Ron Buford, the man who was the dreamer and creator of the UCC’s cutting-edge “God is Still Speaking” advertising campaign, tells the following story: “There were two small boys having a discussion at Christmastime. One boy asked the other, ‘Why do we get a new baby Jesus every Christmas?’ The other boy replied knowingly, ‘It’s because they kill the old baby Jesus every Easter.’”
Too true…these two boys are not the first to notice that the Christmas story and the Holy Week story have much in common. They are bookends, of a sort. Not just chronologically speaking. These two stories are both about human vulnerability as a robe that the Divine willingly wears to make a point. But what, in the world, is that point? Perhaps, today, on a day of parades, a lowly donkey can help us understand.
As a child, I can recall our pastor telling stories about donkeys on Christmas and Palm Sunday. In the gospels, these two holidays are donkey days, as a donkey led by Joseph carries pregnant Mary to the inn at Bethlehem, and some thirty years later another donkey carries Jesus on his final trip into the center of religious and political life, the bustling city of Jerusalem.
The pastor of my childhood, who was the first person I knew to make a connection between Christmas and Easter, had a gentle looking little ceramic animal that he would place on the ledge of the pulpit for all of us to gaze upon. That donkey, no doubt, was part of a larger manger scene. Yet I recall none of the other characters ever being elevated to the pulpit’s height…no shepherds, no Mary, Joseph, or baby Jesus, no wise men, no camels…only this little grey donkey with a baby blue blanket spread delicately across its back. The pastor of my childhood had a vivid and artistic imagination; with it he created for this donkey an imaginary personality, that was, as you might expect of a beast of burden, docile, submissive, and eager to please.
So, by factoring a donkey into the bookend stories of Christmas and Easter, are the gospel writers trying to say that God favors characters that are docile, submissive, and eager to please? Anyone who’s been around a real donkey—not the ceramic stilted kind that appear in manger scenes—knows that they are anything but compliant. Donkeys are stubborn. They are opinionated. They have, as riders like to say, their own head—meaning that if the rider wants to go to the right, and the donkey wants to go to the left, well, you’ll be heading left. So, the same interpretive question could be asked. By including donkeys in these two prominent Jesus stories, are the gospel writers meaning to say that we followers of Jesus, we who literally carry the message of Christ forward in the world, are given permission to be as pig-headed (or should I say “donkey-headed”) as we wish? To put it in language we are all thinking…can we be asses, and still represent the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Palm Sunday answers that question with a resounding “YES!” and with it, we can all breathe a grace-filled sigh of relief. For there are days in each of our lives, and moments within those days, when we do not live up to what we know we are called to be and to do. Look with me at this little donkey, charged by Jesus in today’s story with an awe-filled task, bringing along her baby colt for a walk through the barrios of Jerusalem.
It was to be a festive parade, or so she had been led to believe. She was one donkey who loved parades! Every year of her life, about this same time, she had watched with envy as the mighty and decorated war horses of the Romans paraded by. They marched, strutted really, through the city of Jerusalem, with stately soldiers riding on their backs. This parade was a highly-structured procession, led by Roman governor Pontius Pilate, sitting high on a magnificent war horse, replete with carefully rehearsed soldiers and precise military movements. This procession was (according to authors Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan):
“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. And the sounds? The marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The eyes of the silent onlookers, could be seen through the swirling dust…some curious, some in awe, some resentful.”
This procession was designed to strike fear and unquestioning obedience in those who saw it, for it was an effective demonstration of both Roman imperial power and Roman imperial theology.
Year after year, our little donkey listened to the crowds yelling out obediently: “Caesar is son of God; Caesar is lord; Caesar is savior.” People lined the streets to see them—although as she watched these colorful parades, year after year, she knew in her donkey mind, that the people didn’t seem at all joyful about such a parade of power and might. She smelled fear in them, fear of the soldiers, fear of their horses, fear of the power they seemed to collect around them. People bowed in submission as rows of soldiers—with hands resting on loaded weapons—marched by in strict formation. What an effective billboard for empire’s oppressive and dominating power that even the illiterate would be able to read. Yet this was the parade which our donkey excitedly thought she was being invited to enter! To her surprise, there was another parade entering Jerusalem that day…
It was the parade about which we read in scripture this morning—with Jesus on a borrowed donkey—our little donkey with her baby colt beside her—and children enthusiastically waving palm branches to welcome Jesus into their city while the adults greeted him with deeply-political slogans: “Hosanna!” “Blessed is the King who comes in God’s name!” “Hosanna in highest heaven!”
According to Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, authors of the book, The Last Week: A Day by Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week in Jerusalem, there was nothing quiet or orderly about this second parade into Jerusalem. It was planned as a counter-demonstration,
a carefully prearranged political counter-procession. Yes, this donkey soon learned that there were two parades entering Jerusalem that day…one, a parade of the Empire, a place in which power ruled by might and force, by cruelty and with fear; the other—a parody parade that had at its head, an itinerant healer and teacher who chose her—a donkey—as his humble, stubborn, determined animal traveling companion.
These two parades, these two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to the crucifixion of Jesus. Theirs was not the stereotypic battle between military forces and pacifist protestors. Neither was this a fight between Jesus and Judaism. Nor should this first-century struggle of two opposing parades be dropped into our modern age as conservative versus liberal, Democrat versus Republican, or I.R.S. versus United Church of Christ.
These two processions, simply stated, are not about opposing groups so much as they are about opposing world views that emerge from two competing understandings of power. One worships and expects power from above—whether that above-power be called God, or government, or president, or pope or minister. The other stands tall in the face of these powers and principalities, and daringly proclaims—“I think I’ll be riding the donkey, thank you just the same…” From the back of that humble, stubborn donkey, the rider is heard to say that Divine power emanates from within…from within groups, within communities, families, and yes, even within you and within me… Such power-from-within has the power to change us, one moment at a time, one conversation at a time. That power of God to transform death into life is within all of us and each of us…it is wrapped in the cloak of human vulnerability, so we learned first at the manger and see again in these dusty streets of Jerusalem.
Some 2,000 years later, we still see two processions meandering and marching their way through this city, this country, this world. In one, a vulnerable human named Jesus leads the way. And we are invited by the author of Matthew’s gospel to choose his parade, rather than Caesar’s. We are invited to follow the Christ parade; crying out in word and in work that Christ is Lord, and not Caesar…that Christ’s Kingdom is on earth, and is more permeating and more powerful than any that any empire could imagine. Donkeys and palm branches and politically-courageous crowds urge us to follow this donkey-riding leader, not by accepting Jesus into our hearts, but by having the same heart as did Jesus. It was and is a heart filled with compassion for the last, the least, the lonely, and the lost…a heart full of forgiveness even as it was wrenching in anger…a heart full of love for all God’s people…
For, in following that One who is riding on the donkey, we take our place as citizens of a kingdom of the heart where God rules in power from within, through persuasion, compassion, and love. By naming this day Palm Sunday, rather than Empire Sunday, we are placing our vote with Jesus and the peasants. We are choosing to walk into the city from one direction and not the other, in one procession and not the other. The truth of these two parades is that there will always be powers that seem to be greater than us. That power may be the empire currently known as the United States. In the case of the United Church of Christ, as with our neighbors at All Saints Church in Pasadena, it may be the I.R.S. It may be the union who doesn’t see things through your eyes; or a family member, who seeks to lord it over you. Power seen as power over always seeks a victim. But, like Jesus, riding today into town on the back of a stubborn, determined donkey, intentionally choosing a route across town from the Roman soldiers on their war horses, we too can choose another kind of power. It is persuasive power; it is loving, kind-hearted and long-suffering. It is power that, from a place of great strength, sometimes chooses to be silent in the face of authority, and at other times from that same spiritual center, comes barreling through the doors of the temple turning over tables of commercial oppression.
This week we are faced with a Jesus who embodies power—Divine power—within and who invites us to do the same. When we fail, Palm Sunday, and the week for which it is a prelude, offers each of us moment after moment of grace, hour after hour of forgiveness, day after day of modeling by Jesus and the donkeys all around him of how to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when the empire or the union or our own family is breathing down our necks. Perhaps that ever-present grace is one reason why this week we now face is called “holy.” |
