When Proclamation Proceeds Comprehension

I didn't get to post on Palm/Passion Sunday last week. But, for your amusement, here's one that I preached on said Sunday in England.



Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of first year seminary students like Greek. And if you go to Duke Divinity school, like I did, Greek is synonymous with one man, Dr. Micky Efird. And so, by association, nothing strikes fear into the hearts of first year students at Duke like Dr. Mickey Efird. He has been teaching Greek at Duke since about the time that the Bible was written, and it is sort of a rite of passage for students to go through his class. He is, without a doubt, the most difficult professor at Duke, teaching what is, without a doubt, the most difficult subject at Duke. You only know two things when you sign up for his class. The first is that if you make it out of his class alive, you will know Greek. The second is that you probably won’t make it out alive. Everyone has a story about Dr. Efird., and I am no exception. The first day of class, Dr. Efird came in, looked the class over and waisted no time. There were no pleasantries, no introductions or handing out a sylubus. Instead, Dr. Efird simply started writing the Greek alphabet on the board. He went through each letter with us, teaching us what an Alpha looked like, and how to tell the differnece between a zeta and a Xsi. After what he thought was a sufficient amount of review, he told us to open our copies of the Greek New Testament. To our horror, he went around the room, asking students to read out loud from the Greek New Testament. After a few nervous laughs and the joke that he has heard every semester, “It’s all greek to me,” we were fumbling through a foreign text. He tried to teach us where to put the glottal stops, what a rough breathing mark was and how to determine where to put the emphasis in the words. After what seemed like an eternity of torture, a woman in the back of class protested. “Dr. Efird,” she said, “how can you expect us to read these words when we haven’t had any vocabulary yet? Shouldn’t we first learn the words, and then try to read them?” Dr. Efird slowly lowered his book, pulled his glasses down to the tip of his nose, looked the class over and said matter of factly, “Sometimes in life you have to speak before you understand.”
In preparation for the sermon this week, I have come to a conclusion. I’m pretty sure that Luke took Greek from Dr. Efird. After all, that is what Luke is telling us this morning. Sometimes in life you have to speak before you understand. The disciples, in our text this morning, are a perfect case of speaking before understanding. They have been waiting for this moment since they started following Christ. They are, after all, the ones who beleive that Jesus is the Messiah. And finally, after three years of traveling around with him, he is heading to Jerusalem to claim his rightful place. So, when Christ tells two of them to go and fetch him a colt to ride into Jerusalem on, they waste no time, knowing that such an act would fulfill the prophesy from Zechariah. They hasten back to Christ with the colt, and to signify that he is royalty, they lay their cloaks on the back of the colt and on the ground that Jesus rides upon. This is it! They are actually witnessing the Messiah riding into Jerusalem. Sure, they all had their different ideas of what that meant. Some thought that Jesus was going to take over the city with force, stirring up a political uprising and militarily throw Rome out of the promised land, freeing the Jews from ceasar’s reign. Some thought that miraculously the city would succumb to his reign and hail him as King, thus ushering in the peacful kingdom without any conflict or bloodshed. They all had their ideas, but they were all wrong. The faact is that no one knew for sure what it meant for Christ to be the Messiah. All they knew was that the Messiah had come, so they proclaimed it. The disciples shouted out, “Hosannah! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!” Of course, they had no idea what lay ahead of them. None of them knew that this one that they were claiming to be the Messiah would be dead before the end of the week. None could picture the beatings that he was going to undergo, the deception that he would be betrayed by, the lonliness that he would feel after being deserted by all those now proclaiming him to be Messiah. None of those in the crowd of disciples that day understood what it meant to claim that Jesus was the Messiah, but they proclaimed it just the same. I have to say that I’m on the side of the Pharisees here. They tell Christ to get his disciples to hush up. After all, they don’t know what they area talking about. The look pretty silly, making big claims that they can’t explain. But Christ is quite happy with the disciple’s praises. He seems to think that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, whether they understand it or not. Such is the life of discipleship. We’re not always called to understand it fully, we’re just called to proclaim it. In that way, proclamation proceeds comprehension.
As I wrestled with this text this week, I found myself getting back to the basics of the faith. Questions like, how exactly did Christ’s death on the cross save us? What does it mean to say that Christ is Lord? So I went to Sarum college and pulled out the books that I read in seminary. After all, I thought, if I am going to stand up there and talk about this stuff, I’d better understand what I’m talking about. I re-read all of the theories of atonement, the penal-substitutionary theory that states that there was a penalty to be paid for our sins according to the rules of creation, and Christ’s death on the cross paid the penalty for us, almost as if he pleaded guilty to the judge when we were on trial, and the judge sent him to jail instead of us. I read the ransom theory, which said that becuase of our sin, the devil had a right to our souls. God had lost us when we left the garden of eden, and if he was going to get us back, he was going to have to pay the devil a ransom, and a hefty one at that. The terms for the deal, if we were to go free, God would have to give his only son. Which, as you know, he did, paying the ransom. I read about the moral inflouence theory, that said that the cross did nothing but teach us how to live, dying to ourselves in order to find eternal life. I read about the govenmental theory and the satisfaction theory. The more I read, the more confused I got. If I have to wait to understand this before I say anthing about it, I thought, I’m not going to have a sermon on Sunday. And then, the wisdom of Dr. Efird floated back into my mind. Sometimes you have to speak it before you understand it. Sometimes you have to speak it in order to understand it. Sometimes, proclamation proceeds comprehension.
Of course, this is nothing new to you people. You have understood this since at least the 11th century. You were blessed enough to have St. Anselm as the archbishop of Canterbury under William the conquerer. St. Anslem’s most famous quote stated that Christian discipleship was faith seeking understanding. That is, there is something about this faith that you have to live in order to understand it. You have to hail Christ as Messiah before you can understand what that means. Proclamation proceeds comprehension. You’ll have to speak it before you will understand it. I dosen’t matter what catchy phrase you use, the fact is still the same. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling us to a lazy faith, where we simply throw our hands up and say that we’ll never understand it. Rather, I’m saying that being a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ means proclaiming him to be the messiah whether we understand it or not. And as we do the most amazing thing happens, we somehow begin to understand what that means.
We are going to see some pretty unexplicable events this week. We are going to watch in awe as Christ shares a meal with his disciples, after which he washes their feet, even the feet of the one who will betray him. We will look on in horror as Christ is handed over to the Roman government to be crucified, hung on a cross until he is dead. We will sit, scared to speak on Holy Saturday, wondering if the end has really come. And on Easter Sunday, we will walk into the tomb, gazing at the splendor of the resurection. Now let me ask you this, who here can explain any of the events that we will see this week? I’m sure we all have our theories, how exactly Christ’s death saves us, how God raised him from the dead. We all have theories, but none of us has a full understanding. But that’s okay. We were never called to understand it, we were called to proclaim it.