Entering Jerusalem: "Palm" Sunday
Palm Sunday, Year B. Mark 11:1-22; John 12:12-16
There are three different Gospels to consider for this Palm Sunday, given the separate Liturgy of the Palms, which this year has two options. The Passion Gospels have to be read for both Palm Sunday and Good Friday, with their different emphases, but there is no reason the “Palms” Gospel might not feature in preaching as well.
The choice of Mark and John for this prelude embodies the back-and-forth we have had between the two Gospels in recent weeks, but also offers a possible lead-in to the relevant Passion narrative, one of which is read immediately (Mark) and the other on Friday (John). Here I offer comment on both, which the reader may use to elucidate one or the other.
As often, Mark’s version risks having familiar details of the others read into it, and to interpret Mark adequately requires taking note of what the text does not say. A few very striking differences—two of them “omissions”— are worth considering in particular.
First, Mark’s interest in place should be borne in mind when we realize that his account does not actually involve a triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The actions of the crowd spreading leafy material (see below), throwing garments, and acclaiming the coming kingdom of David, take place at or just outside Bethany and Bethphage. Only after these events are concluded does Jesus actually, anticlimactically, enter Jerusalem without these accoutrements (v.11). At the end of this story, Jesus also returns to Bethany. All this seems to play to Mark’s characteristic contrast between the countryside that welcomes Jesus, and the city which rejects him.
Those acclaiming Jesus in Mark are a little subtler or more restrained than they appear in the other Gospels; they acclaim the coming kingdom of David, not Jesus himself as king. As Vincent Taylor puts it, this scene is “almost Messianic.”1 The implication is that not all will understand; we as readers, like the onlookers, are offered a question or even a test.
To this same point, Mark does not include the interpretive quote from Zechariah featured in John (and Matthew):
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey (9:9)
Mark however—or Jesus—may already be alluding to Zechariah with the instruction to fetch the colt and the subsequent actions found in all versions of the story, but here the reader or observer has to do this work themselves.
Mark also spoils one popular detail of our Palm Sunday image, because there are no branches being waved here, let alone palms, but rather leafy material like rushes or straw “cut from the fields” (v.8)—underlining the rural setting— is thrown onto the road to make a carpet for Jesus to ride over, just as the clothes do.
To get palms, we have to turn to John. The Fourth Gospel is the only one to mention them (John 12:13), although we still have to infer that they are being waved. This detail seems to underscore an image not just of acclamation, but of triumph. The people in this case come out from the city to meet Jesus, rather than being the rural workers of the fields taking him toward it—however they are not Jerusalemites as such, but the pilgrims who are attending the feast, so represent an Israelite collective.
John makes Jesus’ acclamation as king by the crowd more explicit than in any other Gospel, but also notes that the disciples did not understand what this meant. John actually complements Mark here, by observing explicitly that “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” (12:16).
So the two accounts share a presentation of Jesus’ parade that requires more understanding than might be attributed to the players in the story. The difficulty in John—that the crowd seem to know what the disciples do not—amounts to the difference between interpreting Jesus at face value, even following him sincerely, and understanding why. This presentation of an event or speech as immediately impressive to onlookers, but then being misunderstood and revealing the need for a deeper understanding of Jesus, is characteristic of John.
The order of the acclamation and the donkey ride is also reversed here, relative to the Synoptic tradition; Jesus only chooses to ride the colt (without the detailed story of its finding as given in the first three Gospels) after the people have come out to greet him, and in this version the appearance of the ass is what prompts the use of Zechariah to interpret the ride, as well as the event as a whole. This sequence also allows the possibility that the choice of a donkey, with its connotations of humility, is meant to be a response to the more triumphalist imagery of the palms and a correction of a messianic hope that did not understand the nature of Jesus’ glory.
These differences are not what make either story good news, but are among the features of the individual accounts that help us see what each is saying. Although they sometimes seem the most contrasting of Gospels, and these two versions of the story may be one of those times, reading Mark and John together helps reveal a common purpose as well as the distinctive ways they expound that purpose: both Mark and John present a Jesus who cannot be understood without the Cross.
John’s depiction of Jesus, here and elsewhere, presents the power of the Cross spilling across from the Passion itself into the whole of the Gospel; Jesus’ glory is always manifest, if usually misunderstood, but always dependent on that moment when he will be “lifted up.” For Mark on the other hand, Jesus remains—even when about to enter Jerusalem— a mysterious figure who cannot be fully understood until the Cross; in the Passion Gospel for this Sunday the centurion—representative of the occupying power—will be the first to recognize Jesus’ true identity.
Taylor. The Gospel According to St.Mark: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes, and Indexes. London: Macmillan, 1959, 452.