Denial

Denial

Luke 19:28-40

After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he had come
near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of
the disciples, saying, “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. If anyone asks
you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’” So those who were
sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its
owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They said, “The Lord needs it.”
Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set J

I think it was either Friedrich Nietzsche or Soren Kierkegaard who once said that you
know a civilization is collapsing when people read about other people reading other
people’s books—and surely I am a sign of that breakdown because instead of actually
reading some books, I just read the reviews because there is no way I could read
everything I actually wanted to read—there are not enough hours in the day. So,
recently, I was reading a review of two new books about the German filmmaker and
photographer Leni Riefenstahl (New York Times Book Review, March 25, 2007), whose
claim to international fame was her beauty as a German actress in the twenties and
thirties, and later, her apparent closeness and adoration of Adolf Hitler. She made a
few films that seemed to glorify his supremacist ideology, and she clearly admired him,
even late into her very long life. Yet, she always denied that she knew anything about
Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews, or that she was aware of any of the concentration
camps. Now, in all fairness, a lot of ordinary Germans didn’t quite know what was going
on even within their own borders, but someone like Leni certainly knew more than she
wanted to later admit. Even though she continually denied knowing anything at all
about the concentration camps, she made the mistake in an interview in the early
sixties by saying that one of the reasons she made those early Nazi films was because
she feared being sent to a concentration camp if she did not do the bidding of Hitler
and his cronies. It was an unusual misstep for her, because she had been very
consistent in denying any knowledge of the Nazi’s murderous plans in those camps.
The reviewer in the New York Times makes it clear that he believes she knew, she
knew—perhaps not the details, but she knew vaguely what was going on, and that she
spent the second half of her career and life lying to anyone who would listen about the
facts. She even went to court to litigate against those who implied that she might have
known something more than she was willing to admit to, and even up until her death in
2003, she denied it all.

Now, I have to admit, I have my doubts about her denials but I don’t think its
unreasonable to think people can be in authentic denial, even about the most obvious
things. Nations can be in denial, and certainly you can make the case that the people
of Germany in the late 1930’s and the early 1940’s were in denial about what was
happening in those mysterious camps outside the city gates of various towns in
Germany and elsewhere. And we all know of people who are in denial about various
things in their lives, and maybe we’ve been in denial about things in our lives—denial
about our problems, ignoring them, pretending they aren’t problems, looking away from
the obvious so that we can get through the next minute, the next hour, the next day, the
next year. We humans emotionally deny some of the troubles in our lives in order to
get through them, to protect ourselves from the cruel reality of what is happening to us,
or to those around us, or to our nation, or whatever is untenable for us to face. It is
simply a human mechanism to protect ourselves from what we cannot emotionally or
spiritually handle in a given moment, and so we turn away, and maybe Leni did that—
she could not handle her role in the mechanism of genocide, as publicist, as
propagandizer of Nazi ideas about race superiority and so she looked away, forgetting
in order to live with herself, to live with her idealized image of herself. Or she could
have simply been lying, of course, but I’m not willing to pretend that people don’t do it
all the time, deny what is front of their faces in order not to have to face their deep
disappointment or pain, or even to face the contradiction between their ideal self and
the stark reality of that truly more complicated and ambiguous self.

And certainly we have a whole lot of denial going on with a bunch people in the story
we have before us this day, Jesus’ triumphant entry into the Jerusalem. For months
and months, Jesus had been warning them that he wasn’t going to be the Messiah they
wanted, a man who would rip the Romans out of the ancestral lands of Israel, and
restore Israel to its former glory as the light of the world. Jesus told them, over and
over again, that he wasn’t going to Jerusalem to win the battle and liberate Israel from
the Roman clutches, to beat the Romans into submission through some supernatural
force. Even Peter contradicts Jesus when he says that he is going to go to Jerusalem
to die, and that he will be facing an ignoble death, that he will die like a common
criminal. These disciples are a group of people in terrible denial about what is about to
happen in the coming week. They think they’ve come to the beginning of a new era in
which they will be beside the new ruler of Israel, this Jesus whom they’ve been following
for the last few years. And even this entry into Jerusalem seems to be part of the
denial—it is a warrior’s welcome into a conquered city, rather than the prince of peace
entering a city where he will not resist the violence to be soon visited upon him, he will
not resist it with yet more violence in retaliation.

And yet, to be fair, it is Jesus who sets up this entry into the holy city of Jerusalem. The
disciples may be in denial about what is about to happen, but Jesus doesn’t seem to
help the situation by setting up this entrance into the Jerusalem during the Passover
celebration. Still, I suspect that has a lot to do with him always challenging the
preconceptions of what it means to be king, of what it means to rule—indeed, Jesus is
Lord, is King, but the kind of King he is, is so different than any other idea of what it
meant to rule in the ancient world. He rides in as the king of peace, not in order to
wage war, or even after coming back victorious from battle—he comes to the city to die
willingly at the brutal hands of power, to set an example for the world about what it
might mean to love, to win, to choose peace over violence. In other versions of this
story, the writer mentions that Jesus enters into the city to fulfill an earlier prophecy,
hinted in the Psalm we heard today in worship, and in passage from the book of
Zechariah. Nonetheless, the king of Israel enters the city in order to be defeated, to
lose at the hands of merciless and brute power.

But this is not how it was supposed to have ended, and up until the moment when the
Romans seize him in the Garden of Gethsemane, I don’t think the disciples believed a
word he had said earlier about the matter—denial, denial, it cannot be, it cannot be so.
Even in the scenes in the upper room, when Jesus is saying goodbye to them, they
refuse to see the obvious, they refuse the goodbyes, the gestures of care he offers to
them—Peter almost refuses the nourishment from the Passover meal because he will
not accept Jesus’ own words about what will soon come. Things are not meant to end
this way, not when things had been going so well, and it was so obvious that this Jesus
was marked by God for something special, for special mission that would somehow
culminate that particular week. And so, perhaps like Leni, they look away, they deny in
order to survive, to not have to look at what it might mean to win and lose in the
kingdom of God that this Jesus of Nazareth seem to be bringing about.

And who can blame them? Who hasn’t been in denial at some point in our lives, when
bad things happen to us? Who hasn’t denied that the reality of a train barreling
towards our direction, because we couldn’t imagine that such a thing could happen? It
happens sometimes when we lose someone unexpectedly, or when we were harmed as
a child, or even as a adult? Or maybe we’ve done something wrong, and it doesn’t
square with who we thought we were, and we simply put it away in some dark crevice of
our minds—and we just know that WE didn’t do that, we couldn’t have done that! We
disconnect reality from the image of reality we’ve always believed about ourselves or we’
ve believed about other people, especially those we loved or believed in. Our
emotional selves go into a self-protect mode, because we cannot connect reality to our
idealized self-image of ourselves or even of others, and so we simply deny that it ever
happened. Now, this is not all bad—sometimes we just can’t handle the truth, the truth
about ourselves, about others, about our participation in causing someone else so
much pain—think of Leni Riefesthal, and so we just disconnect from reality. To
embrace the truth in those moments might kill us, it seems, and so we deny, we deny.

The disciples deny the obvious signs of what was going to happen to this potentially
explosive figure they followed when they entered into a city ruled by powers who were
more interested in keeping the calm than embracing another competitor for power. The
disciples enter into the city blinded by their hopes, they come into a city rippling with
anticipation of what this new Messiah might mean, and so the crowds wave palm
branches as one would have in the ancient world for any entering and conquering
king. The irony of this passage, always, is that the same crowds who greeted him at
the beginning of the week will also be the ones who cry out, “Crucify him, crucify him!”
at the end of the week. When you disappoint, when you fail to live up to expectations,
when you break the heart of a people, how can you expect anything less from them?
So, the shouts of celebration at the beginning of the week meet their conclusion with
cries of murder at the end of the week—and it comes out of deep disappointment in this
one who fails to meet their expectations of what a Messiah, a Savior, should be.

But you know, disappointment is what we try to avoid when we go into denial, when we
look the other way because we can’t handle what is before us. Sometimes it is
disappointment in ourselves, sometimes it is disappointment in others, or our
government, or an institution we’ve always believed in, or maybe even in the church.
Of course, this is no ordinary disappointment we’re scared of—it’s the soul scarring,
soul destroying disappointment we’re running from in those moments, not just simply
wistfully wishing things had been different. We run away in order not to see, in order
not to know, because we think we can remain whole if we don’t know the whole truth,
the whole truth about ourselves, or about others, or about an institution we love, or
maybe even something or someone we hate.

But Christ, in warning his disciples about the upcoming cruelty of his own particular
death, he wants them to eventually embrace the reality of what is about to happen.
Denial is understandable in moments of crisis—it helps us get through the moments we
cannot handle—but its no substitute for the way the world really is—and sometimes we
have to acknowledge that the world is a difficult and sometimes disappointing place, as
are some of the people and institutions we love and care about. Ask those crowds
waving those palms on the streets of Jerusalem about that truth, and ask the disciples
about disappointment, after the shock of it all had worn off, about what it means to be
disappointed, in God, in someone you love, in your dreams, even in yourself.

Christ warned them about the way the world is, not because he wanted to crush their
hopes and dreams, but because he wanted to remind them about how the world really
works, and that truth is that right before the most beautiful moments of our lives, we
usually experience some of our most painful moments. Right before peace comes war,
right before hope comes hopelessness, right before life comes death. It is the rhythm
of the universe, and in Holy Week, the week before us, we see that eternal rhythm
being played out before our eyes. To embrace Easter, you and I must embrace
Maundy Thursday, the night of the Last Supper ,and we must embrace Good Friday,
ironically named, the day of our Lord’s crucifixion. We simply can’t get to the other
side, to resurrection, to hope, to life, without knowing what it means to die, to be without
hope, to be put into the grave with the stone shuttering us inside forever, seemingly
forever. To know;t get to the other side, to resurrection, to hope, to life, without
knowing what it means to die, to be without Week, no drama—just give me
resurrection—I am a man more than willing to live in denial, but God will not let me or
you deny the reality of the way things are, for better or worse.

We are in Jerusalem now, having entered into the city gates with our Christ, with his
other disciples, and our work now is to embrace the horror so that we can embrace the
beauty of this time. Being in denial will not help us now, we know too much now, and so
we head into the whirlwind of this week, ready for the tears, the disappointments, the
heart-wrenching moments, so that we can finally get to other side, so that we can know
what we really have when we awake on Easter morning. The last meal, Gethsemane,
the betrayal of friends, the torturous death, the closing of the tomb…all of it awaits us.
So, let it come, let it come, so that you and I may say on Sunday, with the angel, “He is
not here, The Lord is risen,” and in saying that we will know what it really means.
Amen.