MARCH 28, 2021 – I remember Palm Sunday of my childhood. At some point you’d wind up with a palm cutting in one hand and a small palm cross in the other. As I recall, you were supposed to save the palms until Lent the next year. Mine never lasted that long.
As to the event commemorated by Palm Sunday, I don’t believe the Gospels were entirely figments of imagination. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (or the compilations under those names) aren’t complete myths or drug trip travelogues. There’s historical reality in there somewhere plus a boatload of aphorisms and insights into the human condition, often expressed by allegory to facilitate understanding and retention.
A week before he was taken down—or rather, first “put up,” then taken down—the Galilean rabbi named “Jesus” rode into Jerusalem to the cheers of an adulating crowd. Throngs lay their cloaks and palm fronds along the path of his donkey—hardly a steed ridden by a traditional king.
Of course, the cheering folk, hopeful that Jesus would deliver them from their woes, were disappointed when he turned out to be . . . Jesus. Worse, he was about to be “turn-the-tables” Jesus, chasing the money-changers from the temple grounds. The authorities soon turned the tables on him, and that adoring crowd, fickle and vicious after all, joined in.
I’m no scholar or theologian. Hell, I’m not even religious. But the older I get, the more that iconoclast of the Christian belief system seems to have nailed it—oops, bad metaphor. At least within the reportage handed down over the centuries, now millennia, Jesus exposed us for who we are. But he couldn’t do so without being a pain to the establishment; a renegade, a rabble-rouser, a fanatic.
The craziest thing about Jesus is that he didn’t seek to establish a “religion.” It took flawed humanity to create that. What I see when I scratch the surface of the early, theologically hair-splitting “Councils,” the East-West schism, the bitter divides within Orthodoxy, the power of the Vatican, the Reformation and further splintering of Protestantism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquests, not to mention rampant pedophilia among Catholic clergy and the puritanical bent of rightwing American Christianity . . . what I see is . . . Jesus smashing up things outside the temple. Surely, he would have been appalled by what’s been done in his name.
Whether you believe he was the Son of God depends halfway on whether you believe in God as Father. That discussion is for another day. Meanwhile, I ponder the idea of a guy who lived a vow of poverty, telling his followers to snatch a colt they’d find roped to a tree—then riding the animal into town as crowds along the way shouted “Hosanna!” How would I have reacted to the donkey parade? Would I have called Jesus a kook? Or called the people kooks for thinking he wasn’t?
I’m sure of one thing: the rabbi’s scruffy image wouldn’t have matched his “cleaned-up” Northern European appearance in my childhood.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
