But the start to that week is puzzling. Jesus is headed to the holy city of Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish Passover, remembering the freeing of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery. He is traveling from Jericho, a city in the Jordan river valley, several thousand feet lower in altitude. To reach Jerusalem, He has to pass over the Mount of Olives, from which He can see the entire city spread before Him. In making this journey, He is far from alone. The population of Jerusalem will swell so much that the boundaries of the city must be officially enlarged during Passover so people can safely celebrate "in the holy city". It is a crowded, chaotic, festive scene. As people pass each other, they recite Psalm 118:25-26, the greeting to pilgrims entering Jerusalem's temple to worship, "... Hosanna (Save us) ... Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." As John tells us, only in hindsight did anything seem remarkable to the disciples.
But why was Jesus, who had walked all over Palestine and who was still a man in His prime, why did He insist on riding? He certainly must have known the words of the prophet Zechariah, "your King comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zech. 9:9)" Did He intend to be fulfilling this prophecy? Were arrangements for the animal made ahead of time? Or did His prophetic vision include knowing the location and time the young donkey would be available? We can't know for sure, but all the Gospels include this event, so it was critical, at least to the early church.
Beyond the act, itself, there are many possible interpretations of the significance of Palm Sunday. Some speak to the dominance of Jerusalem in the conventional wisdom of the day, how the one central temple had become the focus of so much religious belief and practice. Others speak to the enmity between the Pharisees and Sadducees and Jesus. Still others mention the primacy of the rabbinic law, grown so restrictive as to stifle religious devotion.
One particular view encountered today takes portions of these themes to argue against certain elements in Western culture. Jesus had spent much of His ministry reasoning and arguing with the religious establishment, never denying their goal of conforming to righteous standards (indeed, He would claim they did not go far enough), but rather pointing out their hypocrisy in the standards they chose to maintain and the way they went about achieving them. In ways large and small, they had taken their eyes off the prize. In this view, Jesus' entry into Jerusalem and His activities in the subsequent days were a slap in the face of the religious leaders, forcing their hand and showing them to be deceivers of the people and of themselves. The people of that time, in many ways, played into such a narrative, longing to be rescued from the Roman occupation and from their own countrymen who had compromised with the occupiers. Jesus would suffer and die, an innocent casualty of the wickedness of human organizations that oppress their people in the name of peace, while bleeding them of money and robbing them of their spiritual freedom. This is an intoxicating view for those who see the same elements still at work today and who would rail against political and religious regimes that show similarities.
There is, however, an alternative interpretation. More central to Christ's ministry than His arguments with the authorities, was His embrace of the disenfranchised. Women were second class citizens and were protected only through the men in their families, leaving widows especially vulnerable. Yet Jesus was inclusive of women and sympathetic to their needs. The sick and the disturbed were cast out, partly to protect the population from disease, but more to keep them out of sight and out of mind. Jesus sought them out and healed their diseases and comforted their minds. The poor were thought to deserve their poverty for sins they or their ancestors had committed. Jesus saw the damage that society was doing to the poor and encouraged them to keep faith. And when circumstances did not provide a way to separate the 'insiders' from the 'outsiders', rules and laws were set up to artificially do so. Jesus saw right through such injustices. So Jesus did not wage war against the power structures of His day, though they would strike at Him with vengeance. If that had been His goal, He would not have entered Jerusalem on an animal barely able to bear the load. He would have raised an army of angels and laid waste to the sinners in His way.
No, Jesus was after a larger goal - He wanted to fight personal hypocrisy. The people of Israel had sold out to their religious leaders. They glorified their politicians and believed the rules handed down by the elite, even when those rules ran counter to their teachings and beliefs. He knew that the way to reform corrupt organizations is to change the hearts of the people that give them power. Without such support, no organization can survive. But with God's laws written on their hearts and in their minds, no people can fail. For this reason, Christ's entry into Jerusalem stands as an indictment of our own hypocrisy, in whatever form it takes. When we support something we do not believe in or we fail to work for changing things to be more in alignment with God's will, we join the crowd that today sings "Hosanna!" and tomorrow cries "Crucify Him!" Jesus is still fighting for us and asks that we join Him in that fight, not only during Lent, but throughout our lives.
May God grant the insight to see your hypocrisy and the courage to change it.
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