No Love for our Donkey-riding King

On the disciples went into the city to fulfill Jesus’ request. They are clueless as to why Jesus needs a donkey. They are clueless to the fact that they were participating in the in-breaking of God’s kingdom for Jerusalem. They are clueless they were fulfilling prophecy. Clueless Zechariah 9:9 says:

Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
Triumphant and victorious is he,
Humble and riding on a donkey” (NRSV)

But there they go . . . to get the donkey.

They grab the donkey and take it to Jesus. He hops on, rides through the dust-blown valley from Jericho to Jerusalem, marches up the steep Mount of Olives and sees the gloriousness of Jerusalem’s city gates. Filled with passion for this donkey-riding king the disciples move towards Jerusalem.

The disciples say to one another: “Finally! We’ve been following this man for three years and he’s been promising us a revolution, a change in the status quo. He’s told us he’s the rightful king and he is the prince of peace and finally today is the day he makes good on that claim.”

And you know how the story goes: A party ensues. Palm leaves are thrown. Cloaks are laid down. There’s cheering and crying; praising and singing. Boom bands are playing; it’s the parade everyone is waiting for. 

The king is finally here. The king is ready to take his seat at the thrown. The king is finally in the city where God’s presence dwells! The city of David! God and Zion are sharing in a glorious reunion.

And the disciples finally get to see it. All that work, all that confusion, all those parables and sermons, all those miles, boat rides, and miracles, speeches, and years are culminating in this glorious moment of celebration with all the people of this fair city with everyone singing, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD! . . .”

Palm Sunday is a celebration! Jesus has come to Zion, to the place where God’s presence dwells. Jesus, the one they call the heir of David, is the same one given to save God’s chosen people. And Jerusalem love him for it! Right?

Well that is how we tell the story.

But there’s irony in the story of our donkey-riding king. In five days he’s going to be betrayed, handcuffed, tortured, wrongfully accused, not given due process, and finally murdered. And all of this is going to be done by the people now praising his name. I don’t know of anyone other than Jesus who falls so far so fast out of the people’s favor.

Unless the parade wasn’t what we think it was. What if Jesus wasn’t met with boom bands or a parade of people?

Listen closely to the Luke’s story again: “As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they have seen, saying “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD.” (NRSV)

There’s no parade from the people of Jerusalem. There’s no triumphant entry for Luke. Instead, it’s the crazy disciples screaming in the streets about the power and divinity of this man on a donkey.

No one in the city cares. Jerusalem doesn’t shout. Not in Luke. Now in the other gospels they do. But for Luke, Jerusalem is the city that rejects Jesus, tortures Jesus, and kills Jesus.

Luke’s giving us a window to look through so we can peer into the depths of time as well as ourselves. Luke is less concerned about giving us the detail of the event and more concerned about giving us the memory of the event.

The truth is, whoever attended this party did nothing to stop Jesus’ death. Whoever waved the palm branches, the cloaks and cheered, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD” abandoned their king when he needed them the most. These people are the ones who fled the Temple, fled the sentencing, and fled Golgotha.

Luke doesn’t want to paint Jerusalem in a good light. They helped kill God’s son. No matter how exciting this moment is, this triumphal entry, for Luke, is tainted with colors of confusion, hate, and ignorance.

I used to never think about this story this way. I’ve never used to notice that Luke tells it differently than the other Gospels. But he does. Jerusalem doesn’t burst with excitement or with anger. They just move on as if nothing happened. Divinity is right in their midst, and they do nothing.

I bet you can imagine a time in your life when divinity walked right up to you and you did nothing. We are too often like the people of Jerusalem. We corporately practice what we say we believe, but when our faith demands our lives to change – we resist, we ignore, and we build a reasonable excuse to just continue to practice our corporate faith.

Every single day Jesus walks up to us claiming the undeniable truth, “I’ve come in the name of the LORD.” But we dismiss his voice as fast as we hear it. We dismiss it by refusing to claim it as our true identity. Our true allegiance. Our true selves.

Truthfully, we don’t want Jesus to have power of us. Instead, we let him walk right by praying he doesn’t affect who we are or want us to change.

And we are wrong for this. We’re wrong for believing our lives are as good as it gets. We’re wrong for believing our faith is a deep as it needs to be.

When we dismiss divinity then we stop having faith, for faith believes that the goodness of God is walking right up to us with the capacity to change us.

As soon as we stop believing God intersects in our lives, is the moment we lose faith and look and speak and sound a lot like the people in Jerusalem.

The people of Jerusalem are wrong to not pay attention to Jesus. They’re wrong to miss this opportunity to praise their king. It takes Jesus’ death staring them in the face to realize what they’ve missed.

In five more days Jerusalem will realize their mistake. In five more days they look up at Jesus struggling for his last breath, and they will know in the deepest parts of who they are, “They were wrong.”  And we will be too if we continue to dismiss the divinity we find in our own lives.

Jesus is a physical message of hope. He is the embodiment of love that allows all people to turn over a new leaf; to start a new chapter, to reinvent their spirituality and themselves. Jesus is the fulfillment of scripture, the in-breaking of the kingdom and the sign of peace to come, and he just so happens to be walking right down your Main Street. To dismiss this moment, this Jesus, is to dismiss the reality that lives can be changed. That good can be done. That hope can be given. To dismiss Jesus is to fail to participate in the ongoing creation of the world.

Perhaps it is right, then, that Palm Sunday is a confusing day, and that we don’t quite know whether to be joyful in celebrating Jesus’ coming to deliver us or to be reflective and repentant, knowing that within days we will be observing Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

Yes, there is great irony in the gospel of the donkey-riding king. The triumph of love over hate and life over death allows for there to be humor in the incongruity of the Palm Sunday events. We must decide which story we are going to be a part of.

Will we be the people who dismiss Jesus on account of the comfortableness of our lives, or will we be open to God changing us, deepening us, and showing us more of a love than we could even imagine?

This is the question you are faced with. How will you respond?