The Divine Conspiracy
Last night I watched Crash.
I loved it, it starts out, "In LA no one touches each other anymore... they just crash into each other." Brilliant. It's said to be about racism, but it's about so much more than that. It's about living in a broken, seemingly-hopeless world. As you watch you can't help but begin to despair of there being any possible solution to fixing such a jacked up world.
That's where it enters the conversation. "It" is the divine conspiracy, God's wonderful dream of undermining all the evil in the world with pure, unadulterated goodness. Defeating hatred with love, anger with kindness, war with peace, pride with humility, that's the divine conspiracy.
When Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday he entered from the east on a donkey. Meanwhile, sometime that same day Pilate entered from the west, with his full entourage. A Roman Eagle standard led the way, followed by cavalry and foot soldiers of all kinds and at the back was Pilate astride his horse. Why did he do this? It was the week of Passover, a week when 200,000 Jews filled Jerusalem to celebrate that their God is the God of the oppressed and beaten down by remembering a time when God freed them from an oppressor.
Needless to say, if you're Pilate you don't like this idea. You ride with your full entourage into Jerusalem for only one reason- to send a message.
Don't even think about it.
And if you're a Jew watching Pilate enter, you won't.
Meanwhile, Jesus enters from the east on a donkey. The minds of every Jew- all of whom know the Old Testament intimately- immediately go to the prophet Zechariah who in Zecharian 9:9-10 said the following:
"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey. [This is generally where the Christian reader stops, but keep going to v. 10] And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem;and the bow of war will be cut off. And he will speak peace to the nations; and his dominion will be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the Earth."
In Jerusalem on Palm Sunday we see two ways. Two ways to enter a city, two ways to spread a message. But this lesson extends beyond that. There are two ways to approach relationships, the way of riding into to conquer, looking for what you can take from it. Or the way of peace, of looking to see what you can give to it. Two ways of living in a broken, cursed world, the way of war and the way of peace.
We're given a choice. We can choose Pilate's way, the way that yells when yelled at, that becomes bitter when wronged, that looks out for number one.
Or we can become a member of the divine conspiracy. We can show love in the face of great hatred. We can spread peace where all around us is war. We can look out for others before ourselves.
Two ways, which will you choose?
(The above is borrowing heavily from Rob Bell's Palm Sunday sermon as well as Dallas Willard's excellent book, The Divine Conspiracy. A link to purchase Willard's book is to the right, one of Bell's nooma films is also featured and here is the link to his church's website where his sermons can be found.)
