mass event, truth is, historically at least, it probably wasn’t such big deal at all. The adjective “many” in our text is a relative term, and it is impossible to attach a number to Mark’s reference to the presence of “many people who spread their cloaks along the road.” There would hardly have been time or room along Jerusalem’s narrow, winding streets, crowded with Passover pilgrims, to stage a welcome befitting royalty, or even the welcome we’d like to imagine.

Here’s one description of that first Palm Sunday:

“The donkey’s hooves raise little puffs of dust as it jogs along the sun-baked street. The rider sits with his bare feet tucked in tight under the soft, underbelly of his beast. In a gesture of extravagance, one of the men who have gathered along the way to watch rushes forward and spreads his cloak out in the street in front of the animal, and this makes it shy and breaks suddenly into a trot. Taken off guard, the rider is jolted backwards at a crazy angle, and for a second it looks as though he will lose his balance and fall; but then with a fistful of shaggy mane, he pulls himself straight again. . . Several of the onlookers are waving branches of myrtle and willow and sprays of palm leaf. The face of the rider is shiny with sweat. It is not a big crowd that has come to watch, just a small one. Many of them have no idea what the fuss is all about and could not care less. It is something to see, that is all.” (“The Rider,” Frederic Beuchner)

If we had been there, in Jerusalem for Passover in the year 30 CE, might we have taken time out to go and see the Jesus who came from Jericho east of Jerusalem, entering the Holy City on a donkey -- not the fine horse of a military hero or conquering emperor, but the people’s beast of burden? Would we have bothered?

One commentator has suggested that “for Mark’s Gospel, the decisive moment has to do with the new colt which had never been ridden. Others had paraded and would continue to parade on a fine stallion. They would take on the authorities of their day by force of arms and die, gloriously or ingloriously, to be remembered as heroes and patriots. Others again, many more of them, would fall in with the authorities of their day, lacking the courage or the tenacity to hold out for the restoration of David’s kingdom. But only Jesus confronted the powers with disarming love, only he rode to certain death with no attempt to intimidate, destroy, or surprise his enemies.” (Samuel Wells, Christian Century)

Whether the onlookers who watched this rider in chronos time, who held palms in the their sweaty palms and waved them wildly, perhaps desperately, whether they really believed he was the Messiah, or whether they were simply drawn out by the spectacle of it all, we’ll never know for sure.

But Jesus came as the prophet Zechariah predicted the Messiah would come and he came, not just to Jerusalem, but he came even more to the temple. For in a way, after all, the temple was really his destination. Perhaps of all the memorable verses in today’s passage from Mark 11, it is the often overlooked last verse, verse 11 which is the most important: “Jesus entered Jerusalem and went to the temple. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.” Typical of Passover when the crowd swelled, pilgrims camped out on the hillsides of the villages surrounding Jerusalem. Jesus, the observant, devout Jew, would have gone to the temple to perform rituals of purification -- just any other Jew coming for Passover would have done.

In chronos time, I cam imagine that Jesus had sweaty palms as he held himself onto his donkey trotting along the uneven streets of Jerusalem. But in the extraordinary, divine moment of kairos time, as he makes his preliminary inspection of the temple, his palms are sweaty for quite a different reason.

His destiny, looming before him and growing ever larger, is to enter the stronghold of his own religious tradition, to meet face to face symbols and realities of power and hypocrisy, to upset the status quo, and in one brief week to turn the temple cult and all it represented upside down.

And it all begins today as the triumph of sweaty rider on a donkey turns into a sweaty confrontation between reformer and temple elites. The anger against the temple’s money changers, the anger of overturned tables, the anger of scattering the benches of those who have turned God’s house of prayer into a den of robbers – it is an enacted parable denouncing the substitution of religious rituals for doing what the prophets had always said to do, which was to act in justice and to care for the weak, the oppressed, the orphans, the widows and the stranger at your gate.

This temple Jesus will not be the gentle Jesus of our childhood Sunday School memories. The tensions he has felt with the religious leaders of the day have stirred the wrath of these zealous guardians of Sabbath observances, dietary restrictions, and kosher company. Jesus’s position on the issues brought threats to his life. And now he has entered the temple, the stronghold of religious tradition, and just as we do everything we can to protect what we think is sacred and worth keeping about a church building where we worship, so the religious leaders of that day will fight back after Jesus desecrates their sacred space.

This final Sunday of Lent is marked by a celebratory parade. I can still hear the children singing from my own childhood: “into the city I’d follow, the children’s band, waving the branch of a palm tree high in my hand, loudest hosannas, ‘Jesus is king.’” That palm parade, I know, is the primary image that stays in our minds about Palm Sunday. But, for Jesus, it is also a protest march; and, for Jesus, it is a funeral procession.

There was an edition of Newsweek Magazine several years ago, that featured a picture of Jesus on the front cover and the article inside entitled “The Other Jesus.” The article was an effort to look at the ways the world’s great religions - Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism - have appropriated the Jesus of Christianity as a peace-loving prophet and wise teacher within their own religious traditions.

That universalizing appeal of Jesus, this lowest common denominator Jesus, however, hardly takes account of the other Jesus of this Holy Week, the Jesus of sweaty palms who today prepares to clean house, as it were, in the temple courtyard.

Palm Sunday’s parade and triumph is not an end in itself for Jesus. It is a transition on the way to something else. And for those who watch him with palms in hand, the question is this: Who is “the other Jesus” for me, for you, for us, for the church, for the nation, for the world?

Today is about time. God’s time and God’s timing and God’s timeless gift.

Today is about realizing that the word “Hosanna” means praise to God as well as a plea for salvation.

In these days of Holy Week, may our praise turn to a plea and a prayer, and may we pause to consider the way of the cross; may we pause, and take time to feel our own sweaty palms.

Amen.