Tomorrow Christian churches all over the world will celebrate Palm Sunday, commemorating Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem five days before his death, riding on a donkey and surrounded by throngs of well-wishers acclaiming his arrival like that of a king. The event has come to be known as Jesus' triumphal entry. But does it deserve that label?
Set aside the Jesus Seminar and the fringe radicals of biblical scholarship. Turn instead to the so-called third quest of the historical Jesus, underway since about 1980, designed to set Jesus squarely into his first-third-of-the-first century Jewish context in Israel, designed to ask higher-order historical questions than those involved in voting one-by-one on the authenticity of individual verses in the Gospels, questions like: what was the first "Palm Sunday" really all about and how credible are the Gospels' accounts of it? Or, why did at least some of the same individuals five days later cry out publicly for Jesus' crucifixion; indeed, what exactly was the relationship between the "triumphal entry" and the crucifixion?
Increasingly, the answers that emerge are that we might have been better off to call this account the "non-triumphal entry," that at the very least its core probably is historical, and that it reflects an implicit, somewhat mysterious claim by Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah or expected liberator.
Messianic fervor was at a fever pitch. John 6:15 reflects an aside often held to be authentic, even by those fairly suspicious of much in John's Gospel: once before, after Jesus fed the 5000, large crowds had tried by force to make him king, but he ran away from them! Now here he is, apparently consciously enacting the Messianic prediction of Zechariah 9:9, "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey." The episode appears in all four Gospels in the New Testament (Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke 19:28-40; John 12:12-19), a rare enough phenomenon so that it strongly supports historical reliability. After all, if later Christians wanting to exalt Jesus were making this up, they would surely have portrayed him entering on the white horse of the Roman conqueror (as in fact he is portrayed returning at his second coming in Revelation 19:11). And, if it is objected that this is simply a story making Jesus fit the "job description" of Zechariah's prediction," then one must ask why a writer would portray the crowds as so misunderstanding that Jesus was coming on a humble beast of burden, in peace, indeed, soon to lay down his life, as he had in fact repeatedly predicted he would?
This is what theologians call "implict Christology." Jesus is making indirect claims to be the Messiah, ones easily misunderstood. He is fulfilling prophecy but not in the way many hoped for. There will be no triumph on this Sunday; that will have to await Good Friday (for a spiritual victory) and Jesus' return at the end of human history (for a literal, earthly victory). This Sunday will be a reminder of how people wrongly wanted to politicize Jesus in the first century, and the mistake has been repeated many times throughout history ever since.
In an election year in America, the quest of the historical Jesus can help remind the theologians and the politicians that Jesus' primary mission was not about siding with Republicans or Democrats, or their ancient equivalents, or any other amalgamation of social or political causes, important as many of those are. He came instead, as he claimed in Mark 10:45, to give his life as "a ransom for many."--another passage defensible as authentic by the standard historical criteria. Five days later that mission would be much clearer as Jesus showed no resistance to arrest and condemnation. Little wonder many were disenchanted. the historical Jesus of Nazareth lived out his call to love one's enemy and consistently modeled a non-violent ministry. Has the planet learned much yet from his model?
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