ALTERNATE ENDINGS
March 24, 2013, Passion/Palm Sunday
Luke 19: 28-38; 23: 1-5, 18-21, 32-33, 44-46
Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York
Eternal God, beyond time and place yet as close to us as our own breath, be
present to us here and now. May the words of Scripture we’ve just heard unfold
before us in all their life-bearing truth. May they capture our spiritual
imaginations and transform us more into the men and women you call us to be.
And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be
acceptable in your sight O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.
Over the years, there’s been any number of novels, plays, films, even video games,
that offer more than one ending. For instance, the 1985 murder mystery movie
Clue, based on the classic board game of the same name, was released in theaters
with three different endings – that is to say, three different guilty parties. Movie
houses got randomly different endings. But when Clue came out on DVD, you got
all three. You, the DVD viewer, could choose ending one or ending two or ending
three, or you could let the DVD randomly choose one for you.
The story of Jesus could have theoretically ended in at least three different places.
Imagine for a moment that you don’t know the story as told in the Gospels. Stretch
your imaginative muscles and pretend you’re hearing about Jesus for the very first
time. You could actually imagine his story ending in at least three different ways.
The two passages from Luke’s Gospel that Ruth and Tara just read could have
each served as the end of the story. In all the alternate versions, the story begins
the same: Jesus gathers a small group of followers; he teaches and preaches; he
heals and he finds himself in conflict with the religious authorities of the day. This
first part of the story unfolds over two or three years, mostly in Galilee. Jesus
teaches the love of God and the love of neighbor; he heals the sick and reaches out
to people at the margins of society.
-1* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
After this shared part of the story, the first theoretical alternate ending would
culminate in that triumphant moment when Jesus enters the great city of Jerusalem
like a conquering hero, a spiritually conquering hero to be precise. Adoring
crowds cover his path with the clothes off their backs. Multitudes call out in joy,
“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and
glory in the highest heaven!” What a magnificently victorious final scene. The
story would end with the glorious Palm Sunday passage that Ruth read a moment
ago. Call this “alternate ending number one.”
“Alternate ending two” would go on to add the story of the last five days of Jesus’
life, the days from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. The second ending is
traditionally called “The Passion.” It’s actually quite a long and detailed ending in
the Gospels; it takes up three chapters in Luke. It’s so long that I asked Tara to
read only excerpts. This second ending, the Passion ending, includes the resistance
to Jesus that comes after he enters the city. This second alternate ending tells of
the conspiracy that leads to his arrest and multiple trails. This alternate ending
number two would conclude with the crucifixion. It would end with the last verse
that Tara read from Chapter 23 of Luke: “Then Jesus, crying out with a loud voice,
said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed
his last.” A tragically evocative dénouement, this alternate ending number two: a
perfectly good man murdered by an alliance of fear, jealously and hatred. This
perfectly good man maintaining his integrity, refusing compromise to save himself,
offering himself up for the humanity he loved more than his own life. A powerful
conclusion to the story of Jesus this might have been.
Today, on this Sunday we call Passion and Palm Sunday, we remember and
celebrate these first two alternate endings – the Palm Sunday ending and the
Passion ending. We do this all the time pretending that we don’t know the third
ending, the real ending. But, of course, the third ending is for next Sunday.
Lest you think this exercise in alternate endings is a Lindvall fantasy, you should
know that over the centuries there have been more than a few attempts to re-write
the story of Jesus, very often by altering the ending. In the late 18th and 19th
Century, there was a veritable growth industry in the writing of what were called
-2* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
“lives of Jesus.” Hundreds of authors, some of them scholars, others decidedly
not, refashioned the gospel story by editing out what that they thought
unbelievable, snipping out everything they found discomforting, whiting out
anything they deemed embarrassing.
One of the first people to do this was, of all people, Thomas Jefferson. He literally
took scissors to his Bible, cut and pasted, and ended with a Jesus to his liking.
Jefferson snipped out all the miracles and any references to Jesus’ divinity.
Jefferson’s Jesus is simply a moral teacher. He essentially refashioned Jesus into
Enlightenment gentleman from northern Virginia who taught about love and met
an untimely death. Jefferson chose the second alternate ending, concluding his
gospel with the crucifixion.
There was a slew of similar Jesus re-writes over the next century-plus. This whole
adventure in re-doing Jesus was brought to a screeching halt by Albert Schweitzer,
still a pastor and Bible scholar, not yet gone to be a medical missionary in West
Africa. About 1900, Schweitzer wrote a book called The Quest for the Historical
Jesus in which he demonstrated that each of these re-edited Jesuses looked
suspiciously like the author who did the editing. Humanist writers came up with a
humanist Jesus; romantics came up with a romantic Jesus; social reformers came
up with a social reformer Jesus; liberals produced a liberal Jesus; conservatives
fashioned a conservative Jesus.
My point is telling you this is that many of these Jesus editors didn’t much like the
second or third endings. That is, they sometimes edited out the Passion ending, the
one that ends with the cross; even more often they edited out the third ending, the
Easter ending. They gravitated toward Jesus the great teacher, Jesus the young
rabbi with fresh ideas, but little more. They usually ended the story just before the
Crucifixion or Easter.
So, back to my exercise in narrative imagination. Imagine again that you don’t
know the story. Imagine it’s, say, AD 81 and you’re a curious Greek pagan in, say,
Damascus. You’re intrigued with some neighbors of yours named “Christians.”
Their love for each other, their attitude toward life and death, their way of being is
-3* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
like nothing you’ve ever seen. You’re attracted to them and go to one of their
meetings.
On the day you visit, they’re taking turns reading aloud the freshly penned Gospel
of Luke, as they call it. Now remember, you know nothing about their Jesus. You
listen intently as the tale unfolds: the story of his birth, his temptation in the
wilderness, his baptism, his gathering of followers, the Sermon on the Mount, the
parables, his compassionate acts of healing, and finally the story wends to what is
obviously the dénouement, the event that seems to be the climax, the perfect
ending: the great teacher enters the great city to the adulation of the crowds on the
day we call Palm Sunday where he’s crowned with their praises. What a perfect
conclusion, this public recognition of who he is, such a fit and tidy end to the story
of this incredible teacher… But this isn’t the ending! There’s more. They keep
reading. They read about conflict in Jerusalem, they read about a trial, they read
about a ghastly death, and even that is not the end.
We’re all tempted to shrink Jesus to the size of our mortal imaginations. It’s
tempting to edit out that raw death and to de-mystify that mysterious Easter
ending. Even today, people want to remake Jesus into nothing more than a teacher
of religious ideas. But if he were only that, the Gospel becomes merely a polite
and tidy story about a wise teacher. If it ended with Palm Sunday, it would have
been a good-enough tale with a happy-enough ending. And you know what: it
would be utterly forgotten all these years latter. Had Jesus done no more than
introduce another set of religious ideas and moral rules to the world, it would not
have been life-changing good news. But there is more to the story. The Gospels
all insist that the story presses on to the twin shocks of ending two and ending
three – the Cross and Resurrection.
If the story ended with this first ending, the Palm Sunday ending, this faith of ours
would not go as deep as life goes. If it ended with a happy parade, this faith of
ours would not go as high as the love of God goes.
Ending two, the cross, is unavoidably and scandalously planted at the center of the
story. In the cross, the story goes as deep as life goes. Planted square at the center
of the Gospel stands this high-water mark of evil's flood tide. After the cross, there
-4* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
is no way to romanticize Christianity into some watered-down optimism that looks
away from the grim realities of a broken world.
In the cross, God descends to the very depth of human suffering. In the cross, God
declares in a way deeper than words, “There is no pain that you can bear that I
have not born; there is no darkness that can overtake you that I have not also seen;
there is no fear that might grip you that I have not known. All that comes to you, I
have passed through. When you come to pass through it, I am with you.”
And if it ended with the cross, it would not be enough. There comes the third
ending, the true climax of the Gospel – Easter. The great cry of the third and true
ending is simply that the God of love and life has the last word.
In a world filled with alienation and hatred, God really does have the last word,
and the final word is love. In a world where death seems to reign, God really does
have the last word, and the last word is life.
All this is mystery that mortal imagination can never completely bend itself
around, but there it is. The third ending is the true ending, and for you and me the
beginning. But as I said, that’s for next Sunday.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
-5* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.