The Good News of Humbleness

April 9, 1995

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Scripture: Luke 19:28-40; Philippians 2:5-11

For some reason, I keep coming back to that donkey, that little, humble beast of burden that carried Jesus into town that day. At the center of the parade that marked His entrance into Jerusalem for the final week of His life, and at the center of our liturgical worship now 2000 years later on this day we call Palm Sunday, is that little donkey. Somehow, I keep coming back to that.

You know, if you’re a preacher, you hardly know what to do with Palm Sunday.... you hardly know how to handle it. It’s a homiletical “toughie” ---Is it a happy day or a sad day? Is it a day of shouting, or a day of weeping? Do we need kazoos, or do we need hankies? Is it a day of celebration, or a day of lamentation? Or is it, somehow, a mixture, a blending of these?

From the preaching perspective, it’s the most enigmatic of all the great Christian festivals.

Easter is obvious...glorious and obvious...the mood of Easter is clear cut and sharply drawn. The song of triumph, victory, unmitigated joy permeates everything from start to finish. “He is risen.... Go and tell....” The mood of Pentecost is equally clear...dynamic, explosive strength. You can almost feel it and taste it. A Church infused with new, raw power... standing on tiptoe and ready for all comers.

The mood of Lent is somber...a shadow hangs over the events as they unfold, a shadow that grows darker and more ominous as Calvary nears.

BUT THEN, SUDDENLY, OUT OF NOWHERE, POPS PALM SUNDAY. It breaks into that dark, ominous mood. You aren’t looking for it, you aren’t expecting it...it just all at once pierces the cloud like a ray of light.

And coming when it does, and where it does, just five days before the Crucifixion, and after six weeks of Lenten preparation, it has a jarring, discordant effect. Coronation just before collapse? Triumph just before disaster? One day glorious recognition, and almost the next total rejection? You don’t quite know what to do with it.

The Gospel writers themselves weren’t quite sure, I think. Even among the 4 of them, there is tension. They don’t all treat it the same way.

When Matthew and Mark tell the story, they portray it as a city-wide, sitting event. Matthew says, “When Jesus rode into town, all the city was moved....” We usually follow Matthew’s lead in our contemporary re-creations. He pictures the teeming crowds, jammed into Jerusalem for Passover, pushing and shoving, caught up in the drama, shouting and waving palm branches in adulation. Not only that, Matthew quotes a passage from Zechariah which every good Hebrew would have recognized as unmistakably Messianic:

“Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” To devout Jews, that verse meant Messiah. For both Matthew and Mark, it’s a nationalistic, patriotic parade...lots of noise and excitement.

But our passage today is from Luke. In his version, you sense undercurrent, you sense mystery, shadows, growing tension. He says nothing about crowds at all...no throngs, no great multitudes...there are no hosannas, no quotations, no branches cut from trees. If we had only Luke’s account, we wouldn’t even call it Palm Sunday. We’d call it Garment Sunday, I suppose, or Old Clothes Sunday. There’s no mention of palm branches anywhere.

Even more, as Fred Craddock reminds us, it’s very much a disciple event, not a crowd event. Who places Jesus on the donkey? The disciples. Who spreads garments on the road? The disciples. Who rejoices and praises God? SAME ANSWER. Christ is hailed by His followers not by the general public. It’s exclusively an “in house” affair. And this is NOT the group which later called for crucifixion.

Oh, I know...the disciples didn’t understand Him, either. They misunderstood, like everybody else, the nature of His ministry, but it’s not fair to disparage them totally. They aren’t the ones who sing praise and scream death all in the same week....

This is a much more subdued version of the entrance than the other Gospels give. Luke seems a great deal more aware of the ominous cloud that hangs over it all. And how do you suppose Jesus Himself must have felt? What would you think HIS mood was as He rode that little donkey into town?

I’m sure He wanted recognition. I’m sure He wanted followers. After all, it was to draw people to Himself that He came into the world. In one sense this day was a fulfillment of His ministry.

But it’s awfully tempting, and maybe too easy to go from the elation of Palm Sunday to the elation of Easter without ever experiencing, or even seeing the gaping, gruesome valley in between, and you miss the whole meaning of Gospel redemption if you do that. Jesus refused to do it.

I heard somebody say in a sermon one time that Palm Sunday was probably the single happiest day in Jesus’ life. I liked the sermon, but the more I’ve thought about it, the less I’m inclined to agree. Given the context, how could it be?

Do you think for a minute He was fooled by what was going on? Do you think He was taken in by the glitter and the hoopla?

The Church calls it the Triumphal Entry, but it’s really triumphant only in the light of subsequent development. It’s Easter that makes Palm Sunday look good, not vice versa. Palm Sunday makes no sense apart from Easter.

In fact, far from being triumphant at the time, His entry into the city really only hastened the tightening of the net around Him.... It was already in place and already closing.... This only sped up the process. Riding in as He did, challenging the authorities as He did, with such brazenness, almost guaranteed a ferocious reaction. It was a challenge they had to answer. In poker terms, He not only called them, He raised the ante.

Of course they had to do something. AND IT DIDN’T TAKE THEM LONG. Just five frenetic days, and it was over...or so they thought.

No, I don’t think it was a happy day at all. The joy of Palm Sunday is retrospective. Only after Easter did it begin to fit together. He was Messiah. He was King, but in a way so drastically different from everybody’s expectation. And He knew what He was heading for all along, even as He was riding in to face it.

So how do we celebrate it today? Two images, if I may...two images from these two passages, which are our Lectionary readings for this morning, seem to me to be the best way to come to this Palm Sunday story. They don’t tell it all, but they do tell something important. At least this is what kept jumping out at me when I studied them together....

They’re both so authentic and complementary...they make a wonderful fit. One is a visual image, the other a verbal one. One addresses the eye, the other the ear, but both convey a common emphasis so characteristic of Jesus.

From Paul, it’s the line in the 8th verse of that great 2nd Chapter of Philippians, maybe an early Christian hymn about Jesus. The line goes, “And being found in human form, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even death on a Cross.”

He humbled Himself---that’s the verbal image. And the visual image, from the Gospel story, is that pitiful, little donkey. I keep coming back to that donkey. Talk about humble. It’s almost comical when you think about it...the poor, little thing. It wasn’t even a full-grown donkey....It wasn’t even mature. Luke is explicit. It was a colt.

Now, I wasn’t sure if I could use colt with donkey. Is that proper? Somebody in the office questioned it when I told them what I was working on. Doesn’t colt imply horse? Well, that would totally change the image, if true. Matthew and John in their versions both clearly say that the beast was a donkey, but Luke says “colt”. Could it be that we have an entirely different animal here, with an entirely different set of connotations?

I fretted over that for about half a day. Surely the Bible wouldn’t come along and undermine the cherished notion of a lifetime. Surely you can’t let a little thing like accuracy get in the way of a solid homiletical insight. My stars, what would happen to preach if you let a practice like that get started?

So I went to the dictionary, and to seek further corroboration called a veterinarian with whom I enjoy some acquaintance, and both independently relieved my anxiety. The  dictionary defined colt as the male offspring of a horse, camel...or...donkey. There it was in black and white, and the Vet added his confirmation. What a relief!

I wish Luke had spelled it out a little more specifically, and I plan to mention it to him when I get to heaven, but it’s enough to go on.

It was a donkey colt, the foal of an ass, just as the Gospel writers say, and not only was it a colt, a half-grown beast, it was, Luke says, an UNBROKEN colt, one that had never before been ridden. That’s about as humble as you can get.

Jesus acknowledges His Messiahship, announces to the city and to the world who He is by riding into town on an adolescent, spindly, rookie, untested, pint-sized, inexperienced donkey. If you don’t want to call it comical, you’ll at least have to admit it’s bizarre.

We talk about the disappointment of using replacement baseball players instead of real, bona-fide major leaguers on opening day. It came within a whisper of happening. That’s NOTHING compared with this. Here’s the King of the world, King of the universe, declaring His sovereignty by means of a beast so humble, so unpretentious, so modest and lowly you wonder how Jesus could have maintained any dignity. Why, on that little thing His feet probably dragged the ground.

Could there be a message here about the way true greatness is most meaningfully expressed? CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW OTHERS MIGHT HAVE COME TO TOWN?

Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor would have ridden in a chariot pulled by magnificent stallions, festooned with the plumage of imperial authority.

JESUS ENTERED THE CITY ON THE BACK OF A LITTLE DONKEY, AND A BORROWED ONE AT THAT.

A political leader, Herod Antipas, or someone similar, would have been surrounded by security guards---armed men, paid men, who would have held back the crowd from pressing too close, to protect their man from possible harm. JESUS WAS SURROUNDED BY HIS FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS, FROM MANY WALKS OF LIFE, AND RODE INTO THE MIDST OF THE PEOPLE, ALMOST AT THEIR HEIGHT.

A military leader, someone like General Titus, who did exactly this a few years later, would have galloped along the road on a fancy steed, even running over people if they got in the way. He probably wouldn’t even have acknowledged the crowd. He would have just plowed through the middle, as fast as He could go. JESUS ON A DONKEY, MOVED SLOWLY WITH THE CROWD, ACCOMPANYING THE PEOPLE AS WELL AS BEING ACCOMPANIED BY THEM.

A religious leader, in the style of Annas or Caiaphas, would have moved pompously through the crowd, garbed in bright priestly robes, hedged in by an orderly contingency of other minions, who would have prevented him from being touched by anyone unclean..... JESUS DRESSED IN HIS USUAL ATTIRE, NOTHING FANCY OR ORNATE, SIMPLY PLODDED ALONG HUMBLY, NOT SHRINKING FROM THE TOUCH OF ANYONE.

What a beautiful and exquisite thing. AND WHAT STUNNING IRONY. It may be that the humility of Jesus, His humbleness, is that about Him which most faithfully reveals the Divine. Why does that speak to us at such a deep level? What is there about us which instinctively rejects as invalid and dangerous the blatant, bullying demonstration of power, the preening, pompous air of authority, the smug, smooth manipulation of people? What is there about the way we’re made that knows somehow that in true humility there is more real strength than in all the combinations of blustering brute force put together?

Now, I’m talking about true humility, the genuine article, not some fake, spurious kind. We know the difference when we see it....

Somebody wrote a book one time and entitled it, My Humility and How I Achieved It....No.... Genuine humility, by its very nature, is an elusive thing... slippery.... The more you go after it, the farther away it goes.

To try to cultivate it precisely works against getting it. You don’t achieve true humility; you don’t even know you have it, because you’re concentrating so vigorously on something beyond, and bigger, something outside the narrow confines of ME and MY.

There is about true humility a kind of selflessness---not obsequiousness, not self-hatred, not false modesty---those are only forms of pride turned upside down. The truly humble person rarely thinks of humility. He’s focusing on what’s out there... including God.

They tell a wonderful story about Kagawa, the great Japanese Christian, who in the early years of this century worked so hard and long in the slums of Japan. Once he came to the U.S., to a conference and was scheduled to make a speech. The time came for his presentation, and Kagawa wasn’t there. They looked around for him and couldn’t find him.

Finally, they located him in the Men’s Room of the Conference Hall. He was picking up paper towels from the floor which the delegates had tossed away. He said, “I didn’t want the workers to have extra, unnecessary work imposed on them because of the carelessness of my fellow Christians.”

There’s something moving about that, something real, something that touches us with its authenticity.

It was there in Jesus...and a POWER rises out of that unpretentious, uncalculating humbleness---the riding into town on a donkey kind---that can change things because it can change us, when no external force could do a thing.

Wallace Hamilton in one of his books quotes Canon Streeter’s definition of power. Power, said Streeter, is the ability to accomplish purpose. That’s insightful.

Purposeless power is not true power. It’s nothing but noisy devastation. POWER IS NOT POWER UNLESS IT CAN ACCOMPLISH THE PURPOSE TO WHICH IT’S APPLIED. A sledgehammer is a powerful tool for breaking up rock in a quarry, but for the purpose of tapping in little carpet tacks, it has its limitations.

Dynamite works with splendid efficacy—power----when it comes to blasting a hole in a

mountain to build a tunnel....But for the purpose of putting a baby to sleep, or teaching a youngster to love music, you won’t find it effective at all.

Let me paraphrase Hamilton further----When we say the modern world has power, we must quickly ask, “Power for what?” If the purpose is to smash the world, ravage its delicate balance, and leave it desolate, we certainly do have the power. It’s in our capacity to do it....

But if the purpose is to save the world, to unite it, to turn people from savagery to civilization, to cleanse their hearts of hate, to help them find their way to peace with God and with each other, then the power we’re putting our major trust in, and spending most of our money for is simply not going to cut it.... It can’t accomplish that. Power is the ability to accomplish purpose. End of paraphrase. The farther we go, the less bizarre and comical that donkey looks.

God long ago decided how He would go about winning back His estranged and lost creation. Maybe God considered doing it by coercion. How can we know? Maybe at times along the way God was tempted to adopt the sledgehammer, or the dynamite approach. It’s probably a good thing some of us were not sitting on the strategy committee.

But God decided not to use that kind of power, thank God. God would win people back one by one, one at a time, not through power from without, but through lures from within, not by coercion, but by persuasion, not by playing on their fears, but by tugging on their hearts.

How perfectly Jesus reflects it, and how consistently.... Riding into town on a donkey is made of the same cloth as being born in a manger, and working in a carpenter shop, and eating with publicans, and associating with lepers, and hobnobbing with sinners, and not worrying today about what may or may not happen tomorrow, and not letting your left hand know what your right is giving away, and not having anywhere to lay your head, and being obedient until death, even death on a Cross.

THEY’RE ALL OF ONE PIECE. Riding into town on a donkey is so like Him, so arresting in its simplicity, and so graphic as an expression of the power of genuine humbleness to grasp and hold our consciences. Think what might happen if that spirit were seriously put into practice on a massive scale....

In a little book entitled The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives, Dallas Willard writes:

“There is a way of life that, if generally adopted, would eliminate most of the social and political problems from which we suffer. This way of life comes to whole-hearted disciples of Christ who live in the disciplines of the spiritual life in humble obedience, allowing grace to bring their bodies into alignment with their redeemed spirits.”

Then he says this disturbing word: “For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One sadly is not required to be, or to intend to be a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward discipleship.” I leave it with you to make your own personal application.

What is his conclusion? You can probably guess: “Most problems in contemporary churches and in society can be explained by the fact that members have not decided to follow Christ. No one yet knows what changes would be wrought if the way of Christ were truly tried in human affairs.”

That way is a costly way, a very costly way as the events commemorated again this week make painfully clear. But thank God, when you review your own life and challenge...thank God it wasn’t too costly for our Savior.

“Being found in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a Cross.”  Today is Palm Sunday, just five days from Calvary.

Anyone for a donkey ride?