The disciples did as Jesus had ordered them. They brought the ass and the colt and laid their cloaks over them, and he sat upon them. The very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and strewed them on the road. The crowds preceding him and those following kept crying out and saying, “Hosanna to the son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; hosanna in the highest.” And when he entered Jerusalem the whole city was shaken and asked, “Who is this?” And the crowds replied, “This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.” (Matthew 21.6-11)
Holy Week begins today, an interesting way to identify a week that was anything but holy. Overall, the behavior of everyone from the religious leaders to Pilate to the soldiers was despicable. And who really wants to call a crucifixion “holy?” It was abhorrent in every way, a humiliating means of torture and murder that the Romans reserved for the worst of the worst. Sometimes, I think we sanitize the events of the week by calling it a holy week. A solemn week, yes, a sad week, yes, but a holy week. Far from it.
The week begins, as we surely know by now, with the entrance of Rabbi Jesus into Jerusalem, a cesspool of contention and controversy. Always a center of political intrigue and religious infighting, the city becomes a powder keg during Passover, tons of tourists coming to the city and legions of Roman soldiers positioning themselves on the streets, neither group liking or trusting the other. Called the holy city, Jerusalem also had little claim to holiness.
It is into that snakepit that Rabbi Jesus enters, riding on a colt, the only time in the gospels that the Rabbi sits on an animal. Everywhere else he walks. So, we are alerted by that fact alone that something special is happening. Matthew, whom we hear from today, is always interested in juxtaposing the Hebrew scriptures with Rabbi Jesus’ actions, providing a sort of checklist of the ways that the Galilean Teacher fulfills the promise of the ancient prophets. In this instance, Zechariah the prophet had promised to the people that “your king” will enter Jerusalem on a donkey.
Outside the gates of Jerusalem, Rabbi Jesus is enthusiastically welcomed. Matthew describes the scene in this way, “The very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and strewed them on the road.” So, as he approaches Jerusalem, Jesus is given the red carpet treatment, recognized by the crowd as someone special, acclaimed by them as “the Son of David.”
Interestingly, once he gets inside the gates, the reception begins to take a different turn. Again, Matthew offers an image, writing, “And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was shaken and asked, ‘Who is this?’ And the crowds replied, ‘This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.’” As the days pass, we will see the crowds become disenchanted and discontented with Rabbi Jesus, choosing to release a cutthroat named Barabbas from incarceration instead of Jesus.
This has always posed a conundrum to readers, rightly so, because it seems such a contrast. One day, the crowds were cheering. A few days later, the crowds are condemning. The contrast in the behavior of the crowd causes a whiplash, their enthusiastic welcome turning almost overnight into their bombastic rejection of him. How do we explain such a switch?
Some scholars propose an easy solution, suggesting that we’re dealing with two different crowds. The folks outside the gates of the city are Galilean compatriots of Rabbi Jesus, having come to Jerusalem, as he has, for the high holy day, another ironic use of the word holy as we see Good Friday in the wings. The people inside Jerusalem, so goes the argument, are the inhabitants of Jerusalem, including the ordinary people, the politicians, and the priests.
Since the latter group knows little about Rabbi Jesus, who has spent his time in the backroads of Galilee, we hear them ask, “Who is this?” To which the crowd that has accompanied Jesus provides the answer, “This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.” Certainly, the explanation is clean, offering us an easily comprehensible explanation for the incomprehensible dichotomy in the crowds’ behavior outside Jerusalem and then inside Jerusalem.
And for those who like clean and tidy answers to complex and confusing questions, this explanation serves them well, allowing them to applaud the first crowd and lambast the second crowd, seeing two separate groups, one responsive to Rabbi Jesus, the other unresponsive to him, polar opposites, the classic contest between rural people, the Galileans, and urban folks, the citizens of Jerusalem, played out once again.
While I can appreciate the answer, even respect it as an option, I find it ignores the complexity of the human heart, the spiritual center of the human person, a place that easily can hold two contrasting behaviors within its chambers. If we know anything about ourselves, we know that we have good intentions and bad intentions, we have good days and bad days, we love some people and we hate more people. The list is long because the human heart has perfected binary living, a divided heart found in just about everybody. Hypocrisy, for example, thrives in the incubator of just such a heart, allowing us to condemn in others what we allow in ourselves.
So, there is a good argument to be made that the crowd we meet at the start of the story is very much the same crowd that we meet later in the story, one day yelling out their support for Rabbi Jesus, a few days later shouting for his head. They aren’t different people. They’re the same people on different days. That should have a familiar ring to it.
Otherwise, we’re going to have a difficult time explaining where all the Galileans disappeared to. It’s unlikely they went back home before celebrating the Passover, the reason they made the long trip to Jerusalem. More likely, they stayed in the city, mixing in with everybody else, forming a composite group, or as Matthew calls them, “the crowds.”
If we want to stick to the argument that we’re dealing with two distinct groups of people, one a pro-Jesus faction and the other an anti-Jesus faction, then we’re still going to have to explain why we–if we’re being completely honest–can’t put ourselves into either group. Sure, on our better days, we follow most of what Rabbi Jesus has taught and has asked of his followers. But, on our off days, we follow our own inclinations, that part of our heart that leads us to despise people who are different from us, allows us to ignore people in need without a second-thought, and convinces us that our way is the only way, the gateway for bigotry, judgmentalism, and high-handedness.
That’s why I hesitate to break the crowds into two distinct groups, the nice guys and the bad guys, because everyone of us has the capacity to be nice guys and bad guys, two sides of the same person that we call ourselves, roommates in our divided hearts. And were we in Jerusalem during that unholy week, we could easily have sung Rabbi Jesus’ praises to the high heavens at the start of the week and, by the end of the week, we could have found ourselves chanting for the release of Barabbas.
You begin to see, I think, how easy it is for us to say we’d never condemn Jesus, putting ourselves in the nice guys from Galilee, and pointing fingers at the idiots from Jerusalem, who couldn’t see a good thing when he was standing right in front of them. And yet, the truth of the matter is, we’re quite capable of doing both. While we can hope and pray that, as a rule, we’re halfway decent followers of Rabbi Jesus, we also can say that, too often, we fall short, proving we’re little better than the crowd inside Jerusalem.
It seems to me that the crowd who met Rabbi Jesus at the gates of Jerusalem were simply fair weather friends, people who jump on board when everything is good and everything smells like roses. When the heat came down and Rabbi Jesus found himself the target of criticism and the man on the cross, then these same people turned their backs on him, having lost confidence in him, or as they taunt him, “Save yourself if you are the Son of God.”
And, truth be told, being a fair weather follower of Jesus is the easiest game in town, talking the talk, but not walking the walk when the road gets rough, picking and choosing whom we’ll like, but not respecting everyone as Jesus tells us we should, going to church on Sunday, but not giving a dime to the poor on Monday. Uncomfortable as it makes us, we have to confess, at least on this day, that we aren’t the stand-up guys that we like to think we are.
And were it not enough that we convince ourselves to do what is wrong, Matthew tells us how easily we allow others to convince us to stray from the path of righteousness. He writes, “The chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas but to destroy Jesus.” And, sad to say, the crowds–like us–listen to the wrong people and, as always is the case, the consequences are never good.
Why, we have to ask, are we so gullible to the persuasions of con artists and grifters who take us for a ride, a ride on the dark side, pulling us into a crowd of like-minded people who convince us of the rightness of the wrong they are doing? Like our first parents in the Garden, we find ourselves quick to join the party, drinking the kool-aid while munching on the forbidden fruit. If we were whole-hearted followers of Rabbi Jesus, those street hawkers and circus con men would not stand a chance with us.
And yet they do, attesting again to the divided heart that we carry within our chests, a heart that too easily falls for the lie. Sadly, little changes since the lie was first spoken by the serpent. It continues to be spoken to this day, enticing us, entrancing us like some snake charmer, convincing us to back Barabbas, not Rabbi Jesus.
We begin a sad, solemn week today, with each day the celebratory voices from the crowds welcoming Rabbi Jesus into Jerusalem changing into condemnatory chants to crucify him, a turn-around difficult to explain, unless and until we look into our own hearts. And as we clutch the palms in our hands, processing like the crowds in Jerusalem, we may want to ask ourselves, not so much what we carry in our hands, but what we carry in our hearts.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 