One Clop After Another
Palm Sunday
When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:
“Tell the daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”
Matthew 21:1-11
Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna, they cried. “Deliver us, save us!” We might have pictured this scene in our heads a thousand times and seen it in a movie or two. What was it like to be there, in that old city on the hill? What was it like to be at the start of a revolution? Dirt underneath your nails and your sandals—really, where couldn’t dirt get to in those days—each day a battle for survival, hungry for bread but starving for hope. And there hope was, riding the beast of burden and its baby colt like a sidecar in a motorcade. A panoply of cloaks lining the road, needed not for anything practical, just fulfilling the finally-here prophet, the true righteous heir to David’s throne, the teacher, the Master, the king. It wasn’t a hard day for Jesus to find believers. If you put your thumb on a garden hose and sprayed anywhere inside the walls of Jerusalem, the “city of peace” that had seen centuries of war, you couldn’t count how many Jesus fans you’d hit. Some of the city was just learning who he was, but the crowd knew, at least, they thought they knew. They chose their king. They chose Jesus. So they thought.
Jesus chose this parade on this day knowing what was going to happen to him. We know he knew he was surrounded by people who didn’t know they would betray him. He knew that the rainbow road of cloaks and palms was a road into darkness. How could anyone but him know that the sound of the trot into hell would be donkey clops?
But because the Son of God is, among his other roles, a lover of the prophetically poetic, he chose a donkey. He chose this day to paint this scene into the minds of those who would only later understand its meaning. And he chose his friends despite themselves; he would tell them during their final meal together, a meal we will celebrate and remember again later this week, “You did not choose me. But I chose you.” (John 15:16)
If you can hear it, he says this to you too. You might protest, like the crowds might have had he been so blunt, “Jesus, we do choose you as king!” They thought they were choosing Jesus. But they chose an idea of Jesus. When Jesus did not live up to their idea of a Messiah, they turned on him. The crowds here, his biggest fans, shouting, “We choose you, prophet of Galilee!” That’s one part of him, but not all. “We choose you, Son of David!” Another part. But not all. “We choose you, the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” “We choose you, king, save us!”
They picked part of him. We pick part of him. We pick our favorite ideas of him, but we don’t pick all of him. Again, Jesus tells his closest friends, “You didn’t really pick me. I picked you.” And he did choose you. He even chose the part of you that would kill him and leave him for dead today. Jesus chooses the part of you that is ready to abandon him the second you go back into the world.
If it is not clear by now, Palm Sunday is one of the most delicious ironies of our whole church calendar. I don’t know if you’re like me and you grew up with Palm Sunday kind of feeling like an Easter trailer, like “Pre-Easter,” or “PrEaster.” You got the greenery, the sun’s coming out, the warmth. But there’s a delicious irony baked in here: today, we celebrate in pomp and circumstance to echo the crowds that celebrated Jesus and who would betray him. Really, it’s a day where humanity’s fickleness, our capricious lust for attaching ourselves to power, and the hypocrisy of all Jesus followers are on display. Our thirst for being the winner in the story, for being on the hero’s side, is on display today.
When we came to faith by grace, we might have chosen the idea of Jesus that we liked. In Holy Week, after the crowd’s palms and loyalty have been blown away by the first breeze, if we read with honesty and humility, we will see more of ourselves than we might like in these gospel pages. Maybe we won’t see ourselves in every sin along the stations of the cross, but if we are honest with ourselves, we will sit with and meditate on the story of our Lord and confront in ourselves how much we haven’t and still don’t choose Jesus once the stakes become real.
We will also learn that we are not alone. After all, it was a crowd. Peter didn’t choose the real Jesus. None of the twelve could—at least not before they saw who he was. Yet we do know their lives were changed afterward. We do know the apostles would go to their graves for this man they didn’t choose at first. While many of us have had seasons of doubt about the Resurrection, the people who were there and knew him didn’t have any seasons of doubt after a dead man showed up and blessed them with fish, bread, and living peace three days later.
But we’re getting too far ahead. We’re still in the joyful parade into darkness. And in fact, we can be joyful, not at how great we are, but in marveling how our God is bringing his mercy and deliverance and salvation hosannas we sing in the world. Just not how we expect it.
However big the crowd was that day, almost everybody would be gone by the time it was all over. There’d be a couple of women at the cross with him, the women who knew and loved him. There’d be a few Roman soldiers who didn’t know what they were witnessing until it was too late. A couple of thieves, only one of whom begged for mercy as Christ’s spirit cried out in agony. But the parade crowd was gone with the palms.
Earlier this week, I shared a poem in our newsletter by G.K. Chesterton, a strange poem about today called “The Donkey.” When you hear it, you may even recognize yourself:
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
If only we could see how God sees this whole order of creation unfolding, year after year after year billions of times. What would you see if you go through every single cosmic step, one molecule and volcanic eruption and ice age and explosion of life at a time, all through the living God who is in all and through all and for all things, and it is all building to an afternoon when the God who we will kill would choose to ride on the back of a donkey. What if you could see every single breath that has ever been breathed in the history of the universe had led to this moment: the God of all creation now chooses to be in the full, sins-and-all child that you are?
As Christians, maybe all we can really be is donkeys. If so, our Lord will still find a use for us. Even though you will fail to choose him many more times before all is said and done, Jesus will still find a holy use for you. He will always choose you.
There are many mysteries of our faith. You may not know why he blessed you with your life or with believing in him at all. Today, the mystery we sit with is that God chose us even when we were enthralled with the wrong ideas of him and ourselves. For God still chooses us even knowing we will betray him. And he will again. Amen.
