The Symbols of Holy Week: The Donkey

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Donkey

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 9, 2017

Scripture: Zechariah 9:9-10 Mark 11:1-11

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s the beginning of Holy Week, that most sacred week of the Christian year, when we enter Jerusalem with Jesus in triumph, share his last meal, weep at his cross, and only then rejoice in his glorious resurrection. Let me ask you something: Have you ever noticed how each of those central events of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life has an object at its center? Well, each of them does. Today, on Palm Sunday, it’s the donkey that Jesus rides into Jerusalem. Mark just calls it a colt, but trust me on this one, it’s a donkey. More about that donkey in a minute. For Maundy Thursday one central object is the table. More about that on Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday the central object is of course the cross. For Easter it is the empty tomb. Each of the named days of Holy Week has an object associated with it.

All of these things—the donkey, the table, the cross, and the empty tomb—are material objects (even if one of them is an animal), but the important thing about them for us Christians is that they are much more than mere objects. They are symbols. They stand for something. They point beyond themselves to some profound meaning, a spiritual meaning, a meaning that tells us something about Jesus Christ and about God. Through them we find our connection with Jesus Christ and with God. So in our four Holy Week services this coming week (not counting the early service on Easter morning) I want to explore each of these objects, each of these symbols. Today we start with the donkey.

The background of the Palm Sunday story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is that after Jesus has spent perhaps about a year teaching and healing in Galilee to the north of Jerusalem he has made the fateful decision to go to Jerusalem. It is hard to overestimate the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people. It was the site of the temple, the seat of the religious authorities of the day. It was by far the biggest city in the region, and it was the city the occupying Romans worried about most. It had been the scene of violent rebellions against Roman rule in the past, and the Romans feared that it would be again in the future. (They turned out to be right about that, by the way.) It wasn’t where the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate hung out most of the time, but it was where he would go during the Passover, bringing a lot of soldiers with him. At Passover the population of the city swelled dramatically because of all the pilgrims coming to the temple and that made the Romans nervous. So when Jesus entered Jerusalem that fateful day he was entering the center of both the religious and the secular powers of his day. He was entering a city full of people, excitement, and anxiety.

Jesus could have snuck into the city unnoticed. After all, it’s not like his face was all over the television or the internet the way it would be today. No one in Jerusalem knew what he looked like. He could have done it quietly, in a way that would not draw attention to himself. He didn’t. Instead he rode in on a donkey—why that would draw attention to him I’ll get to shortly—to the acclaim of the crowds who lined the road to hail him. Why? Why would Jesus come into Jerusalem that way?

To get at an answer to that question we need to go back several hundred years before Jesus and look at those two verses we heard from Zechariah, an Old Testament prophet. There the prophet tells of a king who is to come. He says that the king is, or will be, triumphant and victorious; but he comes not in a war chariot or riding a magnificent Arabian steed but “humble and riding on a donkey.” The prophet says that this king will “cut off the chariot from Ephraim,” that is, from Israel. He will cut off the battle bow and “command peace to the nations.” This king of whom Zechariah prophesies is pretty clearly a different kind of king. He is humble. He comes in not on a symbol of war, not in a military chariot, but riding a symbol of peace, a simple donkey, an animal of the farm not of war.

When Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem he is acting out this scene from Zechariah. That he is doing so isn’t necessarily obvious to us. I mean, who knows anything about Zechariah today? Not many of us, I suspect; and frankly I don’t think it’s really worth knowing much about. It is a very strange book. Still, Jewish people in Jesus’ time would immediately have understood what Jesus was doing riding into town on that borrowed burro. He was saying through his action rather than through words I am indeed a king, but I am a very different kind of king.

In their book The Last Week, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg imagine this scene this way. On one side of town Pilate and his Roman legions are marching into the city. Consider that scene for a moment: The military commanders ride in war chariots drawn by grand horses with magnificent tack. They are animals of war, animals of might and oppression. They make a fearful sight. The troops follow wearing their armor that flashes in the sun. They carry shields and spears, the implements of war. It is a grand procession, and a fearful one. It is Rome saying we have the power, and we’re not afraid to use it. It is Rome saying do not dare to defy us, for we can and will crush you.

On the other side of town Jesus is riding into the city on a donkey. Now consider this scene: It is a parody of the Roman military procession. There are no implements of war. Instead there is a humble animal from the farm. A useful animal to be sure but hardly a grand one, certainly not a frightening one. The donkey is a symbol of the peaceful life of the ordinary people. His time is the time of peace, the time of plowing, the time of pulling a cart taking the produce of the field to market. He is Zechariah’s donkey. He symbolizes the beating of swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. He symbolizes a world in which everyone sits under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one makes them afraid, to use the words of Micah 6:6.

None of that may be obvious to us, but it would have been obvious to the people who saw Jesus engage in this prophetic act of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Certainly Jesus must have intended people to understand what he was doing in this way. The parallel with that passage from Zechariah is too strong to be mere coincidence. Jesus didn’t sneak, or even just walk, into Jerusalem unnoticed precisely because he wanted to be noticed. He had come to Jerusalem to make a proclamation. He had come to Jerusalem to proclaim to the powers of his world—and ours—that their way is not God’s way. During the week that lay before him he would do that with words. Upon his entry into Jerusalem he did it with his actions.

Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was nothing less than a provocation. It was a provocation directed to the powers of the place, to the Romans and to the Jewish temple authorities who collaborated with them. Later on Pilate will ask Jesus if he is the king of the Jews. Jesus has already answered that question. He answered it when he acted out the prophecy of Zechariah. Yes, he said with his actions, I am a king; but I am a very different kind of king. I am a king of peace not war. I am a king of peacetime pursuits, of agriculture and peaceful trade. I am a king from among the people not a king reigning over the people. Maybe the Romans didn’t get all of that from Jesus’ symbolic act of riding in on a donkey. They probably weren’t up on their Zechariah. The Jewish people of the city, however, surely did. If they didn’t get all that, if they saw only a man on a donkey, or if they saw a reference to a king but missed the clear depiction of what kind of king Jesus is, then they missed his meaning altogether. Maybe that would explain why five days later these same people were shouting Crucify him!

The Romans for sure and the people of the city perhaps missed Jesus’ meaning when he rode into the center of power in his world on a donkey. Christianity has missed his meaning pretty much ever since. We’ve seen his riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as an act of humility. We haven’t seen it as a provocation aimed at the powers of the world. Yet that surely is what it was. We haven’t seen it as a prophetic act proclaiming the kingdom of God as a very different kind of kingdom from the kingdoms or other political structures of the world. Yet that surely is what it was.

So thank you little donkey, and thanks to whoever owned you for letting Jesus borrow you. You played a role you could not possibly understand. You became a symbol, a symbol of peace triumphant over war, a symbol of ordinary, productive pursuits over military ones. A symbol of providing for people not conquering them. Most people who saw you, and most people who have read about you, have misunderstood you. As we begin our journey with Jesus through Holy Week, may we at last understand what you were all about. Amen.