Mark 11:1-11
1When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, [Jesus] sent two of his disciples 2and 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. 3If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’” 4They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, 5some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” 6They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. 7Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. 8Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. 9Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,
“Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
10Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”11Then 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.
Grace, hope, and peace to you from God our creator, and from Jesus, the one to whom we shout “Hosanna” – “Help us, we beseech you!”
Amen.
The good news this Palm Sunday is people coming together united in hope.
Jerusalem, and the great temple on Mount Zion, are gearing up for the year’s biggest festival. All sorts of visitors are in town, mostly observant Jews from villages all over the land coming to pay their respects and rejoice. It’s Passover, the festival that celebrates the escape of the Hebrew peoples from bondage in Egypt. They’re on foot. They need places to stay, water to drink, and food to eat. Some of them surely yearn to have their tired feet washed and anointed with oil. Others are unwell, and have come to make levitical sacrifices at the great temple imploring God to restore their health. The people who live in and around the city are expecting the visitors, and are prepared to meet their needs.
We too know about hordes of visitors – visitors with human needs – here. People from all over come to celebrate the glory we live with every day: clean air, beautiful mountains, glittering seas. They come to meet their human need for the peace and renewal of nature. We know why people want to visit, and we love that about the place we call home. But the visitors aren’t an unalloyed joy. It becomes ridiculous to turn left onto Highway 1. Just try running errands in Rockland on the day of lobster fest. Meeting their needs is hard work, and is the profession of many. Keeping a positive attitude toward welcoming strangers in high summer, that’s a challenge. I know, I know, these are first world problems. But let’s think about what’s in our hearts as people who LIVE where many others come to VISIT. That’s something we have in common with the people of Jerusalem back when Pontius Pilate was the colonial governor. And Mark the Evangelist’s account of that time gives us a glimpse into their lives.
In those days, that land was under the control of a distant empire, the Romans. They understood their imperial mission to be the imposition of world order. They built roads and promoted trade. They reserved police powers to themselves. And a big festival like this was a chance for some propaganda activity. Everybody’s in town, so a bombastic parade would, they believe, impress the pilgrims and get back to the villages when they went back home. They ran a big parade with Pilate on a huge horse, accompanied by cavalry and infantry carrying swords and flagpoles with eagles atop. The parade organizers were skilled at this business of Pax Romana: they wanted everybody to feel safe as long as they followed the rules. And they wanted to intimidate anybody who dared to dream of something better. What better way than this show of force?
At any rate, the big pompous military parade rolls into the city through the ceremonial front gate attended by the local gentry. And we can imagine a few the residents and pilgrims stand, watch, and pay Pilate the minimal respect needed to avoid getting noticed by his entourage.
But today there’s something else going on, outside the city gates, away from the boulevard and hardly noticed by the imperial overlord. Jesus and his disciples have arrived. It seems likely they’re staying at the home of his friends Mary and Martha in Bethany near the city. Surely many other pilgrims are staying near them. And people – locals and visitors both – are buzzing about it. It must have been quite a buzz.
People say to each other, This is Jesus, the one who says “your faith has made you well” to suffering people and makes it stick. That kind of healing, by the way, is religous disobedience. It undercuts the authority – and the economy – of the priests of the temple by challenging the levitical sacrificial commandments.
People say, This is Jesus, the one who makes storms cease on the sea of Galilee. People say, This is the one who took on the temple bigshots and said “the Sabbath was created for us, not us for the Sabbath”. And he’s here with his disciples. They arrived on foot, like the other Passover pilgrims. People say, he’s staying with Martha and Mary, they’re his friends.
People say. The man who will save us is here. And the gathered people hope to catch a glimpse of him. Their hope to see Jesus is a strong hope. It’s a hope that’s greater by far than their fear of being noticed by Pilate’s soldiers. It’s a hope that turned a bunch of strangers into a community.
Fueled by that hope, some extraordinary things unfolded that day along that road from Bethany to Jerusalem. Jesus sent a couple of disciples to borrow a donkey. We’ve heard about that donkey many times; it’s a cute Sunday School skit. But it’s signficant.
When I was ten years old, my dad was posted to the American consulate in a town called Aleppo in northern Syria. Our family lived in a two-flat house on the edge of town. Once in a while Bedouin nomads would camp in the nearby wild pasture. In the way of ten-year olds I wandered over to their camps. The kids sometimes rode my bike, or tried to. And I sometimes rode their donkeys, or tried to. I learned this from the watchfulness of the adults in those camps: their beasts of burden are their wealth, their livelihood, what they need to survive. They let me try to ride, but they didn’t let their donkey out of their sight for an instant. (My mom was watching from the window too, of course. That was a far more innocent age.)
The people of Bethany and Bethphage surely valued their beasts the way those Bedouins do.
My point is this: lending a donkey to a stranger is a big deal. It’s an act of grace.
Something was going on that day. It had already changed those peoples’ hearts, right at the beginning of those events. Shared purpose was creeping into peoples’ souls. A sense of trust was building among the Passover pilgrims and the locals. A fountain of unselfish love – the love the gospel writers call αγαπη agape – was bubbling into peoples’ souls and overflowing.
And the events unfold. People give Jesus their cloaks – their clothing – to sit on … in acts of agape.
He rides the donkey along the road to Jerusalem. That itself an act of religous disobedience, by the way, like healing on the Sabbath: Passover pilgrims customarily walk to the city and to the temple.
The person of Jesus focused the hope of those Jewish people – pilgrims and hosts both – and pulled them into one community. The temple system, with the priests cooperating with the Roman Empire, is something they know is not life-giving. He’s showing them there’s a better way. All these gathered folks are observant Jews, and they know the words of the psalm we just read together. They know what the prophet Zechariah had to say about a restored king. Jesus and his disciples were surely harnessing that shared spiritual knowledge to create hope.
They’re joining their hearts and voices crying that great prayer Hosanna – save us! – with the certainty that their prayer is answered in the person of Jesus. Joy and gratitude pour out along with selfless love.
Forging that community in that crowd of strangers, now that’s a miracle.
Imagine this. A musician with his band members comes here on a crowded holiday weekend. This is somebody some of us have heard of, but never met. Imagine if the musician told a couple of roadies “go up the street and borrow a car from somebody’s yard – the newest one you can find. If somebody tries to stop you, just say ‘our boss needs it, and we’ll bring it back soon.’ ”
How’s that going to work out for them?
Now I’m imagining it’s my car they want to borrow. It would take a change of my heart to be able to even listen to those roadies and not just call the police. I wonder if my heart could change that much.
What would it take for you and me, and the crowd at lobster fest, to join our hearts and hands together like those folks did back then? Hearing that it’s possible, and how they did it, starts us on that path. Sharing our wealth – whatever form it takes, donkeys, machines, money, hearts, souls, minds, strength – for the good of everyone is another good step along the way. We know this, church, and we do our best to put it into action. The good news is that we don’t do it alone. We’re together with our eyes on the man riding the donkey.
We wonder, though, how the disciples were taking all this in. They knew, because Jesus had told them, that every step of his borrowed donkey brought him closer to confrontation with the priests and the empire, nearer to the cross, closer to shame and death. I wonder whether they thought they might be setting up that crowd for mortal disappointment?
Jesus knew his project was costly. He knew the Romans and priests were going to sacrifice him, to publicly take his life, to try to restore their power. And Jesus knew the sacrifice was going to fail spectacularly on the third day. And with scriptural hindsight, we too know the attempted sacrifice leads to an empty tomb and to life beyond death.
But what about the people gathered outside Jerusalem that day? A sacrifice that ends in resurrection? He didn’t tell the crowd “I’ll be crucified, but it’s OK because I’ll rise again?” Instead, he brought them together, heart, mind, body, soul, to care for each other, encourage each other, reinforce one anothers’ hope.
Friends, as we walk toward the cross, let’s do so together in the spirit of Jesus’s self-giving love. His Palm Sunday gift to us, trust in one another, will surely carry us through the hard disappointments of the days to come to the great surprise of the empty tomb.