A Banner Day? Ps. 118:20-29; Jn. 12:12-19
I must have a lot of Odd in me. I say this because it is not the first time I’ve decided to quote the Dean Koontz fictional character known as “Odd Thomas” from the pulpit. I just love this series of supernatural, supercharged novels and the way the main character balances hope and heroism in the context of uncertainty and evil. Although the fourth and most current edition, titled Odd Hours, is my least favorite, I found one section quite relevant to consider for our slow march into Holy Week.
Chapter forty-four has Odd inside of a church. He is engaged, as usual, in a life and death struggle with a couple evil-intentioned villains. At one point, he retreats to a safer part of the church building by way of going through an enclosed walkway linking the sanctuary to an annex of some kind. The walls of this walkway, we are told, are adorned with the artwork of children. Each artistic offering highlights the actions of a “smiling bearded man in white robes” with a halo. Odd Thomas obviously realized this man must be Jesus.
As to the details of these actions, I’ll let our protagonist speak directly – “The Son of God, inadequately but earnestly rendered, was engaged in all manner of tasks that I did not recall being recounted in Scripture. Jesus with hands upraised, transforming a rain of bombs into flowers. Jesus smiling but shaking his finger at a pregnant woman about to drink a bottle of beer. Jesus saving a stranded polar bear from an ice floe. Jesus turning a flamethrower on stacks of crates labeled CIGARETTES … Jesus in a helicopter, rescuing livestock from a veal farm.”
This novel scene begs the question, “What kind of Savior do people expect Jesus to be?” A human Star Wars defense shield? A stern but loving teacher against self-inflicted harms? A rescuer and deliverer of endangered animals and idealistic causes?
Jesus’ entire life, of course, was lived under the weight of people’s expectations. You may well know a similar feeling, with its pressures to perform under a microscope and the constant threat of dashing hopes. In Jesus’ case, though, we are talking generations and generations and generations of people scrutinizing and idealizing him as the possible Savior of the World. And while we are blessed to read this historic account of Jesus’ entry in Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday from a post-Easter perspective, we cannot really understand what happened and why this is significant for our faith journeys today until we give some consideration to what the expectations were that made that such a banner day. The way we do this is to read the accounts of this triumphal entry as it comes to us through each of the four Gospels.
While each Gospel account is worth considering in great detail, today we focus on John. We do so for it is only in this Gospel that we have specific mention of palm branches. And it is also only in this Gospel that the day of the week of Jesus’ entry is specified as six days before the Passover remembrance. Since the Passover would have been held on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, this means he entered Jerusalem on a Sunday. Put it all together and we have John to credit for why we have “Palm Sunday.”
John’s Gospel is full of tremendous symbolism and irony. He loves to lead us to one conclusion and then turn it completely inside out in an effort for us to get the big picture about Jesus. Asking ourselves how the palm branches and the donkey are symbolic and are servants of John’s illuminating irony is essential to our grasping the meaning of this historic event.
Matthew’s Gospels mentions people cutting some kind of branches from trees (Matt. 21:8). Mark adds that these branches were “leafy.” (Mark 11:8). Luke is mute on the matter of branches. John, however, makes it clear that they were palm branches. Common enough for that region of the world, right? Everybody in the huge crowd who had gathered to welcome Jesus understood the deeper meaning of the palms, however.
Traditionally, palm branches were waved like victory banners. They symbolized the heroic, triumphal return of a king from battle. Now what good is waving a banner if you aren’t making some noise, right? Thus the palm waving crowd also shouted with joy and thanksgiving by quoting Psalm 118 – “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord – the King of Israel! Actually, John added the clarifier about the King of Israel, just to make sure his readers would never miss any of the meaning of the royal Psalm.
Try and picture the crowd. Some scholars believe that upwards of 250, 000 visitors would come, as required by religious law, to the lavish Temple in Jerusalem during Passover. This number would be added to the estimated 80, 000 residing in the great city. Ruling over the crowd, and the city, was Herod the Great, who was quite a character. He was a “proxy-king” fully allied with the overall governing power and might of the Roman Empire. He has been described as “Ten times married, a serious drinker and a half-Jew who was half-trusted by his subjects,” who “played the superpower politics of his day consummately.” To this end, he had largely kept down anti-Roman rebellions, and maintained order between the Temple priesthood and their pagan overseers.
The ministry of the lower-middle class teacher and healer who was Jesus, however, threatened to upend all of this. That the majority of the massive crowd had assumed Jesus’ arrival meant the overthrowing of Herod, of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and of the Roman Empire itself is well justified by the collective, historic witness to the people’s experience of Jesus’ miraculous power that we find in the Gospels.
We wave our special palm branches today (they are fashioned into crosses in an African village) to also hail Jesus as King. Go ahead … let me see some waving. You shout out some loud “Hosannas” if you feel so moved as well! What the crowd didn’t know at that time, and what even Jesus closest disciples ironically failed to realize, was that Jesus had no intention of meeting their royal expectations. He was not on course to claim an earthly throne of power, to play puppet politics under the thumb of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Emperor Augustus. He had not arrived in Jerusalem to be Rome’s “boy” nor to be the High Priest of the mighty Temple. He had arrived to passionately fulfill his reverent obedience and incarnation as the Son of God.
As we hold our palms, let’s also gaze upon the mighty, white stallion Jesus rode to town on to claim his divine reign. Oh, wait, we can’t. There wasn’t one. Oh, John, you did love your symbolic, ironic details don’t you? He tells us that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on, of all things, a donkey! Hosanna! Hosanna! Hee-haw, hee-haw! This decision of Jesus was not made randomly or for anyone’s amusement. It was a serious fulfillment of a prophecy about the “end times” offered by the ancient prophet Zechariah (Zech. 9:9).
Deeply divine humility would be the mark of the Messiah-King, not worldly political prowess. And, further, the message was that His reign would not ever come to end, it would still be standing strong at the consummation of all things of God.
Again, however, nobody on the scene that first Palm Sunday really understood what God had going on. It would take the quickly unfolding, terribly traumatic, conflicted and confusing events in the days that followed to get them better clued in. And it would take faithful hindsight following Jesus’ death and resurrection for all the pieces to fall into place.
Today, we stand with them waving our palms, sort of ignoring the donkey. It’s a banner day, though not quite all it appears to be according to our expectations. The most faithful thing we can do this morning is examine those expectations; ask ourselves why we palm branches in our palms. Who is this Jesus, really? What kind of power of God does he represent? To what end? Whatever the sum is of all our expectations, it is not too heavy for Jesus to carry. Check back this Thursday evening at 7 p.m. for a fuller report on this …
Amen.
