Untethered
Mark 11:1-11

April 9, 2006


All of Palm Sunday hinges on that donkey. Did Jesus and company borrow or steal it, and was the donkey ever returned? How can we wave our palms and shout Hosanna when it just might be a dishonest ride, a stolen vehicle? Silly questions, naturally, yet the donkey is at the heart of this confused celebration.

One odd bit about Lent’s pilgrimage is that you and I are standing and sitting at the same spots we were at the beginning of Lent. It’s not that we have not moved, but each week in our wandering around the wilderness we keep coming back to this same location. What makes the difference in most pilgrimages, it has been said often, is what happens along the route to the shrine. Nevertheless, when we arrive at our blessed city, Jerusalem often ends up behaving quite differently than we had imagined.

The little preparatory details seem to consume most of our time. Fetching the donkey takes up half the verses in the Palm Sunday account, and like it or not, we do tend to pay a lot of attention to anything that is paid a lot of attention. No names are mentioned, the village is really not identified, the owner doesn’t figure at all. Here it is the good citizens standing by who raise the voice of protest to the disciples on assignment. Is this any way to bring in the kingdom? A donkey is the ironic reminder that this is the usual way.

When ministers gather informally, often the subject is embarrassingly broached about all the incidental details of the ministry which you find yourself doing - the opening and closing of doors and windows late at night which a parishioner has driven by and noticed, setting up tables and mopping floors, running errands for supplies, playing taxi. Occasionally, one of the ministers will relate an event that was not a detail: a crisis in the community, a tragic death, the counseling of a couple or individual that actually seemed to help. “That was what I was educated to be a minister to do!”

Don’t have to be a minister to think that. If you are a regular here, a person committed to the long and lonely pilgrimage, I imagine you thought there should be more religious fireworks going on in this place. Along your spiritual way you had to set up tables, make coffee, greet people at the door, take out the trash, lug all the fleas from the flea market out to the dumpster - all of this too trivial to include in the continuing Acts of the Apostles at Knox-Metropolitan, tasks and chores forgotten in their place. Is that why Mark spends so much time fetching donkeys, in order to raise tedious detail to a higher standard so that we might become “holy gophers”? [We know what a holy gopher (Gainer!) is in this church!] Is that why we belong to a church?

After the sacrifice and gloominess of Lenten spirits and weather, we are anxious to make a big fuss of Palm Sunday, a prelude to Easter, yearning for a victory parade - waving palms instead of confetti. But as soon as we read seriously and carefully the account, it is apparent that this is a poorly done victory parade. A donkey he preferred instead of an Arabian steed, the difference between a peace march and a military exercise. Peace is always cheaper than war.

Not only a peace march, but Jesus knew this was a funeral procession, just like one of those famous New Orleans jazz troupes walking down the street in file, first playing a mournful dirge and then a Dixieland that makes a dead soul dance. But this is our hindsight; the disciples and branch wavers did not know that. Let our brass blast us out of here today. Let us sing these hymns as loud as we can, just let’s know what kind of procession it is. Just let’s remember that it’s not all over yet. I know we’re tired and want to nudge it on ahead and get to the good stuff. On the road down from the Mount of Olives, the branch wavers and disciples thought they could accelerate the situation and tried to celebrate Jesus’ triumph too quickly. We too keep trying to declare victory too early.

Maybe we should listen a little more carefully to what the crowds are shouting. “Hosanna” keeps coming out of their mouths and we hear it like a cheer. “Hosanna Heysanna Sanna Sanna Ho Sanna Hey Sanna Ho Sanna,” according to the Broadway translation. But the word is more urgent, more desperate. “Save us!” it means. They knew he was the One who could do something in their desperate world. They were right. He was the One, but it just wasn’t time for a parade yet.

Mark is notably sparing in his language. The crowd is shouting their Hosannas and then nothing. Doesn’t even say that the procession had ended and dissipated, but it is clear it didn’t make it into Jerusalem. Jesus is the only one who actually enters the city, goes up to the Temple, checks it all out - not a word is spoken - and turns around and goes back to Bethany with the twelve disciples.

Much ado about nothing?

This was not a rash person, this Jesus. He went back to a friendly environment that night, certainly talked it over with his friends, slept on it and got up the next morning and got it right. Sure, the moneychangers in the Temple got their comeuppins that next day, but it was done so in its proper time.

You and I don’t get to choose our Easter. This is The Week of the Christian year that coincides day by day with the events in the Gospel. We attempt to recreate the tensions and triumphs, the passions and possibilities of that First Week, but there is no guarantee that God’s time will accommodate the time you have chosen. In other words, you cannot arrange Easter to fit your schedule. No one gets resurrected according to a timetable. That does not mean that God never comes; God comes in the middle of your night when you least expect it and you better be awake.

In the meantime, there are plenty of chores to do. Donkeys have to be fetched and untethered, and somehow their wildness controlled. Meals have to be cooked, tables and chairs need to be set up and taken down, floors and bathrooms have to be cleaned, doors have to be opened, people who are struggling yearn to be listened to, the poor need to have advocates, the sick need to be healed and comforted, the imprisoned need to be visited, and God’s word needs to be read and heard and proclaimed each week. That is what you and I were educated to do in the name of Christ.

Maybe, though, this will be the week. Maybe in God’s time we’ll eat together in an upper room as if for the first and last time. Maybe we’ll stand by in the unbearable silence beneath a wooden cross of injustice and death. Maybe we’ll spend a Saturday numb from it all, incapable of articulating what we feel and who we need to be. And maybe on the Third Day there will be no parade, but then, who will need one?

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan