I t’Äôs rather curious when you think about it, how much time Mark devotes in his telling of the Palm Sunday story to the procurement of the animal Jesus rides in on. Fully half the story is devoted to Jesus’Äô careful instructions to the disciples: where to go, what to look for, what to say, what to do. As Tom Long comments, ’ÄúThough no one knows what these two disciples were thinking, I am fairly confident that they had imagined themselves a grander and nobler role on this day than being on the donkey detail.’Äù

But the details are important for Mark, because they drive home a point that would have been clear to his readers but is lost on us. Jesus’Äô entrance into Jerusalem would not have been the only procession that day. While Jesus entered from the east, from the Mount of Olives, accompanied by a rag-tag group of disciples and an enthusiastic crowd of on-lookers, on the other side of town, perhaps at the very same hour, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate would have entered from the west, flanked by Roman soldiers. It was the practice of the local Roman rulers to enter Jerusalem for the major Jewish festivals, not as a sign of reverence for Jewish traditions and ritual, but as a show of Roman power and a reminder to the masses of who was in charge. Pilate’Äôs procession would have been everything that Jesus’Äô was not’Äì or rather, as we shall see, Jesus’Äô procession was a deliberate alternative to what was taking place on the other side of town.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan help us imagine the scene:
[Pilate’Äôs procession would have been] a visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. [The] sounds [of] marching feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.

Which explains Mark’Äôs attention to the details of the donkey. Jesus’Äô actions that day arriving in Jerusalem were not random, but deliberate, a carefully staged counter-procession to Pilate’Äôs display of imperial power. The scene borrows symbols directly from the prophet Zechariah, a passage that would have been well-known to Jesus’Äô followers and to Mark’Äôs readers. Just in case the point is lost, Matthew in his re-telling of Mark’Äôs story, quotes Zechariah directly:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

(vs. 9:9)

Zechariah then goes on to describe just exactly what kind of king this will be:

He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. (vs. 9:10)

Borg and Crossan summarize the day’Äôs events in this way:

Pilate’Äôs procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus’Äô procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God. This contrast’Äì between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar’Äìis central not only to the gospel of Mark, but to the story of Jesus and early Christianity. The confrontation between these two kingdoms continues through the last week of Jesus’Äô life. As we all know, the week ends with Jesus’Äô execution by the powers who ruled his world. Holy Week is the story of this confrontation.

O ften in our recital of the Holy Week narrative, we focus on the fickleness of the crowd– you know, how they all sing “hosanna” on Palm Sunday, but then quickly cry “crucify” by the end of the week. But Borg and Crossan, along with a host of other biblical scholars, suggest that this is a misreading of the gospel story. There is no suggestion that these are the same people crying hosanna one day and crucify the next. Much more likely, they are two different crowds entirely– one of peasants who celebrate Jesus’ bold confrontation of imperial power and his witty repartee with the temple authorities, and the other a band of collaborators hand-picked by the temple authorities. Time and again in Mark’s narrative he makes clear that the temple authorities were afraid of the crowd. That’s why they need Judas to betray him. That’s why they need a plot to arrest him. That’s why they wait until he is in the garden, alone, at night.

        Instead, the question that confronts us in this and every Holy Week is, which crowd will we run with? Which side are we standing on? Whose voice do we listen to?

        In the 1989 film Romero, about the life and tragic death of the archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, the movie begins with Romero presiding over the private baptism of the grandchild of one of the ruling generals at a time when the military dictatorship was brutally suppressing any organized resistance to their military power. You sense just a glimmer of discomfort in the humble, bookish Romero in this lavish setting– brilliantly portrayed by the late Raul Julia– but otherwise he simply performs the ritual in a perfunctory way oblivious to the day to day activities of his erstwhile parishioners. When he is elevated to archbishop, a priest who had been a friend from his seminary days refuses to let him go on with such blinders to what is happening around him, and brings him out into the poorer countryside so he can see for himself the conditions of El Salvador’s poor. The experience radicalizes him. He continues to perform the rituals of the faith, but never again in a perfunctory way. All of a sudden, the simple gestures of standing at the altar saying, “this is my body, broken for you,” takes on a whole new meaning. As the powers-that-be gradually recognize Romero’s change of stance, he becomes persona non grata. He is no longer invited to baptize their children. And when he refuses to back down, he is shot down, in the Cathedral, behind the altar, in the middle of the Mass.

        The Roman Catholic writer and historian Gary Wills, commenting on Jesus’ parable of the end times in Matthew 25, when the Son of Man will come and separate the sheep from the goats, writes:

        What exactly does that mean? “Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers or sisters, you were doing it to me.” It means that priests who sexually molest boys are molesting Jesus. Televangelists who cheat old women of their savings are cheating Jesus. Those killing members of other religions because of their religion are killing Jesus. Those who despise the poor are despising Jesus. Those neglecting the homeless are neglecting Jesus. Those persecuting gays are persecuting Jesus. And that judgement of his is being delivered now, at the moment when he is scorned, ignored, left hungry. He is outcast, and we welcome him not. He needs us, and we do not take up his cross with him, love with him, die with him. That is the awesome test of love that Jesus brings to bear on our lives.

A s I said, the crowd that day didn’t move from hosanna to crucify. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t run away. They didn’t turn on Jesus– they simply abandoned him. By the end of the week, only the women remained, and even they stood at a distance. Perhaps that’s what we pray for this week. We pray to confess how often we are afraid, how often we turn and run the other way when Jesus calls. And we pray for courage that we can stand, at least here and there, now and then, and bear witness to that awesome love that Jesus brings to bear in our lives.

        A curious thing happened this year at the National Prayer Breakfast in January. These annual Washington affairs are usually rather mundane celebrations of American Civil Religion of the worst sort– all the politically powerful surrounded by religious sycophants assuring them that they all have good hearts and God loves them, no matter the consequences of their social policies. But this year, in what was certainly a major misjudgement on someone’s part, the Irish rock-band U2's frontman, Bono, was invited to address the crowd. Even if you have never listened to U2's music– though you should, if you haven’t– you know the work Bono has done on behalf of the global poor, especially the ravage of debt and AIDS in Africa.

        Here’s just a bit of what he said:

        It’s odd, having a rock star here—but maybe it’s odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was… well, a little blurry, and hard to see.

        I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.

        For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land… and in this country, seeing God’s second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash… in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment…

        I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.

        Even though I was a believer. Perhaps because I was a believer.

        I was cynical… not about God, but about God’s politics.

        Then, in 1997, a couple of eccentric, septuagenarian British Christians went and ruined my shtick—my reproachfulness. They did it by describing the Millennium, the year 2000, as a Jubilee year, as an opportunity to cancel the chronic debts of the world’s poorest people. They had the audacity to renew the Lord’s call—and were joined by Pope John Paul II, who, from an Irish half-Catholic’s point of view, may have had a more direct line to the Almighty.

He then went on to say:

        God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

        God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. “If you remove the yolk from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places”

        6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality.

        Because there's no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa and, if we're honest, conclude that deep down, we really accept that Africans are equal to us. Anywhere else in the world, we wouldn’t accept it. Look at what happened in South East Asia with the Tsunami. 150, 000 lives lost to that misnomer of all misnomers, “mother nature”. In Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month. A tsunami every month. And it’s a completely avoidable catastrophe.

        It’s annoying but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

        I close this morning on … very… thin… ice.

        This is a dangerous idea I’ve put on the table: my God vs. your God, their God vs. our God… vs. no God. It is very easy, in these times, to see religion as a force for division rather than unity.

        And this is a town—Washington—that knows something of division.

        But the reason I am here, and the reason I keep coming back to Washington, is because this is a town that is proving it can come together on behalf of what the Scriptures call the least of these.

        This is not a Republican idea. It is not a Democratic idea. It is not even, with all due respect, an American idea. Nor it is unique to any one faith.

        Do to others as you would have them do to you.’ (Luke 6:30) Jesus says that.

        Once again, the question that confronts us in this and every Holy Week is, which crowd will we run with? Which side are we standing on? Whose voice do we listen to? When Jesus enters Jerusalem and confronts the authorities, do we have the faith to stand with him?

        This morning as an act of contrition because we too are afraid, and a petition for courage to walk Jesus’ way, you are invited to come forward and place your palm branch at the foot of the cross. As the music begins, you are invited to come forward, whenever you feel moved to do so.  

                 ✞

© 2006 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel