Matthew 21:1-11
Occasionally there are times where I am uniquely glad I am not a pastor, with a part of my job being to preach a new sermon every week! Most of the time I think it would be fine; but days like Palm Sunday, or Easter and Christmas - times when "everyone" knows the passages already - would drive me nuts, I think. Don't get me wrong, I love the holy days, but on a practical level I can't imagine how difficult it is, year in and year out, to come up with new and engaging sermons for them, while still engaging fully the texts themselves. If your pastor preaches on one of these days, be sure to tell them what a great job they did.
If you've been around the Church for a while you already know today's story - Jesus is coming to Jerusalem, so he has his disciples steal a donkey and then he rides it into Jerusalem. All the people are super-excited because they think he is finally going to settle the score with those nasty Romans, or something is going to happen at least. They wave their branches and throw down their coats and it is a big to-do. We call it Palm Sunday because they were palm trees, for all we know, and then we burn the palms - I skipped writing Ash Wednesday this cycle but it's kind of interesting if you are into that kind of detail, maybe I'll do it next year.
Now, what kind of writer would I be if I just went - zoom - completely off text? This kind, that's what. Don't say I didn't warn you. In fact this thought is coming out of my Winnowing Forks digression from a month ago, but reading that is not a prerequisite to understanding the rest of this - the tl;dr of winnowing forks is that they end up getting used in weddings and circumcisions. It does, however, contain the link to the Weir book, which is amazing, and to the Granqvist archive which is a real treasure of information and photographs - phenomenal women who did an amazing job archiving the modern history of Palestine.
While I was researching Winnowing Forks, I went through a lot of information about various Palestinian celebrations in the mid-20th century. These are clearly rituals that have developed over centuries - though Weir is clear that they have changed since Biblical times, so it's not like I can just say 'this is also how it was', but still the environment is the same and so I am taking some liberties with it. I can't say, exactly, what the details of any kind of festival were, but there were some common threads that seem likely to make sense: in particular, these celebrations were what I might call over the top, and they involved a lot of the community.
The setups for these celebrations are wild. If you are American, you have probably seen a bride with the big poofy dress, maybe a veil, maybe a Disney Princess version. It is nothing. The trick of the winnowing fork is that the bride is so dudded up that she can't be seen under the dress - she looks like a giant, pointy tent riding around on the back of a camel. I always wondered how Laban pulled the trick with Leah, but if this was the way the brides were gowned back then there is no way he could have known. It's not just weddings - circumcisions, there's a whole pre-wedding thing that the men do, there's a thing the women do, basically any part of the celebration worth having is worth having in a huge and dramatic fashion, and the books I read were specifically about weddings so I can only imagine what the rest of the year was like. Jewelry, henna, hair-dos, floofy dresses, hanging shirts of gold coins, gowns - men too, even the boys getting circumcised were riding around in the tents. Desert, sun, it makes sense that you would cover up the most precious of your things, but I hadn't really thought about it until I saw the pictures.
And, I suppose this makes sense for a pre-television era, everything is a community affair. The entourages for the weddings are huge, people everywhere, horses, camels, the whole deal. I can only imagine the smell. Lots of different roles, but it is clear a lot of the people are just along for the ride - and why not! You see the bride, maybe, or maybe it's a kid getting circumcised, and there's a bunch of people happy and running around and it's a public space; unless you just don't like the family or you are in a big hurry you are certainly going to want to join in. Everyone is having good, clean fun; forget your labor for a few hours while the other guy's daughter gets hitched, and he does the same for you, and eventually the whole village is taking off every few months for a wild party in the streets. I have seen a few Bollywood movies, and I am picturing Jesus and the disciples doing a choreographed dance in front of some guy's house in Cana - but I digress. If I ever get the chance to go to a Palestinian wedding you better believe I am there!
So I totally get the folks at the end of this passage - the whole city is in turmoil! Something must be happening! What could possibly be making all this ruckus! Some kind of bumpkin doing his bumpkin things, maybe. Or maybe it's someone famous like Elvis, ooh I could go for a tune. Somebody says it might be the Messiah and he's going to solve all our problems. You know what? Let's hang out and see; could be fun, what else was I going to do - work? Either this guy is going to make a spectacle of himself or of someone else, and I will get a laugh out of either. We don't have enough celebrations around here! So you hang out, you see the guy get off the donkey, nothing happens and you go get dinner. Then a couple days later you hear the high priest outed the guy as an imposter, and then the Romans killed him because he was claiming to be a king, and you don't think about it again. You work, and eat, and sleep, and do it again for a few more years and that's the end of it.
I get it, I really do, because that is absolutely what I would have done. And how sad! Can you imagine, having been so close to Jesus, to throw down a coat or a palm branch, then the party breaks up and you just go back to work? Imagine you're still around for Pentecost, which probably a lot of these people were - you are filled with the Spirit and realize you thought so little of the one chance you had to see Jesus himself in power? You could have followed him around for a couple days, you could have watched him with the leaders of the temple, you could have seen him get mad, but you didn't - you just went about your everyday business and didn't think about him at all. Party's over, go home.
You know why I know that's what I would have done? Because I do it all the time. I get so caught up in doing stuff I forget why I'm doing it, and I forget that there was a moment of celebration that was the root of the whole thing. Jesus came to the world! The world knew perfection! Just once, but really: once is enough. Things aren't right now; at least there was one moment that everything was right. There was a chance for the world to be perfect, and in a moment, in a place, in one man, there it was. All the rest, well, that's different, and we'll see how it goes down in the next reading - but for this instant, there is the savior, the king riding on a colt, lauded as he should be.