Jesus’ ‘triumphal’ entry into Jerusalem is a parody, and that itself is the message. A reflection given to the good folk at Coburg Uniting Church on 17 March 2024. You can listen to a recording of it here.
It is wonderful to be here today, worshipping among you for the first time. Now, I am a Baptist minister and this is a Uniting Church, but in my experience everyone is connected. And, I tend to find, people in churches gossip. So I hope you don’t mind me mentioning this, especially on our first meeting, but when I told someone that I was preaching here, they had an opinion about this church.
It’s not especially famous for stately and dignified proceedings, my informant warned me. It’s not a cathedral; things might get messy. There might be technical difficulties. There might be mistakes. And it might be like this even on Palm Sunday, when we celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
Before you get all defensive, however, let me say that this information made me very, very happy.
In many churches around the world, today’s story will indeed be called ‘The Triumphal Entry’, and it will be told with great pomp and dignity. Perhaps you’ve been at one of these services. The choir slowly processes down the aisle, solemnly singing, then priests wearing exquisite garments follow behind as acolytes waft incense everywhere. The church is aflutter with beautiful banners; and a pipe organ contributes sparkling notes. The congregation stands in their Sunday best and joins in the hymn: Glory! Praise! Honour! and Hosanna! – which means, Lord, save us!
The media commentator Marshall McLuhan once famously observed that the medium is the message. That is, how we tell our stories, the technology we use, and the surroundings we are in, all communicate far more than the story itself.
‘Here is our king!’ the processions say, ‘Hosanna! Lord, save us now!’ When told in the setting of a beautiful stone building with golden candlesticks, costly robes, a paid choir, and a fancy chair up on a dais like a throne, the message communicated is that Jesus is just like the emperor. Only, you know, he’s our guy and could be confused with the bishop. And I suggest that this sort of parade also communicates the saving power of the white establishment, with its links between old money, government and religion.
But some of us—women, say, or children or Indigenous folk or queer folk or people with disabilities or people of colour—have at times found the establishment wanting. Indeed, some of us have learned that the establishment does not always seem to have our best interests at heart. In fact, the establishment seems quite good at shutting out people like us, except when it wants to lock us up: and so some of us might wonder if a Jesus made in the image of the establishment can really save us.
Personally, I don’t think this Jesus can: and this is why I am delighted to be at a church which is meeting in an old hall, and which might sometimes be described as a little bit scruffy, a little bit chaotic. Embrace it, I say. Because if we look closely at the gospel account, we will see that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is not particularly triumphant, whatever title your bible gives the story.
In fact, the way Jesus enters Jerusalem makes a mockery of all that is serious, pompous and self-important; it rejects any conflation with power and wealth. For Jesus actually looks pretty foolish and his entry is ridiculous. And if the medium is the message, then we realise that a guy riding a wee donkey and hailed by nearly naked folk isn’t another emperor. Instead, our guy is a clown.
What do I mean by this? Well, when a ruling authority comes to town, there is a ritual. The Very Important Person appears with a great fanfare of trumpets, riding a noble beast, while the crowds line the streets in honour. I myself participated in a watered down version when I was in primary school. One day, we were marched out of school to line the main street in Fremantle. There we stood in the hot sun for an eternity waiting for the Queen to arrive. At last some cars appeared, driving very slowly; and as the people lining the street called and waved, I got a glimpse of a white glove at a car window turning listlessly. Or maybe I imagined the glove. I really can’t remember. Either way, I have to say, it was extremely underwhelming.
Of course, the Queen did more than ride in a car that day, just as first century Jewish or Greco-Roman rulers do more than ride in procession. In fact, the entrance of a first century VIP to a city follows strict protocol.
First, they come in riding a noble beast. So does Jesus come in riding a warhorse or stallion? No, he does not. Instead, we are told, he enters riding a colt, that is, a young donkey. It’s hard to know how young the colt is, exactly, but we are told that it had never been ridden before. So it’s tempting to imagine Jesus riding on a knock-kneed little colt way too small for him. Perhaps his feet are dangling ludicrously or, even better, perhaps Jesus is standing over the colt and crouch-walking as he pretends to ride.
But one of my kids spent years riding horses and training young horses to be ridden by others. And what we learned is that horses which haven’t been ridden before really, really don’t like it. And so perhaps this little colt’s heehawing and complaining and bucking and farting and skipping sideways and doing everything it can to try and tip him off. We don’t really know, but there is definitely a hint of performance here, and of foolishness, and of Jesus deliberately clowning around.
What happens next? Well, when they get inside the city, a VIP is welcomed with elaborate speeches from local dignitaries. So, does Jesus receive this elaborate welcome? No, he does not. In fact, in Matthew’s version, he’s so little recognised that the people have to ask, ‘Who’s this?’ They’ve got no idea. And to Jerusalem, ‘the city that kills the prophets’ (Matthew 23:37), the crowds reply, ‘This is the prophet: Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee.’
It’s even more of a joke if we remember John’s account, where Nathanael asks, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ (John 1:46). Nathanael clearly doesn’t think so, and that the question was asked in this way tells you the answer: nope, not at all, what a joke! So again, we see mockery and foolishness. Jesus, the great nobody from nowheresville, is riding into town. No one has heard of him, and so his supporters risk his life by outing him as a prophet.
Finally, in a classic entry sequence, a first century VIP heads straight to a temple and performs a public act of ritual sacrifice of the biggest, most expensive animals possible. But what does Jesus do? Well, he goes to the temple, looks around, then simply walks out. No sacrifice, not even a teeny-tiny itty-bitty pigeon.
Having thought it through overnight, perhaps, Jesus does come back to the temple the next day. But again, he doesn’t engage in sacrifice. Instead, this time he drives out the moneychangers who, at rip-off rates, are turning Roman coins into Jewish offerings; he kicks out the traders who, at ridiculously inflated prices, are selling birds for sacrifice; then he announces that what is supposed to be a house of prayer has become a den of thieves. His actions so enrage the chief priests and the scribes that they conspire to kill him.
I wish I could say that his storming of the temple was powerful and effective, but I don’t think so. I am sure that the minute he walked out, the moneylenders and bird sellers and religious authorities shook themselves off, righted the tables, swept everything under the carpet and went back to business as usual, all the while plotting his crucifixion. Again, Jesus looks foolish, even futile.
Then, of course, there’s the cloak thing. In first century Palestine, people only wore two garments. Take off your outer garment, and you’re left with a loose tunic. Socially, you’re regarded as naked; it’d be like me up here preaching in my bra and undies. And the story tells us that people took off their outer garments and spread them on the road for Jesus to make his entrance. In other words, you have a bloke on a wacky ride surrounded by a bunch of nearly naked folk waving stuff and singing.
Putting it all together, we see that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is not a highly serious and dignified procession. His noble beast is a wee little donkey; nobody knows him so he’s outed as a prophet; his blood sacrifice comes later, and it’s when he offers his own body; and his vanguard is not rank upon rank of trained soldiers carrying high tech military gear, but a messy crowd of scruffy folk parading in their underwear.
‘Hosanna!’ these people sing, ‘Save us!’ as they walk and dance and maybe even vogue. They are a parody of marching neo-Nazis, and riot police, and stern religious types who have no sense of humour and not one spark of joy; they’re a parody of every army, ever, and every general and his parade. It’s playful, joyful, vulnerable, disruptive, subversive; the modern equivalent which comes to mind is a pride parade.
So through the medium of the palm procession, Jesus takes the VIP entrance narrative and explodes it. There’s no great show of wealth or power or military violence, nor does he uphold the establishment; in fact the next day, at the temple, he directly challenges the religious authorities who run the place.
Jesus’ arrival is a show of vulnerability and foolishness. It’s street theatre, a jester’s joke. We see a king riding an animal signifying peace; a king without weapons; a king without defences. He leads no army, just a ragged crowd of people all too often rejected and despised by the establishment. He’s a king whose only wealth is love. He’s a king who borrows food to set a table in the wilderness; a king who invites scruffy people to dine with him and to partner in his work.
And so we see that Jesus is not a new and improved emperor, marching in to take possession of a city through the ruling establishment. Instead, he’s a jester coming in to subvert it. And what does this jester ultimately seek? Not riches or domination but the world’s healing, the world’s renewal, the world’s salvation: and this begins among the marginal folk who place their trust in him.
The triumphal entry? You might say it’s an anti-climax, a raspberry, a fart. Because we want God to send us a powerful leader who will make everything right; what we get is a jester, a fool. We want a quick and easy fix; what we get is to enter into the long, slow work of love. We want a reason to believe; what we get is an invitation to join the parade, knowing we might still deny him, knowing we might still shout, “Crucify!” And even if we manage not to get swept up by the mob, we suspect that success is not guaranteed, and being noticed by the establishment may lead to our own crucifixion.
And like a failed joke, we have to admit that the Palm Parade ends with a fizzle. For we are entering Holy Week with carnival joy, but we are riding straight into failure, betrayal, suffering, and death. Everything about Palm Sunday points to this paradox. Joy and devastation, loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair are intermingled; the king will kneel to serve. Adoring crowds soon cry “Crucify!”; good people suffer; god dies.
Of course, we can reject this story of paradox. We can reject its humiliation, its indignity, its bad taste, and we can worship a patriarchal god. We can adopt a theology of domination wedded to power and wealth and the white establishment. Many people, including very many who call themselves Christians, do.
But this Palm Sunday, I invite you to embrace the scruffiness, the foolishness, and the paradox of Jesus. Because I have a hunch that the jester has another yet joke up his sleeve: a joke involving a tomb which becomes a womb, a death which births life, a disappearance which creates a new community of love. And I have a hunch that salvation cannot be achieved through the powers that be, but only through the slow healing of people and communities who are doing the hard transformative work of love.
So let us worship the jester-king who, through the paradox of serious play, upends our expectations and skewers our self-importance. Let us bow down to the one who, through the paradox of servant leadership, shows us how to love one another. And let us offer our whole selves to the one who, through the paradox of the wounded healer, blesses and reconciles all things. Not just the nice bits, the faithful bits, the pretty bits, the good bits, but the bits which betray and deny and despair; the bits which have no hope.
Because I have a hunch that, through the jester, God really does save us. All we need to do is lay down our weapons, our wealth, our dignity, and embrace our powerlessness and scruffiness, and join in the parade. Blessed be God: Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver. Amen. Ω
Reflect: What do you find difficult to bring to the parade? What do you lay down before Jesus now?
A reflection shared with Coburg Uniting Church on 24 March 2024 (Palm Sunday) © Alison Sampson 2024. Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash.
Alison and the whale 