Our blog this month is written by Gordon Mackley:
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Love Wins !
As we get ever closer to this year’s very late Easter, we have as always, Palm Sunday first. Like me you may have wondered why so many of the people who had cheered for Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, deliberately fulfilling the Zechariah 9 prophecy, were only one week later clamouring for him to be crucified.
To understand this better, you need to know a little of Israel’s history and also human nature. Israel had been occupied by different powerful nations but one of the worst leaders of these was Antiochus IV of the Seleucid Empire. He seemed to have an almost pathological hatred of Judaism and the Jews themselves. He committed many atrocities but in 167 BC he placed a pig (an unclean animal) on the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem (the Jews most holy place) and set up worship of the Greek god Zeus there. This was known as the ‘abomination of desolation’ in the prophecy of Daniel 12 and used again by Jesus in Matthew 24. The phrase also recurs in Revelation 13. This ‘abomination’ in 167 B.C. was the last straw and there was a rebellion led by the Maccabees and other Jews against the occupying Seleucid Empire.
This succeeded and Israel became an independent nation again (until the Roman Republic (later Empire) came, in 63 B.C. (not long before Jesus’ birth). The Temple was rededicated by Judas Maccabeus, a Jewish priest. In 164 B.C,, amidst much celebration including the cutting down of palm trees, cries of ;’Hosanna’; and ‘Blessed is the Son of David’ – (all sound familiar?) The festival set up to celebrate this is Hannukah (Festival of Lights) held in December each year. John says Jesus was in Jerusalem in the Temple during a Hannukah festival (John 10:22).
It would seem that those in Jerusalem on ‘Palm Sunday’, having seen Jesus in action over the previous few years, expected him to declare himself as their king in the Judas Maccabeus mould. From the Gospels we can see that Jesus’ disciples thought similarly even after the resurrection and just before his ascension (Acts 1:6).
However, as Jesus says to Pontius Pilate in John 18:36 and to his fellow Jews many times before, although he was the rightful ‘King of the Jews’ unlike the Edomite Roman puppet King Herod and his sons, Jesus kingdom was (and is!) of a different type.
Far from riding against the Romans on a large horse Jesus came on a donkey and allowed himself to be captured by an unholy alliance of the religious Jewish elite and the Romans. This was a bitter disappointment to those who wanted to be rid of the occupying Romans. As oft the case, disappointment turned into frustration and hatred, ‘But they kept shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” (Luke 23:21).
Do we often have expectations of how God will act which are very human but not very biblical? The Book of Job is a whole book of such misunderstandings and we can see them in our own day amongst our fellow Christians (and probably also even ourselves!). Towards the end of Job, God reminds him that he is human and not God. Whatever we think God should be doing to combat all the evil we see in the world, we need always to remember that in the final victory in Revelation, it is not the great military or economic power that we see so much of today, which succeeds; it is the slain lamb who destroys evil once and for all. Love wins – that is what God and Jesus are all about and we need not to tell God what to do about our human evil but to get on board with that project of sacrificial love. Despite what we see in human terms, it is that Godly love which will conquer and restore the world.
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