Well, here we are, at the place we arrive every year: Palm Sunday, gateway to Holy Week. Now, if that sounds like a tourist slogan—See! The disciples gathered ‘round the table! Witness! How just a little spilled salt can upset an entire career—if it sounds like a tourist slogan, that’s how we treat Holy Week, as outside observers of a great pageant. And in some ways, that’s not a bad way to think about it. After all, Holy Week is a week of Holy signs, Holy symbolic actions, which we observe every year. And they don’t call it observance for nothing.
And here’s the thing: One of the biggest symbolic actions of all is Jesus’ riding into Jerusalem on that colt and/or donkey. It is an action that symbolizes something. We just have to figure out what it is supposed to symbolize to us.
Right at the outset, it’s clear that Jesus plans and executes it carefully so that it is a symbolic act. He tells his disciples exactly where to go, and what to do when they get there. And what he plans is a messianic entrance to Jerusalem. As theologian James Duke writes, the story, common to all four gospels, “takes place amid the swirl of messianic expectations during the age of Second Temple Judaism.” These expectations were many and diverse, calling for in some cases the violent overthrow of the Roman occupying forces and their Jewish collaborators. Jesus carefully sets the scene so that these messianic expectations are aroused . . . and in the end, subverted as well.
Although the scene is in all four gospels, it is not told exactly the same in each. In particular, Matthew—often considered the most Jewish of the evangelists—wants to make sure his audience really gets it that Jesus is the messianic fulfilment of Hebrew scripture. To that end, his version is the only one that contains what biblical scholars call a fulfilment quotation, which begins with “This took place to fulfil . . .” And the prophecy that it had taken place to fulfil was from Zechariah, who said “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” That’s why in Matthew—and Matthew alone—Jesus carefully instructs his disciples to go and find two animals: “"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.” Which the disciples do, and Matthew dutifully tells us, with no apparent irony or sense of incredulity, that Jesus mounts both animals and heads into Jerusalem.
And I’ve always chuckled at this, that Matthew is so literal—or perhaps so, how shall we say it . . . dull . . . that he misses the fact that Zechariah is writing poetically, and the chief attribute of Hebrew poetry is parallelism, the repetition of a lines, in slightly different formats, for emphasis. Thus, when Zechariah says “your king will come, humble, riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey” he doesn’t mean the king will ride on two animals, but the line “on a colt, the foal of a donkey” is a poetic repetition of “riding on a donkey,” repeated to emphasize the fact that it will be a donkey. And after all, every donkey is the foal of a donkey, including the one he rode in on.
Over the years, I’ve imagined this scene: Jesus, riding on a donkey and a smaller donkey as well, maybe like a rodeo trick rider, standing with a foot on each, both sets of reigns in hand, or maybe like John Wayne in Stagecoach, stopping a speeding stage by crawling over multiple horses. But just recently, I came across what is now my favorite visualization: a cartoon showing a donkey with a smaller one on his back, and with Jesus sitting on the smaller one’s back, giving a thumbs up sign, and saying “Heeey!” And the poor bottom donkey is saying “I feel stoopid.”
The guy who drew that cartoon, one Thomas Whitley, derides Matthew for this in his blog, saying he “apparently didn’t understand the Hebrew parallelism in the original text . . . Moreover, Matthew apparently didn’t realize the lunacy of saying that Jesus rode both a donkey and a colt simultaneously.” And for a while, I agreed with this rather smug assessment—I know, right? Me, smug?—but something always bothered me about it, always niggled at the back of my mind. If Matthew was a good Jew, if his was the most Jewish of gospels—as scholars, and Whitley, insist—what are the odds that he didn’t understand Hebrew poetry? After all, there are indications that he was well versed in Hebrew literary tropes—such as chiasmata or inclusios—elsewhere in his gospel. Why wouldn’t he understand this very basic feature of Hebrew poetry?
As I puzzled over this, it came to me: what if Matthew understood very well what he was doing? What if he knew all about Hebrew poetry, knew that Zechariah meant only one donkey, and what if he interpreted it literally on purpose? Then the image of Jesus riding awkwardly around on two animals is one he wanted us to have, he wanted us to imagine “circus Jesus,” to picture the absurdity of it all. And then I thought: what a subversive thing to do, and that’s when I became convinced. Because the whole thing is subversive, the whole thing is most ironic. Jesus set the whole thing up to be that way: after all, he’s the one who chose a donkey, the most humble of conveyances . . .
As biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan point out, no King of any worldly state would be caught dead riding into town on a donkey, he’d have a white destrier, a prancing, snorting stallion at the very least. And Borg and Crossan speculate that there indeed was such a ruler riding into Jerusalem that day, on the opposite side of town: they write that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate entered Jerusalem to personally oversee the quelling of any violence that might erupt because of the Passover. And they go so far as to suppose that Jesus set up his entrance to Jerusalem to mock that specific entrance.
Whether or not that is true, Matthew’s account of that entrance both upholds and subverts the messianic expectations of the day, and I think—the most Jewish gospel writer that he was—he deliberately adds just a little extra fillip of ridiculousness to the whole picture. After all, his audience consisted of largely educated, perhaps wealthy, Jews, and they would have no problem picking up on it all . . . they would recognize that the whole thing is a most delicious, a most ingenious paradox, and that it would heighten their understanding and appreciation of just what kind of Messiah they had gotten for themselves.
It’s the same paradox that Paul speaks of so eloquently over in 1st Corinthians: foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, and indeed it points out just how foolish, and how ultimately ridiculous the rich and powerful rulers are in God's sight. Matthew's picture of a king trying to ride two animals, no matter how humble they are, reminds me of the over-the-top symbolic actions associated with the Hebrew prophets. Take Hosea: god commands him to "take ... a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord." Or Ezekiel who, following God's direction, (a) eats a scroll, (b) makes a model of Jerusalem out of a brick, (c) lies on one side for 390 days and the other for 40, and (d) preaches to the brick. And that’s just one of the actions he is commanded to perform.
Whether Jesus actually rode into two on two donkeys or not--and I suspect that he did not--Matthew seems to have been bent on portraying at least a little of that prophetic over-the-topness. He is having Jesus perform a ridiculous symbolic act that shows the ultimate folly of worldly power.
God's ways are not our ways ... To the world it is foolish to worship a crucified king, one who rode into Jerusalem in triumph on one day, on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey, and less than a week later had been murdered, spiked to a crossbeam, in about as painful way a person could die. Because that's the message of this brilliant piece of political theater, and Matthew's equally brilliant portrayal of it. Worldly power is fleeting, it is as ridiculously foolish as a man trying to ride on two donkeys ... A man who, though he is king, son of god, nevertheless rode into town humble, on a beat of burden, like a sack of potatoes.
And the lesson is still sharp today, isn't? Vladimir Putin lets himself be photographed shirtless, muscles bulging, riding a horse. Ronald Reagan cultivated his image as a lone gunslinger, Gary Cooper standing over against the Soviet menace. Talking heads and political opponents castigate a president who doesn't talk tough enough to other nations, using the buzzwords "irresolute," or wishy-washy when what they mean is not war-like, not saber-rattling enough. Franklin Roosevelt hid the fact he was in a wheel chair from the American people because he knew that it read “weak” in the photographs. Or, imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush riding into Washington on a donkey, lanky feet dragging the ground, smiling and waving to the crowds. What would the talking heads be saying?
World leaders have a distressing way of claiming to be Christian and doing the most unchristian things … you can go on YouTube and find a video of Vladimir Putin, scourge of the Crimea and Ukraine, talking about his baptism. And here in our country—and I will not name names—we’ve had presidents who have gone to church on Sunday and defended water-boarding on Monday, who’ve sung Amazing Grace one day and ordered drone attacks the next.
That's not what Christianity is about. It isn't about the one with the most troops or the better generals winning. It's not about the rich always getting their way. God's way is foolishness to the nations, to the world, and nothing shows it more than Palm Sunday, when the king of the universe rode into town, feet dragging the ground, on a donkey and a colt, the foal of a donkey. Amen.
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