When the Rollercoaster Drops Backwards (Mark 11:1-11)

Rollercoasters occasionally pull some slight of hand. Rather than sling you around at velocity, they might bring you to a precipice, and instead of charging over it, the coaster will drop you backwards down the hill that you just got ratchetted up. The fake out and change in direction catches you off guard and can feel like a gut punch. The top was just in sight, and now, you’re plunging backwards, back into deep darkness, and away from the light.

Theme Park rides apply this effect for a thrilling surprise, when life drops you backwards just before reaching the top, the results feel far less pleasurable. In the summer of 2018, I became the Lead Pastor of Grace Church, in Palestine, Texas. The first year or so of that experience was particularly traumatic. I’ve described it in other spaces as getting dumped 150 times in six months with a good chunk of the dumpers explaining why I bore the blame for the breakup. Meanwhile, I spent almost my every waking hour trying to lead that church back to some semblance of health. However, by the end of 2019 into early 2020, things looked largely positive. We felt like by that point, potential leavers had done their leaving. A bunch of new folks had arrived. I spent much more time talking with people wanting to join than people wanting to blame me for their leaving. We could start focusing more on giving folks a deep and fulfilling church experience than clawing something back from the brink. We’d even finally figured out the Wi-Fi password, which had someone gotten lost in the turmoil. Certainly, by February of 2020, I specifically remember feeling like the top was just in sight, that we’d finally gotten up the hill.

The minute someone drops in the words, “February of 2020,” into a conversation, you know what happens next. The COVID lockdowns of March 2020, the uneven reopenings of summer of 2020, and the politicalization of COVID responses dropped us backwards, right back down the hill, at incredible speed. Seeing what remained after things opened back up felt worse for me than the Lockdown. During that season, we simply fought as hard as we could to keep folks connected, and I grew the best/worst beard of my life. Standing in an emptier church, after the battle of the Lockdown, and the previous 18 months of Hell to get the church to a healthier place nearly took the fight completely out of me. Starting nearly all over again, in the brave new post-COVID world, felt like an unimaginably difficult lift. The coaster had dropped us right back to the bottom.

The Disciples go on their own backwards rollercoaster plummet from Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday. As Jesus triumphantly enters Jerusalem, the Disciples must of thought that they had it made. Sure, Jesus had been hinting that we would have to die before his actual victory, but maybe that was a metaphor or something. He said a lot of things in parables. Perhaps, dying meant didn’t mean stopping living? People crowd the streets, as Jesus enters Jerusalem victoriously – like a mockery of one of those Roman parades. This same crowd shouts, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mark 11:9b) They get! They had crested the hill, and maybe, now, the Messiah would just reign and set all things right.

Thursday night into Friday morning rapidly propels them backwards to the bottom of the hill. In the course of 18 hours, Jesus goes from teaching at dinner to being betrayed by one of his friends, taken into custody, violently mistreated, put on show trial, and let down by that “Hosana” shouting crowd changing to their tune to “Crucify him! Crucify him!” By the Disciples’ reactions to these events, we see illustrated their emotions crashing backwards back down the rollercoaster. They flee. They hide. They deny. They doubt. They cower. The victory, once so imminent, now looks impossible.

Jesus lived this same series of events as a fully human actor. Unlike the Disciples, he knew what he faced that week – the joy of acceptances, the pain of betrayal, and ignominy of death. Still, we know that it all affected him. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he wrestles with what’s before him. His divinity never replaces his humanity. Christ seems to feel the gut wrenching rollercoaster dropping backwards rapidly away from a secure plateau.

The incarnation, Christ’s earthly life, serves as an act of divine empathy. An omnipotent and omniscient God does not know the pain of a sudden reversal. That experience lies in the human domain. In entering fully into human life, in the person of Jesus Christ, God chooses to suffer fully alongside us, creating a new avenue for the divine-human relationship.

When a teenager shouts at their parents, “You don’t know what it’s like,” that teenager simply misunderstands the reality. The parents in the situation were, by definition, once teenagers themselves, and in time, the young person will benefit for their parents’ experience. How could a God, wholly other from us, know the feeling of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory? In living the particularly painful experience of Jesus’s earthly life, God does, and it broadens the ways that we can understand God’s love and empathy for us. God does know what it’s like, and so, we can know that God’s love can permeate our own moments of devastation, when the rollercoaster drops backwards away from our hopes.

Pain, depression, devastation tend to isolate us. It certainly does that to me. I can fall into the trap of believing that no one knows the depth of my suffering. I felt that way looking at a decimated church that we already had given everything to build back up. Christ’s journey from near victory to torturous demise, from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, put the lie to that. We always have someone who can understand our own pit, made that much more painful from having glimpsed the mountain top. God knows. God’s been there. God will be there with us and for us – always.