WEEK SEVEN

March 20 - March 26
Theme: The Heart of the Kingdom: Passion & Compassion

The heart of the kingdom is the cross of Christ! Our Lord’s unconditional love and grace were poured out on Calvary for all humans: past, present and future. The story of God’s kingdom required Christ to assume the form of “suffering servant.” On the cross, Jesus took upon himself the sins and evils of the world and in giving up his life, he defeated sin, death and Satan forever. By overthrowing the powers of darkness through his atonement, Christ brought all who believe into God’s kingdom (Colossians 1:13-14). Theologian Jeremy Treat suggests, “The kingdom is the ultimate goal of the cross, and the cross is the means by which the kingdom comes.” 

Sunday, March 20
Palm Sunday
Scripture: Luke 19:28-42

After Jesus had said this [telling them the parable of the ten minas], he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. As he approached Bethphage and Bethany at the hill called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it.’”

Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They replied, “The Lord needs it.” They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it. As he went along, people spread their cloaks on the road.

When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! [Psa 118:26] Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.”

BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD

On Palm Sunday Christians celebrate what is often referred to as the “triumphal entry” of Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem. There are good reasons for referring to this event in this way, but we must also recognize the profound irony, even dissonance, of using this term. Ancient cultures—Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and particularly the Greco-Roman empires that had long controlled Jerusalem—knew how to do a proper triumphal entry, and this is not how it’s done. Rather than riding into the Holy City on a warhorse, Jesus enters on a donkey—or worse, a donkey’s colt. We might well take this to signify a gesture of peaceful rather than belligerent power, but in an ancient context this is also a display of weakness, of lowliness. Indeed, it is precisely the concurrence of this lowliness with the proclamation of “glory in the highest” that gives the narrative such disorienting resonance. As most of the gospels make clear, the prophecy of Zechariah was ringing in the background: “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, [even] on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zech 9:9). The lowliness of Christ’s gesture is not lost on the crowd but neither is the heavy claim it makes. The celebrants prepare the way for a king, covering the path with branches and their own cloaks (Mt 21:8, Mk 11:8; cf. 2 Kgs 9:13), and in John’s Gospel they bring palm fronds (Jn 12:13), a material reserved in Jewish culture for celebrating God’s deliverance (Lev 23:40) and in Greco-Roman culture for celebrating victory. And yet the king approaches his city not with a reassuring, extended right arm of power but as one weeping for his people.

The weakness of the triumphal entry—which eventually culminates in Jesus’ profoundly awful enthronement ceremony as the “king of the Jews” (Mt 27:27-31, Mk 15:16-20)—is powerfully articulated in Palm Sunday by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer. The centerpiece of the work is a painted resin cast of a fallen palm tree—rather than only fronds, Kiefer has laid an entire uprooted tree on the path to Jerusalem. And in doing so, the palm symbol of celebration and triumph also becomes an image of absolute deadness and loss. The fallen tree seems to visually rhyme the dead body of Christ in traditional paintings of his deposition from the cross and entombment. Kiefer thus holds the hopefulness of Palm Sunday together with the seeming utter disaster of Good Friday and the desolation of Holy Saturday. Indeed, as St. Paul makes emphatically clear in his letters to the Corinthians, at the center of the triumphant, liberating “good news” of the gospel is the profoundly weak and foolish looking figure of an “executed Messiah” (1 Cor 1:18-31).

Flanking Kiefer’s fallen tree are numerous (ranging from 18 to 48, depending on the exhibition) large flat vitrine paintings containing palm fronds, branches, sunflower pods, mangroves, brambles, thorn bushes—most of which have been plastered white and mounted against vertical fields of dry clay, ash, emulsion, and other materials. Like the uprooted tree, these too are artifacts of life giving way to death. They are each raised in celebration, but they are also raised as relics of the earth groaning under our primordial cursing: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you” (Gen 3:17-18). And as these are presented against panels of dry earth and ash, it appears as though the ground (even the stones) is crying out—indeed, crying out in many voices: the words Palm Sunday are written across the panels in a variety of languages, placing a broad cross-section of the peoples of the earth along the roadside (cf. Rev 7:9). Kiefer amplifies this crying by also scrawling the words aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem (let the earth open and let salvation spring up) across various “pages” of the vitrine paintings, quoting in Latin from Isaiah 45: “O sky, rain down from above! Let the clouds send down showers of righteousness! Let the earth open up [to absorb it], let salvation spring up, and let righteousness flourish with it. I, the Lord, create it” (Isa 45:8). In sum, Kiefer’s Palm Sunday endeavors to cry out for a triumphal entry that is in fact cosmic in scope—one that meets and accounts for all the groanings of creation and of human history. As Kiefer himself says about this work: “I would never say I’m a pessimist or optimist. I’m desperate” (Pattison 117). From our places along the roadside on this Palm Sunday, Christians around the world join Kiefer in hopeful desperation for—even the audacity to celebrate the arrival of—one who disarms the powers through his own weakness and who turns the deathliness of the cross into a tree of life: a king riding on a donkey.

PRAYER

Seated in heaven upon thy throne and on earth upon a foal, O Christ our God, thou hast accepted the praise of angels and the songs of the children who cried out to thee: Blessed art thou that comest to call back Adam. Arrive, Lord Jesus.
Amen.

Jonathan Anderson, Executive Director, CCCA