Palm Sunday and History

Yesterday was Palm Sunday at the FreeWay, which, outside of "the big two" (Christmas and Easter) is probably my favorite liturgical celebration.  I've blogged before about the significant but often over-looked connections between Christmas and the Triumphal Entry, and how each of the Evangelists handle Jesus' monumental victory parade into Jerusalem slightly differently, drawing out different spiritual, theological and political threads of the story.  I've preached three of the four accounts now-- John, Matthew, and Luke-- and what strikes me is how different and yet identical the view from the Mount of Olives was for each of them.

What I'm thinking about the morning-after Palm Sunday today, however, is how vital this prophetically-loaded donkey ride into Jerusalem is for historically embedding both Jesus of Nazareth and, more significantly, God's act of salvation in and through him.  What I mean is this:  Christmas, and the Incarnation that Christmas celebrates, could have happened anywhere and anytime.  Not really, of course:  Paul says it was at just the right time Jesus came, and Gabriel told Mary that she had found unique favor among God, but even without its specific historical provenance in 1st Century Bethlehem, we could still draw from the Incarnation the theological import that we usually want to draw from it: that the Creator came to his Creation to save it by being born in flesh-and-blood and through the flesh-and-blood of a virgin. 

So too, with Easter-- again, not really: there is a historical necessity to all these events, the where, the when, the who-- but then again an a-historical story about the Creator who loved his Creation so much he willingly died for it to heal and save and forgive it would still make sense to us whether it happened in 1st Century Jerusalem or not.  (And, as a test of this, notice how often our discussions of Easter and Christmas are distinctly a-historical (sometimes almost gnostically so).)

But with the Triumphal Entry it's different.  Who cares that Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem, really, unless the political and spiritual and historical tensions of this time and place and allowed to shine like a spotlight on his mounted figure winding its way down the Mount of Olives?  At least: we have difficulty feeling the theological significance of this story as a story let alone as a saving act of God, until we discover the profound anti-Rome, anti-Herod, anti-Sadducean sentiment in the City, Jesus' allusion to the previous "triumphal entry" by Maccabeus in 164 BC, the historical iimportance of the Temple that Jesus purges, the ache for Shalom that echoes in the Prophetic Tradition of the Hebrew People, and the tragic fulfillment of Jesus'  own prophetic actions when Titus Vespasian demolished Jerusalem some 40 years later, in 70 AD. 

And whatever else it means, the Triumphal Entry reminds us that God's saving acts are deeply embedded in history:  Jesus' donkey is bearing him, not only into Jerusalem, but into the annals of God's salvation-history, and there he reminds us that our God is a God of history, and that an a-historical Gospel is no Gospel at all.

For the record, here's my sermon from Sunday:

Luke 19:28-44 
"A Prophet, the City, its King and his Donkey"