Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Palm Sunday, 24^th of March 2023

Psalm 118:1-2 19-29
Mark 11:1-11

After hearing today’s gospel story, of Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem the week before his death, I am a little surprised that the Roman powers in Jerusalem only executed Jesus, and did not also seek out all his followers to ensure that they had completely crushed the Jesus Movement. The last thing an occupying power wants is for the people it occupies to have their emotions raised and their collective identity reinforced by a public event. Crowds resisting the Powers That Be in the streets is a significant moment in many movements that overturn the status quo: the gay liberation movement that was sparked by the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1968, and that spread further when the NSW Police attacked the Gay Solidarity Group celebrating the Riots’ tenth anniversary; the Vietnam Moratorium marches in the 1970s; the People Power Revolution that overthrew the Marcos Government in the Philippines in 1986; the mass demonstrations that led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Marching in the streets is not enough without a campaign that includes less visible tactics like education and political lobbying. And popular uprisings do fail, when the Powers That Be are both powerful and willing to use murderous violence: the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968; the Chinese government’s massacre of thousands at Tiananmen Square in 1989; Israel’s killing of hundreds of Palestinians participating in the non-violent ‘Great March of Return’ in 2018-2019. Sometimes governments can feel confident enough that they just ignore street marches, as happened with the worldwide marches against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But taking to the streets is often an effective way of getting the attention of the Powers That Be and drawing people to the cause.

Like all these political protests of the past century, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the day we celebrate as Palm Sunday was an act of political street theatre. It was an obvious parody of the Triumphs the Roman Empire celebrated, which were the opposite of popular street marches because they allowed the Powers That Be to keep the crowds entertained while promoting Roman Imperial order. The Jerusalem crowd also saw today’s act of political street theatre as Jesus revealing himself to be a candidate for the kingship that would reestablish the Davidic kingdom, and Jesus was doing that, but not in the way the crowd expected. Most of today’s gospel reading is about Jesus planning his entry, rather than about the entry itself; we see Jesus carefully constructing the political messages his entry will send. He sends two disciples to find a colt that has never been ridden and so is suitable for religious purposes, and gives them the words they can say to enable them to take the colt away. Jesus enters from the Mount of Olives, which in the prophecies of Zechariah is where the Lord will stand when fighting the nations in the final battle at the end of time. (Zechariah 14:4) He is riding on a colt, not walking as pilgrims did, to fulfil another prophecy from Zechariah: ‘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’. (Zechariah 9:9) The cloaks spread on the colt and on the road indicate that Jesus is coming to claim kingship, or at least that his disciples believe that he is. When the victorious rebel leader Simon Maccabeus entered Jerusalem after the second century BC revolt against the Greeks that is still celebrated at Hanukkah, the people around him had palm branches, too. (1 Maccabees 13:51) Reading all these signs the crowds shout out: ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’, and ‘Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David.’ They can see that Jesus’ entry is a challenge to the power of Rome and so they believe that Jesus has come as a candidate to restore the kingdom. When Jesus does not fulfil these expectations, the crowd will turn on him and demand the release of an actual rebel, Barabbas. (Mark 15:6-15)

Jesus is not going to be the Messiah the crowds want and so all the way through this carefully stage-managed procession the military symbolism that challenges the power of Rome is simultaneously being undermined. Yes, by riding on a colt Jesus is fulfilling the prophecies of Zechariah, but Zechariah also said that the King would enter ‘triumphant and victorious’, having ‘cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem’ and Jesus has not done that. Both Simon Maccabeus in the past and the Roman Governor in the present enter Jerusalem with armies; Jesus is surrounded by the motley band of his disciples. If Jesus is coming to Jerusalem as its king, it is not as a militarily victorious one. In Mark’s version of Jesus’ entrance, the procession only accompanies Jesus to the entrance of the city. Jesus enters Jerusalem quietly: ‘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.’ Matthew and Luke have Jesus immediately cleansing the Temple in the middle of a noisy crowd, but Mark tells us that the cleansing of the Temple waited for another day. The anticlimax is deliberate; Mark ends a story full of messianic symbolism in silence and inactivity rather than triumphant noise.

All through the ride to Jerusalem Jesus has been silent. He does not respond to the cries of the crowds, to their cloak and branches-throwing. He is silent in the Temple, looking but not yet acting to drive out those buying and selling. The crowd’s cry of ‘Hosanna,’ which translates as ‘save now,’ might be read as cries for God to ‘save’ Jesus, but Jesus is determined to take the way of the cross. The crowds might think that they are taking part in a triumph; Jesus knows that what is really happening is a funeral procession. Today the church celebrates both Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday; we are reminded that Jesus’ triumphant entrance cannot be separated from his coming death. Something new is coming, not the continued rule of Rome or the restoration of the Davidic kingdom, but new life. We see the king showing an alternate vision to the Pax Romana, a different way of exercising power.

Today we also hear from Psalm 118, which is the psalm the crowd chants as Jesus rides. Their cry of ‘Hosanna’ is a transliteration of ‘Save us’ from the line, ‘Save us, we beseech you, O Lord!’ They also quote the next verse, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ But it is Jesus who will quote ‘The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone’ after telling the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders in the Temple the parable of the wicked tenants. (Mark 12:1-12) Jesus knows that he is about to die, and yet he walks towards his death with utter confidence in God’s ‘steadfast love,’ God’s hesed. Five times in the psalm, three times in the verses we hear today, we are reminded that God’s ‘steadfast love endures for ever’. The psalmist remembers what God has done in the past, and is confident to demand that God continue to show the same love in the future, while giving thanks all the way through. The God the psalm describes is the God who cares deeply for humankind, the God of unexpected reversals, the God who did not simply make the creation but is still intimately involved with it. The line, ‘This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it’ could also be understood as ‘This is the day on which the Lord has acted’. God’s steadfast love never ends; it is as strongly present today as it was with the ancient Israelites and with Jesus when he was on the cross, even if Jesus then felt himself forsaken. Martin Luther wrote of today’s psalm, ‘When emperors and kings, the wise and learned, and even the saints could not aid me, this psalm proved a friend and helped me out of many great troubles’.[1] Because this psalm is traditionally sung at Passover, it may have been the hymn that Jesus and his disciples sang on the night he was betrayed, before he went to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane. (Mark 14:26) If so, I hope it helped Jesus as it helped Luther, with the reminder that God’s love has no end.

I said I was surprised that the Roman powers in Jerusalem executed only Jesus; presumably, they felt that they simply needed to execute the leader and the Jesus Movement would die with him. The Jewish leaders probably believed the same thing; in the Gospel according to John the author has Caiaphas, the high priest, advising the Council that if they hand Jesus over to the Roman authorities the death of one man will save the whole nation from being destroyed. (John 11:45-53) Both groups were wrong. Like many acts of political street theatre, Jesus’ entry on Palm Sunday initially seemed to have failed. It led to the crowd turning on him, once they realised that he was not going to be the Messiah they wanted, and to the authorities executing him, out of fear that he would get the people to rebel anyway. Many other street marches and acts of political protest throughout history have seemed to come to the same ignominious end. But because God’s loving kindness never ends, because God continues to stand with people who suffer, because God is always doing something new, what looks like the end is never the end, and hope always remains. The Soviet Union clamps down on the Hungarian Uprising and the Prague Spring, but ultimately the USSR falls. The war in Vietnam ends. The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras becomes an internationally famous celebration. Two thousand years after his death on a cross we continue to tell Jesus’ story and seek to follow in his footsteps. No victory is final, because we have not yet reached the eschaton, but neither is any defeat. There is always the hope, as Martin Luther King Jr believed, that the arc of the moral universe will bend towards justice.

It has been a few weeks since I ended a Reflection with a poem; let me do so today. This is called ‘The poet thinks about the donkey’ by Mary Oliver.

On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.

How horses, turned out into the meadow,
leap with delight!
How doves, released from their cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight!

But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.

[1] Quoted in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2, p. 150.