Bringing an ass to church

A long time ago, in a land far, far away, a land that some of my people claim as their original homeland, a great general stood on the banks of a stream. It was just dawn. All around him his army stood, ready for orders to march. Young men from the provinces, some from noble families, all up before dawn, armor on, tents packed, animals loaded, a hurried breakfast in the dark. Horses saddled for the officers to ride, a great white stallion for the general, and the donkeys hitched to the wagons, ready to roll forward.

But the general hesitated. For in one critical way, this was no ordinary stream. It was a boundary. A line between the north of the country and the south. A line which, so said the government, could not be crossed by a standing army. If the order was given, if the parade of soldiers and supply wagons began, then the general was in fact declaring himself king. A king set in opposition to the current government. Civil war would not be far behind.

The story is told that the general turned to his friends, his advisors. We can still retreat, he said. But then he took a trumpet from one of his heralds, crossed the bridge over the stream called the Rubicon, and sounded the advance. And Julius Caesar cried, alea iacta est! The die is cast.

And mounting his great white stallion, polished armor shining in the dawn’s early light, Caesar rode toward the capital, and immortality.

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Some eighty years later, a certain teacher from Nazareth, the leader of a rag-tag band of traveling homeless people, spent the night with his friends in a tiny house in a tiny village just outside the capital city of a far-flung province of the vast Roman Empire. And as the dawn’s light began to break, he rose from his bed, shook his sleeping disciples awake, and went outside, gazing into the distance at Jerusalem.

Jesus hesitated. And then he took a deep breath, and grabbed two of his disciples by the arms, and said,

James and John! Fetch me... a donkey!

Um, sorry, you want what?

A donkey!

Where are we going to get a donkey?

Oh, I don’t know. Go into the next village and borrow one.

What do you want a donkey for, Rabbi?

Just go get one, will you?

And so the parade began. No generals in polished armor on great stallions. No troops marching in proud formation. No, just that up-country preacher and his hick disciples, a great parade of lepers and loose women and beggars, fishermen and tax collectors, stirring up the crowd, hollering and disturbing the peace.

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Now, one of these years (but not this year), I’m going to bring a donkey to church.

Yep.

A real live donkey.

And right about the time we do the palm procession, we’re going to open the back doors of the church, and I'll go back there and try to get on its back, so everyone can see what it’s like for a full-grown man wearing a dress to try to climb on the back of an animal he’s never ridden before.

And then I’m going to ride him right down the center aisle. Now, while I do that, I’m going to have the congregation yelling at me as loud as they can, and waving palm branches all over the place, and try to high-five everyone on the way down the aisle, and just for good measure I‘ll have some of the gentlemen take off their coats and throw them out in my way.

Yessir, right down the middle of the aisle. Right where the donkey will want to go, because, as we all know, donkeys love to carry about two hundred pounds of freight while they’re being shouted at and having things thrown at them.

And, of course, donkeys always do this while maintaining an air of dignified humility.

This is how Jesus entered Jerusalem. A great, riotous, undignified mess. In fact, a delicious farce on the way kings usually entered the capital city. Most undignified. Definitely un-Episcopalian. But a sense of humor is a mighty asset if what you're seeking is God's kingdom.

And yet... the Rubicon was crossed. The crowds proclaimed him king. And before the week was over, he would receive the answer of the governing authorities.

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I’ve always felt somewhat schizophrenic about Palm Sunday’s readings. Every year, we dress up this celebration of the triumphal entry. Every year, we tell the story of the arrest and crucifixion, with even a tiny amount of solemn theater to highlight the importance of the story. Every year, we the congregation are asked to sing, "hosanna!" with the voices of the crowd, and we’re also asked to shout "crucify him," and it’s the same crowd.

It’s all too tempting, in the private chambers of our hearts, to assign the good parts to ourselves and the bad parts to someone else. All too tempting to imagine ourselves in the first celebration but not the second.

But that would be dishonest.

We love winners. We love it when God does what we want. We love it when the hero rides into town on the white stallion and trounces the bad guys. But we don’t like being made fun of. We don’t like it when the one we’re cheering for goes to the church and begins turning over the furniture. If I walked into church and turned over the big honkin' table on the grand high platform under the spotlights, or really brought a donkey to church, some of my beloved parishioners would be planting "for sale" signs in my front yard.

But that’s more or less what Jesus did. He came to town, rejected the movement that would have risen up with swords and clubs, and instead humbled himself before God, doing what God wanted rather than what we wanted. And we killed him for it.

On Ash Wednesday, we called each other to the observance of a holy Lent, a time of prayer and self-examination, a time of self-denial and repentance. Now it is time for the observance, to the remembrance, of Holy Week. Not to forget the tragedy, but to remember.

And to remember that God’s love is the only thing that makes sense out of suffering, conflict, tragedy, and death. God’s love does not do away with these things; the cross should teach us that. No, God’s love doesn’t do away with it, but rather it the thing that makes it possible to bear the pain, to see it, to share it, to pass through it.