Palm Sunday Reflection

Here's my Palm Sunday reflection:

Palm Sunday is often taught as the day of Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem coupled with the soon-to-be-shattered expectations of his earthly rule -- for the people welcomed Jesus as a King but would not understand his "spiritual" kingship. What often is not taught in modern sermons fixated on personal salvation-heavy preaching of the other-worldly Jesus that completely lose touch with the historic Jesus is that in antiquity the entry of a king is understood as one who comes to conquer a city. The "good news" (evangelion) was that this foreign king was now in charge. Depending upon your feelings about your new boss, this was a mixed blessing. But in keeping with the historical-symbolic meaning of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, his entry cannot be about personal salvation that was to come at Easter...at least not in that week prior...but was about the material liberation of the oppressed. 

Flavius Josephus reports that such messianic gestures were rife in the 2nd Temple Judaism of Jesus' day and other messiahs did similar things. One messianic movement, for example, was crushed, when the would-be messiah and his followers walked around the walls of Jerusalem in anticipation that God would perform a miracle and cause those walls to fall (an intentional recreation of Joshua's story). Makes one wonder if the gospel writer who relates this to Zechariah was the creator of the link or if Jesus himself really saw himself at that point as a messianic figure in creating his center of action with a view to his own prophetic role carried from the past. What is rather interesting is that those who don't consider themselves oppressed were likely those who will want to kill him (I don't think it was only those who had their dreams of liberation shattered that turn on him as we're led to believe in popular preaching), the same which felt they were experiencing the "good news" of their new ruler. 

Any escapism into symbolism and gesture alone only ignores the fact that Jesus probably did see himself embodying this history. If he did, then it is likely that the proclamation of salvation was not about some confined spiritual liberation only decoded in symbol, but truly about social justice. And in the long line and tradition of conquering kings, along with the inconvenience of kenosis, it was likely to be rejected by many of those who were called to "benefit" from it.

Having said all that, I longingly hope one day to get past the moralizing message, the abstract universal principle of Christian living sermons we are subject to every time this year, that often come at the expense of a rich, historical-symbolic narrative.