Palm Sunday - B
Mark 11:1-11
April 1, 2012
Occupy Jerusalem!
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
Don’t you love a parade? I think Decorah has more parades than any community I’ve ever lived in. The nice thing about them is that nearly everybody can be in one of our parades: high school bands, antique fire engines, tractors of all sorts and descriptions, youth organizations, even politicians. Of course there are color bearers and an honor guard and perhaps even a military unit.
It’s fun to be in a parade. There is a secret place inside of each of us, even the shyest of us, that loves being the center of attention. A parade is a great place to be that since no one really expects much but that you’ll wave and smile and throw candy for the kids.
There is a serious side to parades, too.
Parades are very political events, and not because politicians may be in them. Politicians want to be in them because they are political events. A parade displays a community to itself. A parade is a mirror that is held up to the members of a community that says, “This is who you are. This is what you are supposed to look like. This is how you should be arranged, organized, structured.” Someone comes first in a parade. Someone comes last. A parade rewards someone for embodying the community’s values. A parade excludes some, too, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose.
Parades are most often organized by the community powers that be. They do it in order to have some fun, yes, but also to reinforce the values that make them the powers that be.
But parades don’t have to be advertisements for the status quo. Parades can mock. Parades can stand the status quo on its head. Parades can present a different view of things. Parades can say, “This is how ridiculous you look to us!” Parades can say, “This is how the world should look.”
This was just as true in Jesus’ day as it is in ours.
Most of the parades were organized by the one percent. Some parades were an official part of a festival celebrating some god or goddess. Priests carrying holy objects would move from place to place with the followers of the god or goddess arranged in order. One sort of parade was called a triumph, triumphus in Latin. The Roman Senate could award this honor to a general who had won a important military victory or concluded an important military campaign. The parade was led by the members of the Senate and the leading families of Rome, followed by the captured commander (if any) and other captors. Then might come some animals typical of the place where the battle had happened, especially if the animals were considered exotic. Then came the victor himself followed by his army. They came unarmed, since no armed military unit was allowed to enter Rome itself. The victor wore a laurel wreath, but surrendered it to the god Jupiter in his temple.
We can see how all of this lifted up the virtues of ancient Rome: military aggressiveness, audacity and courage. It also celebrated humility, since someone who was aggressive, audacious and brave could be a danger to the state if he got “ideas.”
But what about the parade that we celebrate and even imitate today? What’s going on here? What is Jesus up to?
Clearly, this has all been planned. Jesus has arranged, even before his arrival in Jerusalem, for a donkey to ride. Why a donkey? We do know that the donkey was the favored mount for ancient kings of Judah. And we know that the minor prophet Zechariah wrote this:
“Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion.
Sing aloud, Daughter Jerusalem.
Look, your king will come to you.
He is righteous and victorious.
He is humble and riding on an ass,
on a colt, the offspring of a donkey.”1
Okay, but I don’t see that Jesus has been victorious, at least not any of the usual sense of the word. And he isn’t a king in any sense.
But he might be making a claim or at least aware that people could think that he was. The crowd shouts “Hosanna! Blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessing on the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest!” The first part of that shout—“Hosanna! Blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”—is from Psalm 118:26. But the next part shows that they might have connected Jesus and David whose kingdom the crowd seems to welcome. But Jesus later says that he is not descended from David, so maybe the crowd doesn’t have all the information it needs.
So what is going on here? I think it’s street theater. With a simple prop—a donkey—Jesus has gathered a flash mob. The prop is ambiguous. It can be read a number of ways. The crowd reads it as a royal claim of some kind. Or it could be that Jesus is mocking these hopes for a new David. He never claims to be David’s heir. He never claims to be anyone, except maybe this very strange figure called “the Human One” whatever that might mean.
Maybe Jesus was providing the people of his day with a kind of screen on which they could see whatever they wanted to see. The ordinary people saw an ally in their struggle to live ordinary lives in the face of the one percenters of their world. The one percenters, on the other hand, saw a threat to their power and privilege.
I think this was deliberate. Jesus is there to pick a fight with the powers that be, but not the sort of fight that a pretender to the throne of David would have picked. Jesus has a more ambitious agenda than simply replacing Roman rule and Jewish collaboration with his own one-man regime. Jesus sees behind the regimes that come and go to the domination system itself. Jesus sees that no matter how you dress it up, even in the scarlet of the legions with the blessing of the gods, violence will never change a system based on violence. They can call it justice if they want, but Jesus knows that it’s just violence in the service of the status quo. He intends to overthrow the whole system. He intends to strip the pretense of justice away from the rulers’ exercise of violence. He intends to absorb the violence of the system into his own body and lay bare the basic injustice of his world.
This bit of street theater will lead, Jesus knows, to another in which the regime will pretend to have justice on their side as they murder him. This bit of theater will rattle the cages of the one percent. The next bit of street theater will bring the end of the regime itself. The priests and other collaborators will play their part, the Roman governor will play his part, the crowd and the disciples will play their parts. But Jesus is scripting the whole thing and the powerful people—the ones who think they are in charge—can’t do anything to stop it.
Jesus is paying a terrible price, because he knows that there is no way around his own death, as much as he would like for that cup to pass him by. Jesus is taking a terrible risk, too, because he will no longer control his own message. That will fall to his disciples and to us. And only time will tell whether that price and that risk will have been justified.
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1Zechariah 9:9, CEB.
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