It all began with a parade, a very modest one that over the years has grown in the imaginations of centuries of believers. As Mark tells it, this particular parade must have drawn only a small crowd. If it had been a larger event, the authorities would surely have known the central figure by sight. Later in the week, they had to get someone to identify him in the garden when they went to arrest him.
Everybody loves a parade and so we love this part of the story: the vision of the handsome young teacher, brimming over with charisma, riding into the city on a little colt—an ancient symbol used by kings about to be crowned and enthroned to symbolize that they had come in peace, and that they were going to be one with us, the common folk. A bit different from tanks and humvees roaring into a city waving flags of might.
This is the pomp—word that in Latin, pompa, means a procession. It was, to be sure, an ironic procession meant to be seen as a march toward enthronement of a king, a bit of civic disturbance and street theatre that was meant to be an “in-your-face” confrontation of the Romans and the religious authorities of the time.
Circumstance, on the other hand, is a condition that determines another action. It was Sir Edward Elgar who, in 1901, took the combination of words from a line in Shakespeare’s play, Othello, and gave it as the title for the music for the coronation of King Edward VII of England. Now it is used for graduation ceremonies, as if those processions were, in some twisted sense, coronations for entitlement.
The circumstance here is that Jesus meant to turn expectations of a messianic Davidic king on its head. In the Moosnick lectures this past week, at Transylvania, and at the Temple Saturday morning, Rabbi David Sandmel explained quite clearly that one of the major asymmetries, a mild word for such a major difference, is that Jewish expectations for a messiah were and remain that of a charismatic prophet who will restore the promised lands to its Davidic empire and glory. The work of the Jewish messiah will be that of redeeming the people and the land, in the sense of buying them out of bondage and oppression.
For Christians, the Christ—the anointed one, the Messiah—was someone altogether different. Christ rode into Jerusalem, and were he to ride into Washington, D.C., or Paris, or Moscow, he would say that the “eye cannot say to the foot ‘I have no need of you’, he would insist that those who leave out and leave behind their fellow human beings diminish their own humanity. Christ rides into Jerusalem, and today into Lexington and Louisville, and Nairobi and Harare to proclaim that life and relationship are synonymous, that goodness cannot occur in isolation, that now, as always, we need to affirm a community of mutual need and love. Christ rides into the city to side with those who are left out and left behind.
How could it be otherwise? If the son of God sided with tyrants, God would be tyrannical. If the son of God sided with no one, God would be indifferent. Only by a clear understanding that God sides with the bruised and broken, the poor and powerless, can we Christians claim that ours is a God of justice. [Coffin, William S. “The Eternal Rider”, The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, Vol 2, Westminster: 2008, p. 381.]
In the Gospels’ accounts, the circumstance that must have felt to the religious authorities as a ridiculing of their hopes and convictions, and then leads, of course, to the rest of the enthronement and coronation story, a bloody, agonizing, seemingly a rout and defeat of this upstart, foolish young man from Nazareth.
It IS an enthronement story, the crowning glory of a secret king born in humble circumstances, but having all the right lineage, placed in a wooden trough for a crib rather than a golden basket, and eventually enthroned on rough wooden beams at the last, when he truly became our king. Crowned with thorns of the field, anointed with his own blood, arms spread wide, but nailed down—because, after all, the world doesn’t like a God to be so willing to include everyone. Such generosity must be pinned down. He becomes the king of glory not in transcendence, but in condescendance. He became as a grain of wheat, cast to the earth, buried under the sod, suffered and died. His glory, his exaltation, was when he finally got his opportunity to be “high and lifted up.” Did not he say, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
And so he does—and the question continues whether the world that goes after Jesus on Palm is cheering a man who has searched their consciences, convinced their minds, and won over their hearts to God? Or are they following a political leader whose power has been proved by the stories circulating the streets of Jerusalem that he raised a man named Lazarus from the dead? Had someone asked them why they were carrying palms, half might have replied, “Because they symbolize peace,” and the other half, “Because the Romans forbid our carrying spears.” Perhaps now, as then, the danger to a people lies less in becoming a “secular humanist” or atheistic society than in becoming a repressive, reactionary religious one.
Still, across the centuries, there continues to be something magnetic about this Jesus. From the very beginning he drew people to him from all walks of life, from lowly shepherds to the learned magi; from the elderly Simeon and Anna in the temple to the little children who scampered alongside as he and the twelve walked from village to village; from a rich intellectual Pharisee named Nicodemus who comes in the night to one like Paul who at first would try to destroy the little group that tried to live by his way, and later would build the church, from the people of Galilee to the people of all nations, to people like you and me.
There is something magnetic, something very hard to resist in this condescending, stooping, humiliated God of Glory, riding a donkey, for God’s sake, into Jerusalem, praying in agony in the garden, standing trial on trumped up charges, and at last put up on that cruel throne without benefit of narcotic to dull the pain. George Bernard Shaw, who claimed no religious faith whatsoever, and who was condemned by many Christians of his era, once wrote: “I am no more a Christian than Pilate was…gentle hearer; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus of Nazareth to Annas or Caiaphas, and I am ready to admit that I see no way out of the world’s misery but the way which would have been found by his will.” Even the writer H.G. Wells says of Jesus, “Is it any wonder, that to this day, this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?”
Whatever our doubts and misgivings, whatever our fickle minds might imagine, we cannot hear this story without knowing in some mysterious way that the pounding of the hammer on the nails going into those wrists and feet– that pounding echoes in our heart as TRUTH—ultimate and total.
So we join the parade to find ourselves with Peter and James and John, betraying him with our inattention, with Mary and Martha and the other women, near the cross, accepting the forgiveness that he offers for our half-hearted following, the little betrayals, the big denials—and we keep going after him.
Along the way of this pomp and circumstance, we discover the promise comes true. Where he is, we one day find ourselves…no longer concerned about what the world values or thinks, only convinced that as we have lost all of those concerns, that when we lose our lives, as he said, we have somehow found the life we sought in the first place. Perhaps Bernard of Clairvaux, in the 12th century, expressed our devotion best:
What language shall I borrow
To thank Thee, dearest Friend.
For this Thy dying sorrow,
Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever;
And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never
Outlive my love to Thee.
Amen.
(attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux,, 1091-1153)
