Article
- Date:
- Sunday 28th March 2021
Year B, Palm Sunday - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Service of the Word
- Readings:
- Mark 11.1-11
As is so often the case, Mark's account of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem is the simplest: in John a "great crowd" bring palm branches where Mark does not specify the tree; Matthew has the confusing account of two donkeys and the words of Zechariah 9.9; and Luke makes the occasion almost private to the Disciples. The obvious Biblical reference, however, is not to a possible prophesy but to an historic event, the dying King David's instruction that his chosen son Solomon should take his father's royal mule and ride into the city of Jerusalem to claim his throne, a reference echoed in the chanting of David's name which greeted Jesus (1 Kings 1.33-34, echoed by 1 Maccabees 13.5).
This is one of the many incidents which is, unfortunately, part of the New Testament's panoply of anti-Semitic texts which is based on two false assumptions of which Mark is innocent. The first is that the religious authorities were, in some way, acting wrongly in wanting to shut down the activities of Jesus. By any standard of the time, he was properly classed as a political "bandit" and was executed as such, the idea that he was crucified between thieves is a simple mistranslation. The second error is more serious however, this is that the same crowd which cheered Jesus with palms only five days later called for his death. There is not a shred of evidence for this. It is as if a London demonstration of the Countryside Alliance in favour of hunting was followed five days later by an animal rights march; there may have been a hostile crowd very early in the morning on what we call Good Friday but that is much less likely than a boisterous crowd on what we call Palm Sunday. Just as we quite frequently explain differences in the Gospels by saying that the evangelists had different agendas, or priorities, or theological points of view, it is important to acknowledge that one of the key agendas of some Evangelists was to differentiate Christianity from Judaism by the use of aggressive language and also to blame the Jews for what happened in order to exonerate the Romans in whose Empire the new religion was spreading. This means that we have to be very careful in how we understand the Bible as the Word of God.
Where does this incident fit into the grand drama of the Passion and death of Jesus? First, it does not constitute a military threat as many self-proclaimed Messiahs did before and after Jesus but, then, the Marcos family was overthrown in the Philippines without a rebel shot being fired. Secondly, therefore, the demonstration posed a political threat to the religious authorities which were only allowed to operate by King Herod and the Romans as long as there was no trouble. Thirdly, there is strong evidence that Jesus did nothing offhand and that the Evangelists wrote nothing offhand. This was a deliberate provocation, followed in the Synoptic Gospels by the provocation in the Temple and the publicly delivered parable of the murder of the son of the owner of the vineyard. Jesus clearly thought that his time had come. He came into Jerusalem as openly as anyone could and condemned the religious authorities as clearly as anyone could.
So, what are we celebrating today, and can we do this without getting ensnared in the anti-Semitic history of Christianity?
To answer this, we need to put ourselves into the minds of the crowds who shouted "Hosanna!", "save us!" What could they have meant by that? The popular theory is that the Jews wanted their Messiah to liberate them from the Romans and that, indeed, Judas, as a known political radical, epitomised this desire; but to think that the crowd thought that Jesus was this kind of Messiah is outlandish for they had heard a teacher and seen a healer and I suspect that the best they could hope for was that he would somehow change the religious dispensation and perhaps abolish the Temple Tax. Jesus himself said repeatedly that his purpose was to save Israel from its long-standing collective sin of idolatry and thoughtful people will have inferred from his actions that this meant Temple reform and some kind of new religious order. And I doubt that many there, when they said or heard the word "save", thought of the after-life. Whatever anybody believed, however, it is impossible to lump everybody together and say they all believed the same thing.
Having got this far, understanding how the Chosen People were to be saved, we can now proceed to ourselves. And here the Gospels are split. The earlier the document, the more emphasis there is on the end of time being a union of God's will on earth as it is in heaven; the later the document, the more emphasis there is on the soul being saved for an ethereal heaven, a tendency the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine insisted upon as he could not possibly tolerate Christ's reign on earth; salvation had to be enjoyed at a distance as far away from earth as it was possible to go.
And so it is that, depending on what we read, on our tradition and our temperament, we have different mental pictures of what it means to be saved; and as long as all of these pictures put Christ at the centre of our future, now and forever, they are fine, with the proviso that they are at the centre of "Our" collective future, not at the centre of "my" individual future. Jesus only died for me insofar as he died for us; he only died for my sinfulness insofar as he died for the world's sin, not only its sin of commission but also its sin of omission. I know this not because of my individual preference, or my individual concern for my individual sinfulness but because, however you understand the word Ekklesia, Jesus wanted his followers to live and die in community and he prefaced his gift of the Lord's Prayer with the observation that we are especially blessed when gathered together.
We are now on the road with Jesus but no matter how we understand it, this is the easy part. May we stay to the end, to the closing of the tomb.