Palm Sunday A

The gospel lesson for this Sunday is Matthew 21.1-11. In The Last Week Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan say the Palm Sunday story is a piece of street theatre meant to contrast with a Roman military procession into Jerusalem. They say Pilate would have come into Jerusalem for Passover to keep a lid on things, and he would have come in with a typical display of Roman power. Jesus, in a street theatre reference to Zechariah 9, reminds the crowds of a king who comes into Jerusalem in humility, on a donkey, to banish war and bring peace. While in Mark the reference remains implicit, carried by the structure of the narrative, here in Matthew the reference is explicit. Matthew quotes Zechariah 9.9: “Tell the daughters of Zion, look, you king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

I find the thought that Jesus is challenging what Borg and Crossan call the “domination system” compelling and preachabe. But the Zechariah story properly belongs to the Jewish festival of Sukkoth, in the autumn, not Passover. So I have always wondered if the Palm Sunday story might actually describe something that had happened half a year earlier. Was the timeline collapsed in order to heighten the dramatic tension of what, liturgically, we call “Holy Week”? Surely half a year would have given a more reasonable amount of time for the Galilean Jesus to develop a reputation in Jerusalem and get in trouble with the authorities.

Or what if the Palm Sunday story is simply Mark’s midrsh on Zechariah? What if the Palm Sunday story is Mark’s way of interpreting Zechariah’s prophetic, messianic hope by re-telling it in a narrative starring Jesus, in the same way that Mark’s crucifixion story is a midrash on Psalm 22, or in the same way that Mark’s baptism story is an interpretation of the Exodus story?

The Jewish practice of interpretating a verse by re-telling it in a different form was fundamental to its rhetorical culture. Nothing could be left alone. Everything had to be told twice. I love what Gerald Bruns says about the rabbinic passion for interpretation by re-telling:

The rabbis themselves…were never embarrassed by hermeneutics: “the rabbis said: Solomon had three thousand parables to illustrate each and every verse [of Scripture]; and a thousand and five interpretations for each and every parable”—which computes to a total of three million fifteen thousand interpretations for every scriptural verse. From a modern standpoint, which pictures a solitary reader isolated with the scriptural text and trying to divine an interpretation…this interpretive extravagance is outrageous; but the rabbis are not to be pictured this way. Their relationship to the text was always social and dialogical, and even when confined to the house of study (beit midrash) it was never merely formalist or analytical. They saw themselves in dialogue with each other and with generations of wise men extending back to Koheleth and Solomon (and even beyond to Moses and to God himself, who is frequently pictured as studying his own texts) and forward to the endless openings of the Scriptures upon new questions that are put to them. Gerald Bruns, ‘Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation,’ in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Fontana, 1987), 630.

You see this need to repeat and clarify in the most familiar texts, in Psalm 24, for instance, where everything needs to be said twice in order to clarify:

The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof;
the world, and they that dwell therein.
For he hath founded it upon the seas,
and established it upon the floods.
Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD?
or who shall stand in his holy place?
He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart;
who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive the blessing from the LORD,
and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

We get this in Zechariah. The king comes “mounted on a colt, the foal of a donkey”. And this leads to one of the most bizarre details of Matthew’s Palm Sunday story. Matthew, making explicit what was merely implicit in Mark, quotes Zecharaiah 9 and seems to take it literally:

"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. … This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, “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. Matthew 21:2-7

Does Matthew imagine Jesus to be riding into Jerusalem straddling two beasts at once? Or is he deliberately throwing into the story an element impossible to take literally, in order to teach how to read it, not literally, but as a narrative whose function is to serve as an interpretation of Zechariah?

Can an obsession with what actually happened to the historical Jesus lead us to overlook how first century writers actually wrote and thought? The wealth of sociological and historical research over the last twenty or thirty years has added immeasurably to our understanding of the Christ event. But we can;t allow that to obscure what is happening from a literary point of view. It seems to me Matthew saw Mark’s story as the midrash it was (an interpretation in narrative of the Zechariah that helps us understand the Christ event) and wanted his readers to get the point. The point is proclamation, not history.

Interpretation is the key in another sense. Our response to the text is an interpretation. As the reformers said, Scripture doesn’t become the Word of God until it is preached, and even then not until it is lived out in the lives of the faithful (the end point of the interpretive process in praxis).

First of all, simply as a story, Palm Sunday begs “interpretation” in dramatic action. This Sunday is customarily played out in our churches with dramatic processions enacted by the congregation. At University Church in Chicago the whole congregation would make a public procession around the block on Palm Sunday. I remember one hazardous Palm Sunday when the sidewalks were covered with a thin hard sheet of ice. Back inside for worship, the dance choir pranced energetically down the central aisle shaking noisy palm branches which they then laid on the steps at the front of the sanctuary as they bowed in reverence at the conclusion of this entrance rite.

Here in the UK, in Birmingham, at Weoley Hill Church, the Scouts and the Guides and the Brownies and the Cubs would process in while the rest of us were singing loud hosannas. One of the Venture Scouts, with long auburn hair—the recognizable kitsch image of our Lord—would dress in a white alb and be carried on the shoulders of his fellows while all the rest of the young people in the parade waves palms. Here at City Church the young people come in waving branches while the choir sings a version of “76 Trombones” (“Jesus rode into town in a big parade”, see worship resources on the church website) then act out the story as it unfolds from Palm Sunday through the crucifixion and death of Jesus. (Unlike Mark, Matthew has the Palm Sunday procession flow into the rest of the story, highlighting the theme of confrontation in driving out the money changers from the temple.)

In Matthew’s version of the story, on Jesus entering Jerusalem, “the whole city was in turmoil, asking, "Who is this?" (21.10). In Birmingham, I would use a roving microphone to interview people in the crowd, asking what this hoopla was all about. Jack Thompson, one of the theologians teaching at West Hill College, was particularly hilarious in giving an absolutely opaque Christological discourse as a way of parodying the theological take on Jesus. My favourite interview of them all was with Chris Mayhew, who wore a donkey mask and spoke in a rough Kentish farm labourer’s accent to give the donkey’s eye view of the excitement. We were convinced that this is what the donkey would sound like, could he speak.

We did these interviews in order to convey the sense in Matthew’s version of the story that no one really knows what is going on. It’s like the parable of the final judgement, Matthew 25.31-46, in which no one knows who Jesus is when they see him. The crowd thinks it is all about triumph. What the Palm Sunday procession really stand in contrast to is the via dolorosa, the way of the cross. It does this in two ways. On the one hand, as a triumphal, messianic entry into Jerusalem it stands in contrast to the way of the cross as the way of defeat and shame. But on the other, it actually prefigures the cross to which it stands in contrast. It reveals, in the tension of Zechariah’s conflicting messianic images—the king who rides a donkey—the paradox of the cross as the real moment of triumph that re-interprets all messianic expectation. Insofar as Jesus, crucified in the company of the condemned (the three crosses make an image of a new community of solidarity and inclusion, or "at-one-ment"), is demonstrating unflinching fidelity here, fidelity to God and to neighbour, even at the moment of his suffering and death, the cross affirms the Palm Sunday celebration rather than contradicts it. This, of course, is the fundamental Christian paradox. As the reformers said, the kingdom of God is hidden under its contrary, the cross. Neither the people nor the disciples nor the authorities understand what is going on at Palm Sunday. The process of interpretation needs the cross, and what we might call the discipleship of the cross, to be complete. As the fidelity of the cross is lived out in the fidelity of the people, the stories of tradition have a chance to become the Word of God, not just proclaimed but understood and lived. The Palm Sunday story begs dramatic play, and more. The story calls us to "interpret" it by the way we live, in our own confrontation with the powers and principalities of our world. Without living through the whole story the fundamental mystery of Christianity is lost. Sadly, more often than not our congregations are like the crowds in the original story. They just don;t get it. All they want is Easter, so they never eally get what their faith has to offer.

In Matthew the procession reaches a triumphal climax in the dramatic conflict experienced at the temple. The procession begins at the Mount of Olives, which in Zechariah 14.4 is identified as the location for the final struggle of the day of the Lord. This eschatological dimension of the story is not to be missed. The coming of Jesus into Jerusalem is like the coming of the Son of Man. The stories of judgement and conflict that are part of the vision for the Day of the Lord are told here in the life of Jesus and in present-time, in the life of the believer. It is like the confrontation people feel on the path of conversion. There is confusion and disorientation. There is praise, but often for the wrong reason, and we won’t know the right reason until we see the story all the way to the end, and say Amen to it with our own lives.

“Hosanna” is a Hebrew word that means “deliver us!” or “save us!”. It’s the kind of word one shouts out loud or deep inside the soul when one becomes conscious that the way things are isn’t the way things ought to be. Deliver us from the domination system, Borg and Crossan would say. We want a messiah who will rescue us. It’s one of the stages on the pilgrimage to conversion. On Easter we shout something different: “Alleluia!”, another Hebrew word. This one means “praise the Lord!”. It’s the kind of thing we shout when we see that our salvation is tied to our discipleship, and the way we learn to empty ourselves, as Christ did, for others. Christ 'R' Us. On Easter, the baptized, those who have died and been reborn with Christ, shout “Alleluia!”