Scripture Sunday: Remembering the Palms

by Ashtyn Adams

John 12:12-16 (NRSV)
12 The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. 13 So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord-- the King of Israel!" 14 Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written: 15 "Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt!" 16 His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.

John’s passage describing the events we will celebrate this coming Palm Sunday initially appears wanting for the purposes of creation justice. Especially in comparison to Mark’s version, which was covered in last week’s episode of the Green Lectionary Podcast, where we are given details that paint a dense picture of provision and illuminate a little ecosystem of reciprocity and mutuality between humans and creation. For example, as the episode pointed out, we see humans giving their cloaks, willing to sacrifice as co-contributors with the trees who give their branches. For Mark, there is this groundedness that is so important and exposes the intimate humanness of Jesus. For John, there is a different priority at play. The book not only takes a more philosophical perspective of the Christ of the cosmos, but the author centers the theme of belief and unbelief. Its sheer brevity, a mere 4 verses in comparison to Mark’s 11, contains two references to Jewish scripture: Psalm 118 and Zechariah 9, underscoring Jesus’ divinity with haste and clarity. Although we are “missing” some information here, and the people awkwardly begin praising before Jesus rides the donkey, John’s reference to Zechariah in 12:15 provides a richness into the kind of King coming that Mark likewise lacks. John invites us to wonder if we understand this mystery before us, if we are properly remembering the Messiah who rides the young donkey and not a war horse. ​

The reference in John 12:15 is to Zechariah 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Verse 10 continues, “I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the warhorses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth.” Righteousness and victory are re-defined in terms of humility, graciousness, and nonviolence from sea to sea. The rulers who force their will onto creation and use it as a means to demonstrate their power, exceeding their limits, are taken away. The battle bow, an instrument that kills and separates life, is broken and replaced with a strange image of peace: of a human sharing in the ordinary life of a young creature who is newly learning what it means to carry another, a stranger. It is a striking image of kingship and true power that prompts a further question in Zechariah 9:17,” What is his goodness, and what is his beauty? Grain will make his young men flourish; so too wine his young women.” Goodness and beauty are tied to the flourishing of all creation together. It makes me think of the Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-14: “because God did not make death, and he does not delight in the destruction of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them.”

​Hearing Zechariah as the backdrop for this passage illustrates a crucial point, one made by Rowan Williams in his essay on Mother Maria Skobtsova, for reading the gospel according to John and celebrating Palm Sunday: that encountering God in history may not be reducible to material reality, but it is literally nothing without it.* Our identity has an inseparable and unchosen connectedness to the rest of the Earth; the world is not some evil or a field for us to exercise our virtues, it is no backdrop for our “religious duties.” As we remember the colt Jesus rode into Jerusalem on and the palm trees grabbed to meet him, we see that honoring creation is “not in fact an extra chore on top of the main work of communing with God. It is itself the stuff of communion with God.” The disciples, who did not understand what was happening at the time but continued to bear in mind the life of Jesus, provide a call for us as the season of Lent closes: we must actively remember the kind of King we follow and dispel the myth that humanity is alienated from its material environment, that we can relate to God without it. Sin, as Williams defines it, is willed isolation, “and this isolation as a solitary desiring subject is what most erodes our reality.”

We must actively remember the kind of King we follow and dispel the myth that humanity is alienated from its material environment, that we can relate to God without it. Sin, as Williams defines it, is willed isolation

John’s concern with belief remains extremely relevant– we must ask ourselves and our churches if and how we will welcome this kind of generous and bow-breaking existence into our worlds marked by environmental abuse and exploitation. As the donkey lifted one dusty hoof after another, and as the palm branches designated a path along the soft earth, may we contemplate our web of relations among all living things and move with such generative forces, forward.

Notes:

* Maria Skobtsova was a pioneer in the French resistance of WWII, working with refugees and destitutes, and courageously defending Jews. She was executed, taking the place of another woman, at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1945. Her martyrdom is widely recognized and she was canonized as a saint in the Orthodox Church in 2004.

​Books:

Rowan Williams, Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021).

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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