The Song of the Rocks
A Palm Sunday Communion Meditation by Brent J. Eelman
Abington Presbyterian Church
April 1, 2007

Luke 19: 28-40
    ²⁸After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.
    ²⁹When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, ³⁰saying, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. ³¹If anyone asks you, “Why are you untying it?” just say this: “The Lord needs it.” ’ ³²So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. ³³As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’ ³⁴They said, ‘The Lord needs it.’ ³⁵Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. ³⁶As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. ³⁷As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, ³⁸saying,
‘Blessed is the king
   who comes in the name of the Lord!
Peace in heaven,
   and glory in the highest heaven!’
³⁹Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ ⁴⁰He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’* 

“I tell you, if my followers were silent, the stone would shout out.” I was originally going to title this sermon, ‘The Song of the Stones”, but it occurred to me that the casual passer-by might see the sign on Old York Road and think that I was preaching on some song by the Rolling Stones. It could become even more confusing when accompanied by the announcement about the memorial concert, leaving some to thing that the Passion according to St. John’s would be performed by the Rolling Stones. Hence the title uses “rocks”. Rocks and stones, however, neither sing nor shout… or do they? The story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem is a dramatic account of power encountering truth. It is the story of power trying to muzzle the message of truth. “Tell your followers to be quiet.” “Yes, I could do that… but if I did, the stones would shout.” Truth can not be muzzled.

I

The words came from Luke and with those words he introduced the story of Jesus’ passion. It was a story that was filled with irony, twists and turns. The story of Jesus’ final week on earth causes us to cringe, to cry and also to hope. It is a story about power and truth. The two are not the same, yet we often confuse them.

Jerusalem was the city of power. It was the center of the Hebrew religion. It was where the deals were struck that allowed the Hebrew religion to exist alongside the Roman occupation. Jerusalem was the home of the temple, the center of Hebrew faith, the place where the Holiest of Holies dwelt. Jerusalem was the political and religious center of the Middle East. Into this walled city which represented earthly authority and power came Jesus, mounted on a colt. A conquering hero? No… just a poor Galilean peasant; a rabbi; healer with his disciples. Yet he was greeted with shouts of “Hosanna!” They sang the words of Psalm 118:

"Blessed is the king
who comes in the name of the Lord!
Peace in heaven,
and glory in the highest heaven!"

A king… But what king rides a colt?

More importantly, why were the Pharisees afraid? What frightened them? The Pharisees were afraid of something. They went up to him and say, “tell your followers to be quiet.” What was it that they want silenced? What could this peasant, with no wealth, no army, no power do that would frighten them so?

It was truth… the simple truth that Jesus proclaimed and lived. That is what frightened them. Truth is frightening if you are living a lie! And so they conspired with others to silence him, and thus silence his followers, and thus silence the truth. They tried to silence truth with kangaroo courts, whips, nails, crosses and guarded tombs. But the rocks continue to shout…. Their song is heard, even today.

II

One of the popular TV shows is called CSI… it is about crime scene investigators who try and discover the truth about a crime that has been committed. The CSI detectives work with corpses, insects, and other objects that cannot speak, and yet these silent objects do, and the detectives are able to piece together the story, the truth of what happened, even when all the witnesses are silenced. I believe that the appeal of this TV show is that it touches that part of us that wants to believe that truth ultimately emerges and triumphs. We want to believe that evil will be exposed, and the truth, no matter how suppressed, even by murder, cannot be hidden. On CSI the inanimate and silent remains scream the truth to the detective.

Are we that much different than the Pharisees? I sometimes fear that we have become so invested in the way that things are, that we do not want to hear truth if it will disrupt our lives. Truth has a way of doing that. The church for many years tried to suppress the truth that Galileo and Copernicus discovered. Why? Until the middle of the last century churches kept women out of the ministry and other positions of leadership in the church. Why? In the world of statecraft there are political cover-ups and covert actions that are designed to hide the truth. Why?

Then there is the self: our inner being, with all the contradictions. We have a darker side, and we try and hide that also, hoping that others will not see or know the real person we are. Often we are successful, yet we know that in the presence of God, we are transparent, and the truth is revealed… with grace and forgiveness.

I sometimes fear that we have lost the powerful drama of this week. Can we look at the gospel story of Holy Week as a detective story, where slowly and methodically, the Holy Spirit reveals to us what is true and what is illusion? Then we learn who were involved in the cover-ups. Then we learn who told the truth. We also learn about the truth of suffering, death, and the sources of this evil. But most of all we learn about life: that life like light, cannot be extinguished, nor can it be hid. You can torture it and crucify it, you can put it in a tomb. But ultimately life, which is the greatest truth, breaks through the silence and shouts, “He is risen! Death is no more!”

History tells the story of those who have tried to silence them…. “Tell them to keep quiet!” It is the story of failure, because we cannot silence truth… indeed… "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out." This week their song echoes in the air and it will not be silenced.

This is the Good News. Amen.
 

*The New Revised Standard Version Bible, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers) 1989.

Abington Presbyterian Church, Abington, Pennsylvania,  www.apcusa.org