Sunday Musings
Today is Palm Sunday, the beginning of the holiest week of the Christian year. In the next few days, Christians will commemorate and celebrate the final days of Jesus’ life and the empty tomb of Easter.
Two traditions collide on this particular day — the re-enactment of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in the final week of his life and the public reading of the Passion narrative, the events of his death. The first part of the day is triumphal; the second is somber.
At the Cottage, we’ll emphasize only Palm Sunday today.
In 2006, John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg published The Last Week. The book begins with a historical image of the “two processions” that entered Jerusalem on the same day — one led by Pilate, the other by Jesus. I’ve no idea how many thousands of sermons have been preached on this passage in the years since. In recent years, however, I’ve never not heard a Palm Sunday sermon allude to it, borrow the image, or quote it directly. The “two processions” have become nearly a commonplace in liturgical and mainline churches.
On this Palm Sunday, I invited John Dominic Crossan to read the opening pages of The Last Week for our Sunday Musing. The author’s reading is followed by the excerpt from the book.
I loved hearing him read this. I hope you will, too.
Humble Lord, while people clamored for a warrior-king,
the colt revealed your servanthood:
as you face the way of tears, the tearing of the temple veil,
take us from the baying mob to place our faith in you, Jesus Christ,
our victim and our savior. Amen.
— Steven Shakespeare
Mark 11:1-11
When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’” They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,
“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!”
Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
“The Two Processions,” from The Last Week. Read by one of the authors, John Dominic Crossan.
From The Last Week, by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, pp. 2-5.
Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30. It was the beginning of the week of Passover, the most sacred week of the Jewish year. In the centuries since, Christians have celebrated this day as Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week. With its climax of Good Friday and Easter, it is the most sacred week of the Christian year.
One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, his message was about the kingdom of God, and his followers came from the peasant class. They had journeyed to Jerusalem from Galilee, about a hundred miles to the north, a journey that is the central section and the central dynamic of Mark’s gospel. Mark’s story of Jesus and the kingdom of God has been aiming for Jerusalem, pointing toward Jerusalem. It has now arrived.
On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Jesus’s procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’s crucifixion.
Pilate’s military procession was a demonstration of both Roman imperial power and Roman imperial theology. Though unfamiliar to most people today, the imperial procession was well known in the Jewish homeland in the first century. Mark and the community for which he wrote would have known about it, for it was the standard practice of the Roman governors of Judea to be in Jerusalem for the major Jewish festivals. They did so not out of empathetic reverence for the religious devotion of their Jewish subjects, but to be in the city in case there was trouble. There often was, especially at Passover, a festival that celebrated the Jewish people’s liberation from an earlier empire.
The mission of the troops with Pilate was to reinforce the Roman garrison permanently stationed in the Fortress Antonia, overlooking the Jewish temple and its courts. They and Pilate had come up from Caesarea Maritima, “Caesarea on the Sea,” about sixty miles to the west. Like the Roman governors of Judea and Samaria before and after him, Pilate lived in the new and splendid city on the coast. For them, it was much more pleasant than Jerusalem, the traditional capital of the Jewish people, which was inland and insular, provincial and partisan, and often hostile. But for the major Jewish festivals, Pilate, like his predecessors and successors, went to Jerusalem.
Imagine the imperial procession’s arrival in the city. 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. Sounds: the marching of 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.
Pilate’s procession displayed not only imperial power, but also Roman imperial theology. According to this theology, the emperor was not simply the ruler of Rome, but the Son of God. It began with the greatest of the emperors, Augustus, who ruled Rome from 31 BCE to I4 CE. His father was the god Apollo, who conceived him in his mother, Atia. Inscriptions refer to him as “son of God,” “lord” and “savior,” one who had brought “peace on earth.” After his death, he was seen ascending into heaven to take his permanent place among the gods. His successors continued to bear divine titles, including Tiberius, emperor from 14 to 37 CE and thus emperor during the time of Jesus’s public activity. For Rome’s Jewish subjects, Pilate’s procession embodied not only a rival social order, but also a rival theology.
We return to the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem. Although it is familiar, it has surprises. As Mark tells the story in 11:1–11, it is a prearranged “counterprocession.” Jesus planned it in advance. As Jesus approaches the city from the east at the end of the journey from Galilee, he tells two of his disciples to go to the nod village and get him a colt they will find there, one that has never been ridden, that is, a young one. They do so, and Jesus rides the colt down the Mount of Olives to the city surrounded by a crowd of enthusiastic followers and sympathizers, who spread their cloaks, strew leafy branches on the road, and shout, “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!” As one of our professors in graduate school said about forty years ago, this looks like a planned political demonstration.
The meaning of the demonstration is clear, for it uses symbolism from the prophet Zechariah in the Jewish Bible. According to Zechariah, a king would be coming to Jerusalem (Zion) “humble, and riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (9:9). In Mark the reference to Zechariah is implicit. Matthew, when he treats Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, makes the connection explicit by quoting the passage: “Tell the daughter of Zion, look your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Matt. 21:5, quoting Zech. 9:9). The rest of the Zechariah passage details what kInd of king he 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. (9:10)
This king, riding on a donkey, will banish war from the land—no more chariots, war-horses, or bows. Commanding peace to the nations, he will be a king of peace.
Jesus’s procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate’s procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus’s procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God. This contrast—between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar—is 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’s life. As we all know, the week ends with Jesus’s execution by the powers who ruled his world. Holy Week is the story of this confrontation.
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We need to undomesticate Palm Sunday in our churches. Jesus was staging a kind of counter-demonstration. While Pilate rode into the city on a military stallion, Jesus entered on a borrowed donkey, symbolized sovereignty—but also Zechariah’s promise that Yahweh would one day banish the war horse forever! The procurator claimed the Pax Romana, the Nazarene a “Pax Christi.” Pretty subversive stuff—and our churches have the habit of recreating that “demonstration” in our Palm Sunday liturgies. But to really represent this gospel story in our world, we need to re-contextualize its symbols into our political moment, and re-place our witness back into public space.
— Ched Myers
INSPIRATION
Eccentric tree,
lofty, lithe from spiny copse:
nearly shadeless rod
with razor fronds —
misfit wood.
Yet you alone from the stands of arboreal majesty
surrendered stalks
for fervid peasants waving hosanna
and carpeting grace.
Susurrating above the throng,
did you aid their supplication?
Did you bow in the breeze
as One rode by?
Perhaps that fleeting genuflect redeemed the weald,
for, unlike your kin whose more mundane timber gave
stake and beam,
you gifted glory.
— Diana Butler Bass, “For God So Loved the Weald”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the story of Palm Sunday by contrasting it with another entry-parade across the city. They have always concentrated just on Jesus. This is the kind of surprise that I enjoy in a sermon, homily, or blog. It’s why I subscribed to the Cottage in the first place.
I am deeply moved by the contrast of the two processions to Jerusalem: one representing the Roman Empire's power and Jesus' entry from the east. This year the word sacrifice became a word to ponder.. I think Jesus was a sacrifice, but by Caiaphas ("Better that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish" - John 11:50) to the god of the Roman Empire. Jesus, on the other hand, continued in his father's will: that he love to the end. I know this because of what he did after his Gethsemane prayer: he healed the ear of a soldier who had come at arrest him, he forgave those who executed him, he told one of those being crucified with him that they would be together in paradise that day, and he took care of his mother giving her into the care of the beloved disciple.
Then your insight about being at the table and the movement from table to trial to crucifixion to tomb (burial) to tomb (resurrection) to table again is a game changer for me. One kingdom rests on the myth of redemptive violence, the other rests on the power of love and shared meals (signifying shared meals, shared love, shared community, shared live in all its dimensions).
Thank you! It will be a very Happy Easter.