My sister has an embarrassing picture of me. I am about 3 years old, and I’m kneeling over, peering down the hole of a nest of leaf-cutter ants. It brings back incredible memories for me. I came in and told my mother once, "The ants, they are my friends." I was fascinated with how they struggled down the trail carrying these (for them) huge pieces of carefully carved leaf. I wondered at what they did with them deep in their nests. I was never bitten or stung, even as I tried to give leaf pieces back to ants who had dropped theirs. What I didn't know that I learned many years later was that ants cannot see, but they smell very well. My efforts to give an ant back its leaf was totally misunderstood: What came from an honest gesture of altruism, was tainted with the scent of an alien, a threat and a challenge, and was rejected. I may have seen us as friends, but we truly lived in different worlds.

Sometimes when I read the stories of the Triumphal Entry and the Passion I think that Jesus and those who lived in His time and place lived in two different worlds. One was the world of selfish ambition, figure-headed by Pilate in all his Roman power and glory. Pilate had arrived in Jerusalem in all the power of the Roman empire just days before Jesus, with slaves and soldiers and war-horses, all the trappings of the power of Rome. His display was calculated at once to impress and intimidate the Jews. They were known to be more violently nationalistic during the feast of the Passover. (After all, the Feast of the Passover celebrated their exit from Egypt, the divine act of God that made of a nation of slaves a nation of free men and women. They were God's show-case piece, intended to display to all the rest of the nations of the world what God was like. Certainly God would be on the side of a rebellion spawned in these tempestuous days.) Pilate was essentially disinterested in the small squabbles of a distant and cantankerous province of the Empire. There by order, not by choice, He was just making the best of a bad situation.

The other was the world of self-sacrificing love, embodied in Jesus in all His humility. When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem He did so on a borrowed donkey, not a war-chariot. He was followed by an ad hoc group of followers, not disciplined ranks of soldiers. His entrance seemed spontaneous and genuine, not calculated to achieve anything. When He was done with His ride He merely left the city once again.

Caught in the middle is the Sanhedrin. God intended them to lead God's people in displaying His character, yet here they ironically find themselves relying on the occupying Roman government to get their wishes. And what they wish is that the Son of God would just go away! No, worse than just "go away," they wanted Him dead. They did not want the Kingdom of self-sacrificing love. They perceived it as the stench of an alien, a threat and a challenge, and they rejected it. They have traded the glory of their heavenly calling for the interests of earthly kingdoms.

In fact, the whole of the Gospels in one way or another can be told as the tale of two Kingdoms, not kingdoms clashing as in the Middle East these days, when economic, political and religious systems face off for dominance. The kingdoms of East and West seem as different as night and day, yes, but they nonetheless existed on the same plane—that of the kingdoms of this world. No, the conflict here is between the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of This World.

It all takes its context from the very, very beginning of time, when Adam and Eve lived in harmony with God, and the heart of God ruled the world by voluntary and willing submission. But when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they chose to do something on their own. Though being less than God, they pretended to act like God, setting themselves up as the creator of reality, rather than the definer and steward of it. They chose to establish, if they could, their own kingdom. And so pride is the root of all sin. Sin alienates us from the God who created us. Yet God, from before time, knew this was an option for the creation to which He had granted free will. And, not wanting it to remain so, has an answer. Permanent alienation was not acceptable to God, so at the proper time Jesus came, born of human stock, yet Son of God, in whom the fullness of the deity dwelt.

So here is the One who has come from God to reconcile humanity being rejected by humanity. The conflict is no less than the heart of God versus the pride of humanity.

The Church is supposed to be about reconciling the alienation, about learning to choose the Kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdoms of this world. And so we pray each Sunday, "Thy Kingdom come." Yet in today's Gospel lesson this Kingdom seems so quickly and easily overcome by the powers of the lesser world. Today through Thursday commemorates the days in which the kingdoms of this world kill the King of the Kingdom of Heaven. It has to be the darkest five days in the history of our race, indeed, of creation itself, of reality itself. Yet...can you still cling to dead hope?

Fr. Paul Moore+