Nov. 26, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

Mark 1: 1-11

We’ll hear this story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem again at the Blessing of the Palms next spring. It is the opening scene of the drama called “Holy Week,” which crescendos on Good Friday and comes to a surprisingly lower-key climax three days later with broad but careful hints that he who was executed by crucifixion – there being as yet no electric chair or gas chamber – came back from the dead.

The narrative of the triumphal procession is the height of poetic license because any such undertaking would have been stopped before it was started – stopped and probably violently so by the Roman cohort whose commanders were already sick and tired of the Jews and their threatened messiah. It could not have been possible for what is portrayed in today’s gospel to have happened.

It seems clear that Jesus was a subversive figure – in the sense that, say, Gandhi was subversive: Just going about quietly making sense and, therefore, trouble.

Given our reverence – at least in the abstract – for Jesus’ ethical message, which in practice is surely transformational, we would want him to have been greeted in such a glorious way.

Almost certainly, Jesus entered Jerusalem under cover of darkness, staying away from the authorities as best he could. People probably found him, though, and he probably spoke with those who had the courage to listen to him. But either he wasn’t as careful as he might have been, or someone ratted on him; and the rest we know.

Over time the church responded by creating he story of his triumphal entry into the holy city just as it created the story of his resurrection. What the church meant by those stories was that it considered Jesus to have been the most important person in its history, perhaps in all of history.

The imagery of the triumphal entry is drawn sometimes verbatim from Hebrew literature composed hundreds of years earlier than New Testament times. Those much older documents envisioned the procession a messiah-king into a city his armies conquered for him, there to take possession of it.

Later Christians transferred that hope from the past to the future. It gave us the language of the Second Coming . . . which brings us to the liturgical theme of this day, the Sunday next before Advent.

The theme today is one of expectation – not in real life for a sky-rending descent of Christ to Earth, but for a gradual realization of the remarkable ethic Jesus articulated – not a unique ethic by any means. In almost every human civilization there has emerged the wisdom of doing unto others as one would be done to. But not always has there been the wisdom of loving one’s enemy and turning the other cheek to the smiting hand. That was new.

My father used to say that expecting something to happen without trying to make it happen was like being a goldfish in a bowl swimming around waiting for a few crumbs of food to be dropped into the water. “You, sir, are not a goldfish,” father said. “You must do more than wait around for something to happen. You need to help make happen what you want happen.”

That wisdom applies here. Advent is not to be a time of waiting for something to happen – because things will happen. It’s just that we would, or should, like to have a hand in what they will be.

If, for example, one desires the world to acclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, the only thing he has to recommend him for such exaltation is the ethic he taught. Let one put it into practice, crediting Jesus, and Jesus will make that triumphal entry as desired. It can be made it happen, only someone has to make it happen.

If, however you are allergic to the Cecil B. DeMille pomp and circumstance of a regal procession, just love your enemy, forgive as often as necessary and do unto others . . .

It’s a contagious ethic that catches on, one person at a time. It doesn’t come in a procession with waving palms and shouts of “Hosanna.” It simply shows up in human behavior day by day.

© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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