An Untamed Heart
Mark 11:1-11
April 1, 2012
Palm Sunday
All sorts of characters populate the Palm Sunday story. Crowds of people, for one. Jesus,
of course. The disciples. The Jewish authorities and the Roman soldiers, watching this spectacle
with a wary eye.
This morning, though, I want to talk about the donkey. The “colt,” in the translation that
Keith read for us – a young donkey, never ridden. An untamed animal.
And I’m not alone in wanting to think some more about this donkey. Year after year we
hear the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, and then one year it strikes you: Why does Mark
spend so much time talking about Jesus’ mode of transportation? He devotes more than half of
these 11 verses about the beginning of Holy Week to the mundane details about acquiring this
animal – where to go to find it, what kind of colt to seek, what to do, what to say.
This may be the most important donkey in the history of the world. There’s a statue of
him in the Donkey Hall of Fame.
And so it’s worth asking, why a donkey? And why this donkey?
Partly Mark tells this story to show that, as Jesus enters Jerusalem for the first time in his
life – the place where he will provoke the ruling authorities into killing him – he’s fulfilling the
Hebrew scriptures. Riding that donkey, Jesus is embodying the words of the prophet Zechariah,
who wrote this: “Shout and cheer, Zion! Raise the roof, Jerusalem! Your king is coming! A good
king who makes all things right, a humble king riding a donkey, the mere colt of a donkey.”
Certainly Jesus, who was a student of the scriptures, would have known these words; and
certainly the crowds that gathered around him would know them as well. And so in choosing this
ride, he is embodying the scripture; he’s acting it out in a dramatic and memorable way, with his
body, so that nobody could miss his point.
The Hebrew Scriptures are full of this kind of thing, what scholars call an “enacted
parable.” The prophet Jeremiah goes to a pottery studio to show how God will punch down the
recalcitrant nation of Israel like a misshapen lump of clay. The prophet Ezekiel eats a papyrus
scroll so that he will speak only what the Lord has written. (He says it was “as sweet as honey.”)
The prophet Isaiah walks around stark naked for three years as a warning that Egypt will be
invaded. These are people who put their bodies to use in service of God’s message.
And that’s what Jesus is doing on the two-mile road from Bethany to Jerusalem. He’s
showing the crowds that here is the king promised to God’s people by the holy scriptures. Just as
the prophet Zechariah had foretold, he’s riding a donkey.
But what kind of messiah is he? That’s the question that has dogged Jesus throughout the
three years of his public work. Plenty of his followers – people who had watched him heal
people and cast out demons and teach radical ways of compassion and acceptance – were still
convinced that, when push came to shove, Jesus would take up the sword and lead the Hebrew
people in an armed revolt against their Roman oppressors. Because there’s prophecy in the
scriptures as well about that kind of messiah – the conquering hero, the one who will use
violence to free God’s people.
That’s not the messiah Jesus had to be. And so, faced with these competing expectations
in scriptural prophecy about what the Messiah would be like, he chose Isaiah’s “suffering
servant” model – the Messiah who lived out and demonstrated radical submission to God’s
leading, all the way to death on a cross. The victory that he finally embodied was not a military
victory; as history shows, that kind of victory is only temporary. Jesus’ victory is the victory over
death in his Resurrection – a victory over humankind’s forever enemy, and a victory that he
shares with all of us in the promise of our own resurrection after death.
There’s another aspect to what’s going on here, and it’s a political aspect. By riding this
donkey, Jesus is sticking it to the Roman authorities.
Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan suggest not only was there a procession from
the Mount of Olives on the east that day, but there was also a Roman procession entering from
the west, and its focal point was the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. (You’ll remember
that Pilate shows up later passing judgment in Jesus’ show trial.) The custom was for Pilate to
make a big, showy entrance into Jerusalem each year in the days before the Passover celebration.
The Jewish pilgrims would be streaming into the city for this holiest of Jewish observances,
celebrating the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. And maybe in the back of their mind
they would hold out the hope of escape from their oppression in Israel as well. And so Pilate
wanted to make sure they didn’t get any fancy ideas. He and his posse would have ridden
grandly, with war horses, chariots, spears and swords, into the city, just to remind everyone that
Rome was in charge.
And against this spectacle, an assertion of the absolute power of a military empire, here
comes the king that Zechariah foretold, “a good king who makes all things right, a humble king
riding a donkey.” In your face, Pilate! Take that, Caesar! Jesus is publicly thumbing his nose at
the very symbols of Roman power. Soon he would do the same to the leaders of the Jewish
power structure when he overturned the tables of the money-changers at the Temple. The
Romans had no patience with even a whiff of opposition to their authority, and the Jewish
authorities were only too happy to collude with them when it lined their pockets. You can see the
storm clouds gathering. Jesus is provoking a swift and violent response.
It’s not that Jesus is courting his death. I don’t think he wanted to die. In his agonized
prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, it’s clear that the prospect was a dreadful one for him. But
his passion for justice and his anger at injustice – a passion and anger he inherited from the
Hebrew prophets who went before him – led him to take bigger and bigger risks to show the
contrast between the status quo (where Herod was king) and the kingdom of God. These risky
acts of non-violent activism led to Jesus’ tragic martyrdom.
One more thing about this donkey. Mark is careful to show that this is a colt that has
never been ridden. An unridden colt is likely difficult to work with because it hasn’t been
trained. Riding this animal is dangerous. No one knows how it will respond as a mount or how it
will react to the shouting crowds. There’s a good chance that the colt would not follow Jesus’
lead, making it dangerous to Jesus and the crowd.
Maybe the unridden colt is a symbol that Jesus is trying something new that’s never been
done before. This way isn’t safe, it hasn’t been test-driven, and it’s anything but tame. That
sounds a lot like Jesus, doesn’t it? Jesus, who isn’t interested in the way things have always been
done. Whose life and ministry, especially here in the chaos and fear of his last week on earth,
was anything but predictable. Whose Christ-spirit lives among us, untamed, always ready to
surprise us with the ways God continues to break into our world.
As we enter Holy Week, my hope is that Mark’s story of Jesus continues to haunt us, to
challenge us and to inspire us as we discern how God is calling us – today, right here, in our time
and place – to follow Jesus’ way, the risky way of non-violent activism, loving kindness and
gracious compassion. The spirit of the Christ is untamed. We take a risk in riding along with it.
But following Jesus on the journey requires nothing less.
May it be so. Amen.