Sermons
March 24, 2024 (Palm Sunday)
“I am your king.”
Mark 11:1-11; 14:3-9
There is not an audio recording of the sermon this week due to technical difficulties.
One of my seminary professors used to introduce lessons from time to time by imagining phone conversations between movie studio execs and Cecil B. DeMille as he worked on his epic films about the Bible.
“You want to do it how? Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem with leafy branches and coats on the road? What about the waving palms? The great crowds shouting ‘Hosanna’ as their King rides into town in triumph? Aren’t you going to have any of that? Where’s the royal splendor, the drama, the grand Technicolor experience?”
Isn’t that how we picture the scene—perhaps courtesy of Cecil B. DeMille and others, most notably Franco Zeffirelli, who’ve made films about Jesus? The Gospels are all very clear that Jesus rides an unbroken colt or a young donkey, so that’s always the case in the films, but still he’s coming into town on one of the main streets, with the entire city of Jerusalem lining the roadway, greeting him with palm branches waving and shouts of acclamation as though he were a monarch returning to the city after a great military victory. In Zeffirelli’s TV miniseries, a bystander actually says, piously, as Jesus rides by, “Welcome to our city.”
But you just heard Mark’s version.
DeMille and Zeffirelli and the movie execs would be bitterly disappointed with it. You just can’t quite get a grand Technicolor spectacle out of this thing. There are no palms waving, just leafy branches laid on the road, along with the cloaks of some of the people who were there with him. It doesn’t appear that the people shouting “Hosanna!” as Jesus rode the donkey were people from the city of Jerusalem, but just Jesus’ followers, the people who were traveling with him. It actually doesn’t look like the procession even goes all the way into the city—it all appears to happen outside the city walls.
What is going on here? This is not a Triumphal Entry.
So, what is it?
My guess is that this is a piece of street theater. That isn’t necessarily how we think about Jesus and his disciples, is it? A ragtag bunch of players, putting on a performance that makes some kind of a point? And what point are they trying to make?
What is certain is that they’re acting out a prophecy from Zechariah, a prophecy that came to be interpreted as being about the Messiah:
“Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”[1]
The prophecy goes on to say that this king will overthrow the powers that oppress Jerusalem and command peace among all nations; and that he will rule over the entire earth.
Mark’s first hearers may have found another story coming to mind, from 2 Kings 9. In that passage, after Elisha anoints a military commander named Jehu as king over Israel, with the charge to overthrow Ahab’s son and successor, Joram, who was currently on the throne in Samaria. He does this in secret, and Jehu tells only his closest advisors about it; but then when he comes out of the house where he had met with Elisha, they spread their cloaks on the steps as they proclaim him to be their king.
This story certainly would have come to mind when the events of our second reading for today took place: Jesus anointed in the privacy of a friend’s dining room by an unnamed woman who was functioning in the role of a prophet like Elisha.
We are more familiar with Luke’s and John’s versions of this event—all four Gospels include an account of a woman anointing Jesus, but Luke and John have her anointing his feet, while Matthew and Mark describe a woman pouring the precious substance on his head. This one detail makes this version a scene in which a woman of power, a prophet, acts as God’s messenger to identify the one God has chosen to be king—as Elisha does to Jehu in 2 Kings 9, and as Samuel does to David in 2 Samuel 16.
But again, to what end does Jesus process right up to the city walls on a donkey, not on a main thoroughfare but more likely down a back street? What point is he trying to make? Is it a parody of the actual parades and processions the Romans liked to engage in—where oftentimes a victorious military leader would come into a city belonging to a defeated people, perhaps with the leader of that people in chains? Or where Roman authorities would parade in as a show of force when there was the possibility of unrest among the subject peoples? It isn’t unthinkable that at the moment Jesus’ parade theater takes place, that kind of Roman parade was happening on the main street of the town.
Or was it a dramatization of Jesus’ message, what he’s been saying throughout the Gospel: the kingdom of God is at hand? That could be, especially since the bystanders are quoting from the 118th Psalm, which has royal and even messianic overtones.
I suspect it’s both—on the one hand, a subversive message about the Roman powers-that-be, what God might really think about their claims of authority; and on the other hand, a reminder that God’s kingdom is not the same kind of kingdom as the ones we see here on earth. But if it was just acted out on a back street, among Jesus’ followers, and the procession doesn’t even go into Jerusalem itself, which appears to be the case here, then what do they hope to achieve?
Mark leaves so much unsaid, unexplained, unclear. Is it just acted out for the sake of Jesus’ followers, something they’ll understand later? I just don’t know—and it’s hard for me to imagine the Roman authorities getting wind of it, or finding it much of a threat to them.
Mark’s description of what happens next is also pretty understated: Jesus goes on into town—no mention of anybody going with him, although I imagine some folks did—goes into the temple and looks around, and then he and the twelve disciples go back out to Bethany, where they’re evidently staying while they’re in the area. John’s Gospel tells us Jesus had friends in Bethany: Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead; and Lazarus’ sisters Mary and Martha. Maybe he stayed with them, letting the women who followed him stay inside the house while he camped with the men in the yard.[2]
The next morning he gets up and goes with his disciples back to Jerusalem, back to the temple. Maybe the little piece of street theater the day before didn’t attract a whole lot of attention, but what comes next sure does.
It makes me wonder what the conversation the night before, over the supper table in Bethany, might have been like. Jesus had gone into the temple and looked around—and he must have seen what went on there, the money-changing and selling of animals.
There’s a variety of explanations out there for why these things appear to have upset Jesus so. Some say there may have been a bit of a racket going on. You could, according to this line of thinking, only use one particular coin to pay the temple tax, and whatever money you had with you had to be exchanged for that particular coin. Those who did the exchanging would have charged for the service, maybe just a little, or maybe whatever they thought they could get away with, just like with the folks who collected Rome’s taxes and took more than Rome required as their own income. And animals brought in from outside for the sacrifices had to be unblemished on inspection by temple officials; it’s possible those animals were routinely deemed blemished, so you had to buy an approved animal from one of the temple merchants, quite possibly at inflated prices.
Others suggest all of this money-changing and animal-selling was happening in the part of the temple grounds where a non-Jew could go to pray and seek the presence of God. That would actually satisfy both the prophecies Jesus quotes here: the one from Isaiah that proclaims God’s house “a house of prayer for all peoples,”[3] and another from Jeremiah in which the prophet denounces the temple having become “a den of robbers.”[4] Anyone, even a Gentile, who wanted to seek the presence of the God of Israel was supposed to have been able to enter this part of the temple grounds to pray; but the middle of a marketplace isn’t exactly conducive to prayer.
I don’t know enough, really, about first-century Jewish religious practices to be able to evaluate these suggestions. I’ve heard them from some people, and then I’ve heard others say there is no evidence to support them.
In any case, Jesus went into the temple that day and made a scene. Maybe it was, again, a bit of theatrics—I can’t imagine, once he left, that the moneychangers and animal merchants didn’t come right back in and get right back down to business. But this time he got the attention of the religious leaders—who were collaborators with Rome to shore up their own power.
Rome may not have seen Jesus as much of a threat, but the religious leaders in Jerusalem sure did. The crowds were spellbound by Jesus’ teaching—maybe they’d never been all that spellbound by the teaching of the chief priests and scribes—and what he was teaching, not to mention his dramatic spectacle among the merchants and moneychangers in the temple, was definitely not sympathetic to the way the chief priests and scribes were doing things.
Mark is pretty clear that this is the beginning of the end,[5] the event that set off their efforts to do away with Jesus—efforts that, as we will remember later on this week, eventually proved successful…or so they thought.
[1] Zechariah 9:9
[2] I can see people suggesting that if they were staying at Lazarus’ house, Jesus would have been the one to stay in the house, because he was the Teacher and the leader of the group. But knowing what we know of Jesus from the Gospels, I feel like he would have given up that place of honor to those among his followers who would have appreciated a bit more comfort, not to mention safety.
[3] Isaiah 56:7
[4] Jeremiah 7:11
[5] Matthew and Luke are, too. The exception is John, who places this story at the beginning, not the end, of Jesus’ public ministry (John 2:13-22); for John, the last straw was Jesus’ raising of Lazarus (11:1-44), not the cleansing of the temple.