PROTEST MARCH, COMPLETE WITH HORSE AND DONKEY

Scripture Reading: Matthew 21:1-11

Imagine the excitement, the pageantry, the thrill of that day… the crowds in Jerusalem were enraptured, lining the streets. The air was buzzing with anticipation. Preceding the main event was everyone who was anyone: look – there was the High Priest; and over there, the captain of the Roman guard; members of the Sanhedrin; Herod himself; all the elite lined up in an adoring row waiting to welcome home the man who was personally appointed by the Son of God.

And here he comes, arriving in a sea of cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles – the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate!

This was the real parade on Palm Sunday, the one that really counted, that was really impressive. Emperor Tiberius, self-proclaimed Son of God, had sent his Governor into Jerusalem to make sure there wouldn’t be any funny business over the Hebrew festival of Passover, a festival that, after all, celebrated the people’s liberation from an earlier empire.

Of course, you knew the Governor didn’t live there, in the dirty, backwater town of Jerusalem. No, the Governor’s residence was to the west, in the seaside town of Caesera Maritima, “Caeser’s City on the Sea!” Pilate was coming through the western gate of the city to remind the people what real power was, who the real power-holder was, and how the people needed to keep their place.

Meanwhile… and that should be the real beginning to our Gospel Reading this morning… meanwhile… because everything Jesus would say or do in the last week of his life was overshadowed by the reality of the Powers that Be, religious powers, political powers, and, more than anything else, imperial powers… meanwhile… Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee decided to make his own entrance into Jerusalem on the opposite side of the city, through the eastern gate. He had decided to hold a counter parade.

And that’s the parade we’re called to be a part of today. Not the triumphalist entrance of the Roman Governor, surrounded by horses, chariots, and weapons, the gleaming representative of royal power and royal theology, but the humble entrance of the Nazarene peasant, riding on a donkey of all things, surrounded by humble folks not fearsome weapons, faithful voices not fanciful trumpets, and welcomed with improvised stage craft - cloaks stripped off and spread out, palm branches cut down and waved around.

Meanwhile… here comes Jesus of Nazareth. Come to think of it, this was not so much a parade as it was a protest march.

The first political protest in which I took part was back in 1979. I was in college in Minneapolis when President Carter was trying to renew registration for the military draft. All of us college students gathered that day in front of the student union were against it. Guess what we started to chant at that protest? Go ahead, you can say “hell” in church: “Hell no, we won’t go! Hell no, we won’t go!” But to some of us that seemed too 60’s, too confrontational. We were children of the 70’s, after all, a gentler and more relational time. So several of us made up a counter chant and started shouting it: “If it’s all the same to you guys, we’ll stay here, okay?” Surprisingly, we got quite a few folks to join us. Sounds silly, doesn’t it?

I’ve always thought a good protest ought to have a little bit of humor involved. One of my favorite all-time anti-war protests occurred back on October 21, 1967 when Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg and some 100,000 protesters surrounded the Pentagon, and, focusing their positive energies, began chanting in hopes of lifting and levitating the building. I wonder if any of you were there that day? It sounds absolutely silly, doesn’t it?

And, to hear Matthew tell it, there was something kind of silly about Jesus’ Palm Sunday protest march into Jerusalem: “… they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.” Did you notice this strange turn of phrase in our Gospel Reading? And did you think it was only you who wondered how Jesus could ride on both a donkey AND a colt? Did he sit with one leg on each? Did he switch from one to another? What’s going on here?

Well, this strange turn of phrase probably has its origin in two places. The first is practical: have any of you become familiar with a donkey? And, please, I’m talking about the animal here. What are donkeys most known for being? Stubborn – that’s right. It’s almost impossible to get a single donkey to do what you want it to, to go in the direction you want it to go. So Jesus’ solution was a practical one. Guide the young horse and the donkey will follow. Jesus sat on the donkey while the donkey, out of herd instinct, followed the colt.

Here’s the other place this odd turn of phrase came from - the prophet Zechariah: “Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” It’s a funny way of putting it, but Zechariah probably understood mules, too. And Jesus, by sitting on that donkey, by actively evoking a parody of the Roman processional on the other side of town actively, made Zechariah’s point. For here’s the next verse from the prophet:

“He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations.”

Now do you understand why Jesus got into trouble, marching into town on a donkey?

Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel he referred to himself as “poor and humble”, and, by riding on that donkey, he was proclaiming himself the promised King for all the little ones, the poor and humble who get nothing from those in political power and expect everything from God.

That’s why they go crazy over him. That’s why they strip off their cloaks, cut down the palm branches, and shout themselves hoarse: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Jesus is the symbol of all their hopes and dreams.

But as soon as Jesus enters the city, the mood quickly changes and takes on an edgy quality – “the whole city was in turmoil” – and the praise gets scaled back considerably – “Who is this?” “The prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.” One can almost imagine the phrase “so-called” applied before “prophet” and can hear an echo from Nathanael’s question in John’s Gospel: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

It’s hard not to get disgusted with this rapid change of mood, with the enthusiastic crowd wilting in the face of the daily realities of living in an occupied Jerusalem, with the hard Holy Week reality that the acclamations of the crowd on Palm Sunday will give way to calls for Jesus’ death on Good Friday.

What happened? Why did the crowd back down? What happened to the will of the people?

Well, nothing unusual really. Reinhold Niebuhr cynically but realistically entitled one of his books on social ethics Moral Man/Immoral Society. Tommy Lee Jones in the movie Men in Black put it more succinctly: “People? A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” This quick turn-around in attitudes shouldn’t surprise us. In our culture the balloon of popularity pops faster than you can say “Eliot Spitzer.” Tommy Lee Jones was right. People are mules.

And as the excitement of the Palm Sunday protest march winds down, it seems Jesus is nothing more than the man who sat down in front of the tanks in Tianamen Square in Beijing. Our hopes are raised for a while, our enthusiasm rises, but then the world intervenes. Our hope evaporates. Our spirits fade. Protest seems pointless, silly.

A bunch of adolescent kids shouting in Minneapolis didn’t stop them reinstituting registration for the draft. A bunch of Chinese students occupying Tiananmen Square couldn’t bring about democracy in China. Jesus riding on a mule didn’t bring down Rome.

So why bother? You can’t levitate the Pentagon.

You know, however, that there was someone watching out the window of the Pentagon as that protest took place. He had been growing uneasy over the war and the sight of all those protesters moved him deeply. The man watching was Daniel Ellsberg. There’s a blast from the past for you. Ellsberg would later make public the Pentagon Papers, a set of documents that revealed the shocking inner workings of the U.S. war effort. The Nixon Administration would order a break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office trying to get the “goods” on Ellsberg. Along with the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-ups, this would bring down the Nixon Administration.

Sometimes Rome does fall.

And how silly did it seem to us watching Lech Walensa and the Solidarity movement in Gdansk, Poland, stand up to the Soviet occupiers?

And how silly did it seem on that incredible night in Berlin when the people came out on both sides and simply tore the wall down? “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” President Reagan demanded in 1987. But, two years later, the people did it.

And how silly did it seem when the People Power Revolution in the Philippines stood up to Ferdinand Marcos? After some leading soldiers defected from the Marcos regime, those soldiers huddled in a military camp awaiting an attack from government troops. But then came hundreds of thousands of civilians who surrounded the camp. When the government soldiers arrived to attack, nuns knelt before tanks, men and women linked arms together, unarmed civilians placed their bodies between the weapons of opposing soldiers. The government troops turned away in shame. Two days later, Ferdinand Marcos fled the Philippines. Nonviolence had won the day.

And how silly does Palm Sunday seem to us on this side of the resurrection? That Easter Sunday morning the savage power of Rome exercised through crucifixion was simply undone. The tomb was empty. The dead were raised. The co-called prophet Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee was now the Lord of Life!

And that’s why we march, we mulish, stubborn folks; that’s why we hop down from the high horse of detachment or rise up from the low pony of despair and follow Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, as he makes his long march through human history proclaiming the Kingdom of God and the bright resurrection dawn of human possibility.

And that’s why we are bold to cry: Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

Sermon preached by Reverend Steve Savides on Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008 at First Congregational United Church of Christ, Appleton, Wisconsin.