Jesus and the divine revolution of love
Palm/Passion  | Luke 19:28-40

Jesus enters Jerusalem like a rockstar. Which is to say, with great anticipation and fanfare. 

When I was a kid, rock was dominated by classic rock giants like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Aerosmith who were followed by the rise of hair metal bands like Def Leppard, Poison, and Whitesnake. And what was common about all of these artists was not the music, but the image. Being a star was about style more than substance, and devoted fans worshipped them. 

The word fan is short for fanatic. At its heart, the desire to follow a star requires a kind of irrational obsession, to show fanaticism to someone without their returning the favor. The same goes for following a favorite sports team or politician.

But in the winter of my 8th grade year, a different kind of rock arrived on MTV with an entirely different sound and style. We saw “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on 120 Minutes and our jaws dropped — that the thing that was missing from our lives, which were dominated by hair metal and pop princesses, was this. And at its heart was the star who didn’t want to be a star.

The tension of being the biggest name in music would eventually take the life of Kurt Cobain, but his legacy, of genius and a kind of anti-supremacy, anti-popularity, anti-style vision would define a generation of flannel-clad Xers who would seek, not to follow a king, but the one who refused to be a king.

Among the Multitudes

As Jesus enters Jerusalem, we have a similar tension at play. Jesus is not looking to be a king. He has avoided previous attempts to make him one. And he just taught, out on the outskirts of the city, about the tyranny of kings. And yet, there is a kind of anti-king kingship that surrounds the man. He is the new David — much like the young man who God loved and so unlike the king who had a man murdered so he could steal his wife.

And the people, the people are excited. All of the disciples, the multitude of disciples, are ready for this king’s reign. They want it so badly.

This is a truly Lukan way of speaking, too, of defining the crowds that followed Jesus as his disciples. That the twelve we think of as disciples — the evangelist calls them The Twelve — but they comprise only some of the disciples. The others, at one point numbering seventy, which is the same number as counted “the nations” of the world, so they could take the good news with them. Now, they number much more than that. Hundreds, no doubt. Perhaps thousands.

These are the crowds celebrating the entry, so excited, so threatening to the order. To the actual King of Israel. To the people charged with protecting the king’s authority, worrying about his power and subduing dissent. But the disciples number in multitudes, like the number fed by five loaves and two fish.

The question of power is at the heart of this story. 

Kings exist as both embodiment and metaphor. And Jesus’s kingship represents the presence of power with the absence of tyranny. A two-fold relationship that is only possible if kings reject selfishness, fear, and rage. If they accept the Dream of God to strip them of authority, put them at the end of the line, and serve others with grace and trust. 

No king can do this because few people would accept that behavior from their king. And no king would accept the mantle of king selflessly. Except, perhaps, Jesus. The exception that proves the rule.

Riding into Jerusalem

Another way power is expressed in this passage is in the method of arrival. Jesus sends some disciples ahead to get him a beast of burden upon which he might ride into the city. We all have an image in our minds of a donkey, no doubt. But notice in this gospel it refers to a colt. Young donkeys are called colts. But so are young, untamed horses. The same linguistic ambiguity is present in the original Greek. In short, we aren’t sure exactly what Jesus is riding into the city in Luke’s gospel. 

The same ambiguity is present in the gospel of Mark. Matthew, meanwhile, has both a colt and a donkey. And the kicker is that it doesn’t say which one he actually rides — the language implies both! That he is somehow on both at the same time! Only John says Jesus rides a donkey.

What does this matter? 

The donkey is a perfect image of humility to contrast with empire. We can see it viscerally in our minds. Kings ride massive horses, don’t they? Not donkeys. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan describe this moment as political street theater and suggest that it is a symbolic clash with Rome. And that so much of the imperial pageantry of empire involves height, attaining a towering stature over others or using high flags and polearms that can blot out the sun.

A donkey is low and humble. So it would be the perfect foil to display the lowliness of Jesus.

The Colt

Now let me offer a different image; a different foil to the political supremacy agenda of empire. 

I’ve never raised horses, so I have to trust what others tell me about it, but training a horse takes time and repetition. Weeks, months, years of consistent work. And this training, what we often call taming, is really relationship building. One builds rapport with the colt so that it might learn to trust a human to be near them, let alone climb up on its back.

Wild, untamed horses are rebellious and dangerous. They buck and trample.

And Jesus, the man who stills storms can still the storm of a colt’s heart. Animals trust him and demons fear him. So this is the one who enters Jerusalem to a kingly fanfare, scaring the Temple leaders, not with power or lowliness but with trust and thousands of people hungry for something (and someone) they can actually trust.

Entering Holy Week

This is our story for Holy Week, for our own entrance into a season of threatening empire with the thing it fears most: trust. In God and one another. This is why empire seeks our trust only in it. Because it is afraid of what we’ll do if we trust each other.

In the days to come, we will experience Jesus’s trust in his disciples, sharing with them what they will need to take up the mantle he carried from John the Baptizer. A mantle that was an expression of his trust in God that this path to the cross is his alone.

There is a kind of test to the Holy Week narrative that we so easily overlook. That Jesus challenges authority in the Temple, teaches credibly to the masses, tries to get his followers to see things as he sees them, before ultimately surrendering to his fate. And we so often spiritualize the week and emotionally hold the torture and murder of our Lord, our king, as a ritual sacrifice at the altar for God without our going to the temple or getting our own hands dirty.

But the point isn’t to remember the death of Jesus, but to witness the love of Jesus in subverting the power, in refusing to participate in it, in revealing God’s grace, which comes through service, not domination. Humility, yes. But in service to trust, to the community, to our neighbors.

And there is a wildness to this endeavor, too. An untamed, dangerous capacity to change us and our expectations. Like a new riff with percussive beats that sweeps us up into a new story, a new dream for the world. Hear it. A new sound that opens doors to something more real, more authentic, more true. For all of us.