Sky Jutani (0:00)

But there's this chest in front of our door, wrapped in chains and padlocks. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Sky Pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media. I'm Sky Jutani. Today we're doing a skydive, which is a solo episode. I'm here by myself in my office, and I got plenty to talk about before we jump into the content. Just some updates, things going on. I like to use these skydives to kind of tell folks a little bit behind the scenes what we're doing at Holy Post Media. First off, I'm really looking forward to the next Holy Post live event, which we're doing in Detroit on May 3rd. It's a Saturday, May 3rd. I'm speaking in Flint, Michigan, that Saturday morning and then Sunday morning. But in between on Saturday evening in Detroit, I'm going to be with Tim Alberta, who's a journalist. He wrote that phenomenal book. I think I had him on the show numerous times last year. His book is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, really examining what happened to evangelicals in this age of Trump. So get your tickets for that. You can go to holypost.com events and join me there. Other stuff going on. Last week we had a board member in town here for Holy Post Media. We had our board meeting and lots of reviewing of things going on. Really grateful that things are going as well as they are. When we launched this thing some years ago as a separate company, really had no idea what we were doing or if it was going to work, but been super grateful that it is working well. And that's really thanks to all of you who tune in, who listen, who've become Holy Post plus subscribers. Give you guys a little inside scoop in the coming weeks. You're going to be seeing a very new look for Holy Post Media because now we have, of course, multiple shows. It's not just the Holy Post podcast. There's a Skypod, there's Caitlin's show, there's Esau's show. There's all the things we're doing on Holy Post Plus. So we decided we kind of needed a look and a brand and an identity that captured all of that, which isn't just Holy Post podcast. So Holy Post Media, which is kind of the umbrella brand, is going to kind of unroll its new look in the coming weeks. And you'll see that on our website. You'll see it in other places. You'll see it on our signage here in downtown Wheaton, outside. And it was a lot of fun, a lot of work putting that together, but look forward to unveiling that for all of you. Also coming in May, I can't tell you the details yet, but I'm really looking forward to a new project that I'm launching with Holy Post Media, something that we've never done before. It's going to be a completely different animal and it's going to be taxing on me. It's going to be a lot of work, but I am very, very excited about it. So look forward to that announcement coming in May. Also in May, I'm going to be back out at New Songs in Santa Ana. New Song is a church, Dave Gibbons Church. I've been preaching out there roughly every other month for the last number of months. I'll be back out there on May 25th. I believe that's Memorial Day weekend, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. So friends fans out in Southern California, if you want to come by, there's two services at New Song on the 25th. I'll be at. Finally, Last thing, thanks for all of you who've been giving me feedback who are subscribers to With God Daily. I've done, I think, 10 weeks now on this series on the temple and the tabernacle, and it's been really fun. I love the learning. I enjoy the writing, and a lot of people contacted me saying, wow, I'm learning all kinds of stuff I'd never known before about these ideas that permeate scripture. So thanks for your feedback. I'm going to be taking a bit of a break from the temple series. To those of you who are subscribers to With God Daily know that I do new material part of the year and then I'll recycle old material or update older series so that I can focus more attention on other projects. So following Easter, I'm going to be picking up a series we did a number of years ago on miracles, which I call Wonders, and updating those devotionals, adding some new ones, incorporating more drawings and doodles. So just a reminder, if you're not a subscriber to With God Daily, that is like my bread and butter. That is what keeps me going. And subscribers to that are wonderful. And I've been at it for what, 14, 13 years almost. So I expected it to go one year. It's now 13, and it's it's just become an unexpected joy and an important part of my ministry. So go to withgodddaily.com and you can get that. Okay, what are we doing today for the skydive? It's Good Friday this, this episode comes out on Good Friday. So I know you're probably bombarded with Holy Week stuff in your churches and communities. You're going to hear wonderful Easter messages and maybe Good Friday messages. And I'm not just trying to add to the pile of that stuff, but I've been thinking about this this week because of two things. One, there's a kind of chronic question that comes up if people are really inquisitive about scripture and Holy Week, asking why did the crowds on Palm Sunday who celebrated the arrival of Jesus, you know, the shouts of Hosanna and the palm branches and all that, how did those same people go from shouting Jesus praises on Palm Sunday to shouting crucify him just a few days later on Good Friday? That's an interesting biblical theological historical question. And it, I think, relates to this moment we're in in the American church with MAGA and Trump and the fact that at least in the white evangelical church In America, over 80 plus percent of evangelicals have thrown their support in for Donald Trump. And I know that that exists on different levels. There are the die hard, you know, drink the Kool Aid kind of MAGA folks, and then there are the hold the nose, I don't see an alternative, so I guess I'll pull the lever for Trump kind of. And there's everything in between. So I'm not saying I don't want to paint it with a broad brush or a singular view, but I think there's an explanation that you can get both about the crowds in Jerusalem during Holy Week and the crowds of Christians in America and the way some of them have been willing to jettison their loyalty to at least the way of Jesus, if not the name of Jesus, at least to the way of Jesus, in order to follow something that I think looks very contrary to the way of Jesus. I've been thinking about all that this week, and I went through some of my files and things I've written in the past and sermons I've done, and I kind of compiled various things and want to present it to you kind of through that lens. How do we understand the crowds in Jerusalem and what explanatory power does it have for the communities many of us are in right now trying to make sense of what's going on and why so many people have turned their back on the way of Jesus? And I think the common link here between those two things is humiliation. It's the question or issue of humiliation. The word humiliation comes from the Latin word humus, which means dirt. I've wondered. I need to ask somebody who speaks Arabic, but I wonder if hummus comes from a similar root. Like, is it because it's kind of like mud. It's like dirt, right? Although it's delicious. So humiliation means to feel like dirt, a sense of worthlessness that you have no value. Some people confuse humiliation and embarrassment, and this is a simple way I distinguish them. Embarrassment is something we do to ourselves. I embarrass myself all the time. Ask my family. You've probably heard it on this show and the Holy Post. I not terribly upset by embarrassment. Humiliation is different because humiliation is not something you do to yourself typically, it's more often something that is done to you. And for that reason, it's more wounding, it's more painful. It stays with you on a deep, deep level. Sometimes when you've been humiliated, like you, you just, you can't shake that. Give you an example from my life. When I was in second grade, I felt profoundly humiliated by my second grade teacher. And let me give you the circumstances. So the summer between first and second grade, my younger brother died in an accident, obviously a deeply traumatic experience for my whole family. And my family was a mess coming out of that, as you would expect. And I was only a second grader and my way of dealing with that trauma was I just kind of shut down. When I went back to school that fall, I just wasn't functioning well on any level. And so I wasn't doing my schoolwork, I wasn't doing my homework. And on one particular day when I failed to do my homework yet again, my second grade teacher made me stand up next to my desk. And then she came over and she we had those open top desks where you kept all your books and papers inside of them. She came over and she sat down in my chair and she opened up my desk. And with the whole class watching as I stood there, she went through all the papers in my desk, all my unfinished homework papers, and one by one started pulling them out and waving them for everyone to see and creating a pile of all of my unfinished work as the class just watched me. And I stood there, humiliated, embarrassed, whatever. The only thing I hated more than my teacher in that moment was, was myself. I felt worthless. I felt like a failure. I felt just awful. And the fact that I can still remember that feeling 43 years later speaks to the power of humiliation. Now, before you think my whole childhood was a disaster, like that teacher was the exception for the most part. I had wonderful teachers. I'm indebted to them they were loving and nurturing, compassionate. And I am very, very fortunate to have the schooling and the teachers that I did. My second grade teacher, not so much. I don't know what happened to her. I assume she left education to go club baby seals or something else cruel. But that humiliation stuck with me. And that's the power of it. That's what it does to us. And I think on an infinitely greater level that helps us understand what the people in Judea, in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, experienced. You got to remember that if you, if you take Palm Sunday and the waving of the palm branches and the laying down of the cloaks and the shouts of Hosanna, you have to read that through the moment, what was happening in that time to those people so you can understand what they're saying. At the time, the Jews were an occupied people. They were living under a foreign empire. And making matters worse, that foreign empire were the Romans. They were Gentiles, pagans, idol worshipers. And so Jews remember going back to the time of the Exodus, prided themselves for being God's chosen people, the one people with whom he had a covenant, the one people to whom he entrusted his Torah, his law, his self revelation through the scriptures. And so they deeply internalized their sense of value and significance and even superiority as God's chosen people. At the time, in the first century, it was not uncommon for Jews to refer to Gentiles as dogs. You even see this in the New Testament. And I mean, it's kind of a negative way of elevating one's own superiority. It isn't just that we're superiors, other people are inferior. But that was a pretty common attitude in first century Judea. But they were caught with this sort of cognitive dissonance because if we really are God's chosen people, if we've really got this special relationship with the creator of the universe, if we are the only ones who've been entrusted with his law, with his covenant, then why are we under the heel of this Godless empire of these gentile idol worshipers? It just didn't make sense. And so the occupation made them question their value, made them question their identity. And adding to that pain was the fact that the Romans were not the first empire to rule over and dominate the Jews. They were just the latest in a long line of pagan empires, whether it was the Greeks or the Assyrians or the Assyrians or the Babylonians. You go all the way back to the Babylonian exile. And for centuries they'd lived under this humiliation. And so the People of Jerusalem and all the pilgrims who had come to Jerusalem for the Passover when Jesus was there, they were. They were kind of desperate for vindication. They desperately wanted to be elevated once again to what they saw as their proper place. Now put them in that moment. And they're in Jerusalem, and they start meeting up with people that are coming from throughout the land. And they're bringing with them stories about this prophet from Galilee who feeds thousands with just a few fish and loaves, who calms storms, who exorcises demons, who raises the dead. I mean, just a stone's throw from Jerusalem was the home of Lazarus. And just days earlier, he'd raised him from the dead. And a bunch of people saw this. So all these stories start coming into Jerusalem, and suddenly these humiliated people start experiencing hope. They start having this expectation that, wow, maybe there's someone here with a power we've never seen before whom God has sent to deliver us from our humiliation, from Roman occupation. And remember, it's Passover. Passover is the festival that commemorated God delivering his people from slavery in Egypt through Moses and through the miracles that Moses performed through the plagues upon the Egyptians, through the parting of the Red Sea, all that amazing stuff. It was a festival to remember God's liberation. And now it felt like someone might be here who's even more powerful than Moses. Moses never raised the dead, and maybe their new deliverer has come and he's going to destroy the Romans the way God destroyed the Egyptians through Moses. And this is it. This is the great moment. And so you have this combination of profound centuries of humiliation combined with sudden expectation, hope that their deliverer had come. And that's an explosive combination. Profound humiliation, deep expectation. You bring them together and wow, it's just combustible. Expectations are dangerous things. I used to be a pastor, as many of you know. I used to do premarital counseling. And probably the biggest challenge I had with a lot of those couples was helping them deal with their expectations for marriage. Because unrealistic expectations can lead to profound disappointment. So expectations can be great, they can be powerful, but they can also be really, really dangerous. Let me tell you a story of kind of an innocent story of how I saw this play out. When our kids were little, my wife and I decided through some generosity of some friends at our church, to take them to Disney World. And rather than just tell them we were taking them to Disney World. I don't remember. Back in the day, there were, like, commercials that showed families telling kids, you're going to Disney World. And they'd be all excited. So I had this idea of, what if we don't just tell the kids, but we build the anticipation and we build the excitement. So here's what I did. I came home from a work trip one day, and I told the kids around the dinner table. And our kids were young at this point, like elementary age, kindergarten, preschool age, kind of in that range. I told the kids that while I was in New York, I was approached by a stranger. And he handed me this letter addressed to. To the kids. And they're like. When I brought out this letter, and the letter was from a fictional person that I made up named Robert Sterling from Universal Exports. James Bond fan fans will know the reference. I created the letterhead. I actually took the old Pan Am logo, the airline logo, and I changed it to Universal Exports, and I printed it out really formally and made it look all real and signed by Robert Sterling. Anyway, this letter from Robert Sterling sent to my kids telling them that they had been selected for a secret mission to be recruited as a. A group of children that were going to help. I think it was something about the United States and the United Kingdom were going to work together on some program that was going to use kids for intelligence work or spies. This was also the era when Spy Kids movies were really big. And my kids love that. And so they bought it. Like, I don't know why, but my kids bought it. They thought this was real. And I just kind of went. I. I fed into it, but I went along with it. And then it just started to snowball. So in the subsequent weeks, they kept getting messages from Robert Sterling. Sometimes they came in the mail, like, legitimately, through postage. I created a fake website with a password. I got strangers to drop off secret messages to my kids in weird locations. I remember one time, we were all flying together as a family somewhere, and I. I told the flight attendant what was going on, and I gave her some special message. And so in the middle of the flight, she came over and said to, you know, my kids, you know, this came. This was delivered before we left the airport, and they were buying all of that. At one point, they got a key sent to them that was for a locker at the local shopping mall. And when they opened the key, there was, like, a stuffed animal inside. And they didn't understand what was going on. Then one of them realized there was something inside the stuffed animal. And so they. They cut it open, and there's this notebook inside the stuffed animal that had all these hidden codes in it. I mean, it Just went on and on and on. And I'll admit, like, I loved it. I loved coming up with the puzzles and the clues. I. I loved all the cloak and dagger stuff. I was having a great time. This went on for weeks and the kids were totally bought into it. Until finally, I think it was a Saturday morning. There was like a bang, bang, bang, bang at the front door. And we opened it. No one's there, but there's this chest in front of our door wrapped in chains and padlocks. And then some note about to find the key. It was in this thing in longitude, latitude, whatever, and it was kind of like a geocache deal. And eventually the kids found the key at a park nearby. And then they come home and they put the key in, they open the lock, they take the chains off, they open this chest, and these helium balloons come out of the chest. And they're holding a banner up on our ceiling. And the banner says, we're going to Disney World. There was no cheering, there was no jumping. There was no excitement. Just silence. And my oldest daughter, who could read better than the other two, looked at the banner. And then she looked at me. I don't know the best way to describe this. She looked at me the way Agent Kuyon at the end of the Usual Suspects was looking at the bulletin board and. And the wheels in his head is turning. That's the look she's given me. Like, confused. And then she has this horrible realization. It clicks. The penny drops. And she realizes that her father is Keyser Soze, that I was Robert Sterling, that I was the one who was behind this whole thing. And she yelled out the dirtiest eight year old scream you can imagine and gave me this scowling look. And she just said, you lied to us. And then she ran off to her bedroom in tears. That was not the reaction I was hoping for. And looking back, I realize I probably oversold things a little bit. I got a little too caught up in the cloak and dagger stuff. And I learned from all that that raising expectations is a dangerous thing. Because I overshot the expectation of just Disney World. Because my kids apparently thought they were being recruited into some spy network. And when that didn't happen, their unmet expectations morphed into anger. It all worked out fine. They love Disney World. We love Disney World. At the time, it was great. But I think that illustrates a little bit what maybe the people in Jerusalem were. I mean, their expectations had to be infinitely higher than my kids going to Disney. Obviously, after hundreds of years of subjugation and humiliation. And all the stories they were hearing about Jesus, all of his power, and here he is entering in Jerusalem. They thought he was going to come in with a show for the centuries, destroy the Romans, drive them out, re establish the kingdom of Israel and elevate them above every other nation on earth. That's the expectation. But what did he do instead? He comes into Jerusalem and rather than driving the Romans out, he makes a whip and he drives Jews out of the temple courtyard and turning over tables. Rather than condemning and confronting the pagan Roman authorities, he confronts and condemns the Jewish religious authorities. And rather than destroying the Roman Empire, he says something outrageous. He announces that the temple was going to be destroyed, which was the center of Jewish identity. It was unbelievably counterintuitive and offensive. It was madness. And the people, including Jesus own disciples, were totally confused by what he was doing, why he was doing it. And eventually the people became furious, especially the religious leaders. And so they finally arrest him, of course, and they take him to Pilate, the Roman governor. And this is where things get really interesting. You might hear this in some of the Good Friday sermons or Easter sermons, or even last week's sermon at your church or community. But we tend to paint Pilate in frankly a rather positive light. In a lot of our very removed cultural and chronological distance from these events. We tend to view Pilate as just this outsider Roman governor who doesn't want to get embroiled in this mess between Jesus and the Jewish authorities. He's kind of confused about why this is a big deal. Like why are you so upset with Jesus? And sometimes he gets painted as just a. An honest pagan who's trying to know the truth. I mean, there's that dialogue about truth in the Gospel with Pilate. And so some of us take all that to me, well, Pilate's kind of just caught up in something he doesn't understand. That's really sane washing. That's a word now, right? Sane washing. Pilate. In reality, Pilate was just cruel and evil. And you've got to understand his role in all this and his role in humiliating the people of Jerusalem to get at why Jesus ends up on that cross. The ancient historian Philo wrote about Pilate. So we have sources about Pilate from outside the New Testament, and they paint him as just awful. So here's what Philo says about Pilate. He says Pilate's corruption, his acts of insolence, his habit of insulting people and his cruelty were never ending. He was gratuitous and he had the most grievous inhumanity. That's how a fellow Roman talks about Pilate. I mean, just awful. I mean, he'd fit in perfectly in today's politics and social media. But beyond that, Pilate was also deeply anti Semitic. He hated the Jews, and he took every opportunity to antagonize and humiliate them while he was governor of Judea. So, for example, Philo reports that Pilate put up images of the emperor Tiberius at sacred Jewish sites around the land in direct violation of Jewish law, in direct violation of the Torah against graven images. And Philo says that he didn't do this so much to honor Tiberius as to, quote, annoy the Jews. So it wasn't like Pilate just was ignorant of Jewish tradition or unaware of their prohibitions against graven images or that he accidentally insulted Jewish sensibilities. No, no, no, no, no. He took every opportunity to deliberately annoy and antagonize and humiliate the Jews. He's just a rotten, awful, terrible person. So when the Jewish authorities bring Jesus before Pilate, Pilate sees Jesus as yet another opportunity to embarrass and humiliate the Jews. He saw Jesus as a way to dig the needle even deeper, like twisted in the sides of the Jews that he was supposed to govern. Some people have wondered, if Pilate thought Jesus was innocent, which apparently he did, why did he have him flogged? And the answer comes when you understand why he was using Jesus or what he was using Jesus to do. He had him flogged because it was Pilate's sick way of mocking the Jews. Yet again, he told his soldiers to beat Jesus to a pulp. They put a purple robe on him, a color of royalty. They put a crown of thorns on his head. They mock him. They're kneeling before him and saying, hail, king of the Jews, and no doubt laughing at all this. And then Pilate takes Jesus with this purple robe, with this crown, and then he marches him out in front of the crowds in Jerusalem, and he says to them, behold, here's your king, as if to say, you know, you guys are losers. And here's a pathetic loser of a king, Beaten, humiliated, mocked. This is a king worthy of you. Because this is how I see you Jews. And here's your king. It's. It's gross. It's disgusting. It shows Pilate's perverse, twisted sense of humor. And it's all in that context that you have to understand the reaction of the crowd. So this is the moment. It's in John 19, when when Pilate marches Jesus out after he's beaten with the crown and robe and all that, it's in this moment that it all comes together and explodes. You have three key ingredients Roman cruelty, which has been going on for not just a century but centuries under different pagan occupiers occupying Israel. So you have Roman cruelty, you have the Jews deep sense of humiliation and you have their unmet expectations of Jesus. Rather than vindicating the Jews, Jesus had now become yet another another tool of Roman humiliation. He they had hopes on Palm Sunday that he was going to come in with power and might and triumph over their pagan enemies. And yet now they were seeing him pathetic, broken, a joke of a king without even the self respect to defend himself. And apparently you know, this guy had the power to drive out demons and raise the dead and he's just willing to sit there silent and allow these idol worshiping Romans to humiliate him and mock him. The people looked at Jesus and they hated him for what he did and what he didn't do. Their expectations that he didn't meet and the fact that he was now being used to only further their humiliation. Okay, let's take a step back now from that scene and back up. Don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. 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