by Joshua Vis
Last Sunday, I explored the idea that Jesus never really integrated his message about God’s coming kingdom with his insistence that he must die and rise again.
Jesus began his ministry proclaiming that God’s kingdom was coming soon and this kingdom would be just and good. The proper response was to change one’s life dramatically. Care for all people. Do good deeds. Jesus proved the veracity of his claims by doing deeds of power. He attracted a following because this was a message that Jews of Jesus’s era both understood (It fit with their religious tradition.) and desired (Most Jews hoped God would decisively deliver them from their enemies.).
Then Jesus hit his inner circle with the revelation that he would be crucified and then raised from the dead. No one believed this unprecedented messianic blueprint. The disciples ignored it and continued to put their hope in promises like this: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (Mark 9:1).
The Triumphal Entry as Sign of the Kingdom
Scholars debate the historicity of many of the events of Jesus’s life, except for the events at the end of Jesus’s life. Jesus was crucified by the Romans. There is no meaningful dissent on this. Jesus likely showed his displeasure for the current temple complex (the cleansing of the temple) in the last week of his life. Again, most scholars believe this happened. And most scholars believe that Jesus was hailed as the coming king, the messiah, as he entered Jerusalem for Passover, an event Christians call the triumphal entry or Palm Sunday.
Jesus orchestrates this triumphal entry, asking two of his disciples to get him a donkey to ride into Jerusalem. Jesus appears to have known the sacred texts of Judaism well. He must have known the symbolism of this manner of arrival to Jerusalem. The coming messianic king would enter Jerusalem in this way.
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
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;
his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. (Zechariah 9:9-10)
Jesus’s followers have no trouble sorting out what Jesus is indicating. In all four gospels (all four!), Jesus’s disciples hail him as the coming king as he rides this donkey into Jerusalem. In Matthew, Mark, and John (John too?!), they shout, “Hosanna,” which means “Save, now!” Here’s what they are thinking:
“It’s happening!
The messiah is coming to Jerusalem to inaugurate God’s coming kingdom. The Romans will be toppled.
Satan and his demons will be defeated.
This is what we’ve been waiting for!”
Jesus’s followers are not misreading the signs. Jesus does not stop them when they declare him their coming king. Jesus allows their cries for salvation to go unchallenged. He wants this. This entry could only be understood as further confirmation, by Jesus, that the kingdom truly was imminent.
What in the world is Jesus doing? If he knows that he is going to be arrested and killed, why is he indicating that he is indeed the coming messianic ruler of the kingdom of God?
Try as we may to make sense of Jesus’s actions here, these are not the actions of someone communicating that death and resurrection are around the corner.
God’s “No” to Jesus’s Hopes?
So what is happening in this story? Here’s my idea. It doesn’t fit with our normal conceptions of Jesus. It presumes that when we say that Jesus was one hundred percent human, we actually mean it.
At some point in his ministry, Jesus suspected that the kingdom was not going to come in the way he had envisioned. God was not going to intervene in a convincing and unambiguous fashion. Jesus was reluctant to accept the “death and resurrection” alternative, as any human would be.
When Jesus came near to Jerusalem, he was seeking and hoping for God’s decisive intervention. The triumphal entry is Jesus’s plea to God—
Let’s do this now. What, honestly, is the point of death and resurrection?
The endgame is your kingdom on earth. Let’s do it now, God.
You don’t need my death and my resurrection.
Let’s do this how you, God, have typically done. Let’s choose violence and domination.
We know that the Old Testament attests to a God who intervenes violently. At times, Jesus claims that violence and terror will accompany the arrival of the kingdom. The book of Revelation narrates God’s kingdom coming with unspeakable violence. The triumphal entry says, “Let’s do that and let’s do it soon.”
But that didn’t happen. God said “no” to exercising power and inflicting violence.
Maybe those images of a god who intervenes violently are actually idols, idols we should reject. Instead, perhaps we should look at the image of Jesus suffering and dying on the cross, without also contending that God was looking down at Jesus on the cross with satisfaction. Maybe this is true: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6; Matthew 9:13).
No to Dramatic Intervention. Yes to Love.
In keeping with my larger theme here in Lent on The Twelve—Lent without Easter: No one gets to experience Easter, but we all experience Lent—I leave you with this. Stop hoping that God is going to intervene and make it all ok. God did not do that for Jesus and God is not going to do that for you or me. Even after Jesus’s resurrection, the disciples, and now all of us, are left with the world as it is. We have to face unknowing and sadness and suffering, and, choose to affirm life anyway. And we should affirm life! Life is incredible!
The message of the triumphal entry is that we should reject the idea of a fantastical and mercurial God who occasionally breaks into our world to save someone from pain and suffering. Likewise, the cross says “no” to that version of God. Instead it asks us to find the courage to hope in each other, in our acts of love, mercy, and kindness toward one another—not because God has abandoned us, but because God has empowered us.
God urges us to choose to love one another. God will not be experienced through miraculous interventions. Rather, God will be experienced through acts of justice, graciousness, kindness, mercy, and love. Through everyday acts that celebrate life-as-it-is and seek the flourishing of all peoples, God becomes manifest in our lives. This portrait of God affirms our lives as they are (often difficult and sometimes wonderful) and it affirms God’s presence in our lives (often unclear but sometimes evident). It asks each of us to pick up our cross and say “yes” to a painful, but wonderful life of loving this crazy world and the people in it. Because maybe this is true: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12).
I appreciate the thought of Jesus being 100% human…admittedly the first time you shared this concept I wasn’t onboard with it. I liked to believe that, yes Jesus is both human and God, but the split was like 20:80 at best. To consider the idea of it being 100:100 was difficult for the engineer in me.
In this post, you call out that “Jesus appears to have known the sacred texts of Judaism well. He must have known the symbolism of this manner of arrival to Jerusalem”.
I’m wondering if there is room for an argument that since Jesus is also 100% God. And the Bible ascribes the characteristics of deity to Jesus Christ as eternal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and immutable. Then the “must have known the sacred texts” is a bit understated. In fact, I read your post to say that Jesus being 100% human, in fact had a stronger control of his actions during that triumphal entry than his 100% deity.
Follow my thought process?
Can you help me dig deeper?
Thanks for your thoughts.
“God will not be experienced through miraculous interventions.”
Except, of course, God has been experienced in this way if the testimony of God’s people is to be believed. This statement makes sense if one asserts a position something like apophatic spirituality or of the more secular-minded Hume, but does it actually reflect the life of people, of their walk? If the universe is filled with a surplus of meaning as Heschel says, why should we think that the miracle is ruled out? The very conditions of our ordinary life, of its limited nature, leaves open the possibility of something else. And that, I would suggest is the better way to understand the Triumphal Entry, not as a theology of glory, but one expressing the truth that there is another story at work in our lives, that the purposes of God are not yet played out.
“The message of the triumphal entry is that we should reject the idea of a fantastical and mercurial God who occasionally breaks into our world to save someone from pain and suffering. Likewise, the cross says “no” to that version of God. Instead it asks us to find the courage to hope in each other, in our acts of love, mercy, and kindness toward one another—not because God has abandoned us, but because God has empowered us.”
I’m struggling with your posts because the message of the triumphal entry that you espouse seems contrary to the message of the cross and the empty tomb.
Yes, reject a fantastical and most certainly a mercurial God, a CGI, moivesque interloper – but embrace an intimate, loving God whose heart aches for us. A God who came in flesh, 100% divine AND 100% human, shoehorning the entirety of his majesty into weak flesh. To be without sin yet condemned under the law, to die and yet live and reign eternally, to take his own to be with Him, forever.
Likewise witness the miracle of preaching. To stand before the dead, like in the middle of a cemetery and call the dead to life by the power of the Holy Spirit. Or the miracle of faith, believing in God while permanently warped to reject him at every turn.
Finally, the miracle of a God that lives within us as you close with. That when we pick up our cross we do not do so in our own strength nor simply in the strength of community; but in the strength of a Savior who promised to never leave or forsake us – with the power that spoke the universe into existence.
That is miraculous. That is the Gospel.