Beyond Our Grasp

John 20:1-18

Resurrection of the Lord

5^th April 2015

Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper

With gratitude for the life, witness, ministry, and deep friendship of Lawson R. Brown.  Whenever I read John 20:17, I will think of him. Lawson died on the 8th April in Dundee, Scotland. He was 83.

 In John’s telling there’s always something more just beyond our grasp. Matthew and Luke each have their versions of the story. In Mark’s gospel there is no resurrection appearance, only an empty tomb.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in unique ways, each attempt to describe the indescribable. 

John’s version is rich in detail and imagery, and yet it’s remarkable that in his telling resurrection is always more than a fact of history, more than something that we nail down to an exact moment in time, a verifiable event. The story, the narrative, even Jesus himself are there…and not there, present yet absent, available for the eye to see but not for the hand to touch. And so this Easter morning I want to stay very close to John’s text to see what he might be up to here.

Let’s consider Mary Magdalene.  She goes to the tomb, in the dark, before first light, expecting to see one thing, namely the closed tomb where Jesus was placed, only to find something else, a stone removed.  She arrives after the fact.  She arrives after the event, and comes across the after effects of a previous occurrence, namely a stone that had been rolled away. The event itself is missing, just like the unseen hand or force or whatever that rolled the stone away and removed the body.

Then Mary goes to Simon Peter and “the other disciple whom Jesus loved,” most likely John.  “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb,” she says, “and we do not know where they have laid him” (Jn. 20:2). Taken away.  Removed from.  Displacement once again. That which was once “present,” there, is now gone, removed, absent.  They always seem to be one step removed from some previous act or event.

Then Simon Peter and John arrive to see for themselves.  John looks into the empty tomb and “sees the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in” (Jn. 20:5). Linens that once wrapped a dead body lie there missing a body. This, too, is striking. Suggesting an absent body brings to mind the memory of a once-present dead body.  There’s always this play between presence and absence in the story.  Startled by what he sees, John steps back. 

Then Peter goes into the empty tomb and fills the space with his presence.  He, too, sees the burial “linens lying there,” then he discovers “the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, rolled up in a place by itself” (Jn. 20:7).  Apart.  Like Mary, they, too, arrive late, removed from some previous, mysterious act.  They discover that someone removed the body, just as Mary said.  But they also discover that someone actually removed the body!  Someone—again we have an absent, unseen hand, which has such a strong presence throughout the narrative—someone unraveled the linens from around the body, unbound the body, carefully, leaving traces of this act in what remained behind.  They saw for themselves and believed for themselves.  And, so Mary was a faithful witness—but what did she really see?

Peter and John then leave Mary behind—in her grief.  Nice job, guys! They just leave her! Every time I read this I’m struck by their thoughtlessness.

Still crying, she finds the courage to bend over and look in for herself.  And then Mary is blessed with seeing something that Peter and John either missed or were kept from seeing.  She saw a curious sight, two angels “sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet” (Jn. 20:12).  She says to the angels, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him” (Jn. 20:13).  Again, a narrative loaded with absence, “taken away,” lost, once found.  She doesn’t assume that he got up and walked out of the tomb, she’s not expecting resurrection. Someone must have removed the body.  This is probably the reason why she doesn’t recognize Jesus when he does appear (from out of nowhere). She doesn’t recognize him because she wasn’t expecting to see him.  We see what we’re looking for. Jesus then echoes the same question posed by the angel, “Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” (Jn. 10:15).  And so she begins to retell the story of Jesus’ displacement, of his misplacement, and her disorienting, unsettling experience.

Suddenly, her absent Lord utters her name—“Mary!  Mary!”  The lost is found.  But the one who has now found him never really “has” him.  You can imagine her running toward Jesus with joy and disbelief, wanting to hug him, hold him.  Wouldn’t you?  Wouldn’t you?  But then Jesus says, “Do not hold on to me” (Jn. 20:17a).  Do not grasp me.  Do not hold me here. Do not try to keep me down.  Do not try to manipulate or control or define me—or what has happened here.  “I am ascending.”  I won’t be here long.

Always beyond our grasp.

It’s a remarkable text, John’s gospel. He’s making an historical claim: the actual facticity of Jesus’ resurrection.  It happened.  It occurred.  That’s worth commemorating. And yet that event is always a disappointment to the historian because what happened is not subject to historical analysis.  However, John never said he was an historian. At the beginning of his gospel he doesn’t say, “I, John, an historian, here recount this story.” He’s a gospel writer, the sharer of good news.  What we are doing here today is claiming, celebrating, giving thanks to God for a theological claim that is true every Sunday, every day. 

Resurrection, the resurrected Jesus is always beyond our reach and Jesus remains the ever-elusive one whose presence is known even in his absence.  It’s the unresolved tension of presence and absence in John’s account that points the way toward something else that’s absolutely essential, crucial, here, something that should give us a clue about whose been at work here all along: The unseen hand of Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, is written all over this story.  How do we know?

Go back into that empty space.  Not the empty tomb, but the space between the two angels in the tomb, “one at the end and the other at the feet” (Jn. 20:12).  John’s gospel is the only one with this version of what happened—and nothing in John’s gospel is there by mistake.  God is, literally, in the details. 

John never says this explicitly, but any Jew reading this would immediately think of a similar image: the mercy seat of Yahweh, the ark of the covenant, the dwelling place of Yahweh. Which was flanked with what? Two cherubim, two angels.[1]  This is remarkable.  The two cherubim that flank the ark defined a space, an empty space, where Yahweh dwelt, present between the cherubim, yet never portrayed.  Present and absent at the same time.  The theological claim here is this, “If you want to see the God of Judah, this is where he is and is not: to ‘see’ him is to look into the gap between the holy images.”[2]  God is the one invisibly enthroned, non-representable.  Yahweh has always been understood as one who is non-possessable, mystery, difficult to recognize, impossible to “nail down,” indeterminate, always beyond our understanding, beyond our grasp, and yet, somehow, here, present, real, now. 

This is the God who raised Jesus from the grave.  This is all God’s doing.  It has God’s “fingerprint” all over it.  The Resurrected Lord is the embodiment of God’s redemptive love in the world, a strong love that cannot—will not—be bound or contained or grasped by us or the world or even the Church!  That’s the good news!

Therefore, we must resist absorbing Jesus into our visions or images of him, making him do or say the things that only reinforce our beliefs or ideologies or attitudes or opinions.  If you think you have Jesus all figured out––he’s not the Risen Lord.

And, again, we need to remember that John’s gospel was never meant to be what we might call historical non-fiction.  Neither was it was it written with the scholarly demands of the historian in mind. 

John had only one audience in mind: you and me.  In other words: the Church.  He had you and me in mind.  And John wanted his community then, and every community of the Nazarene, to know that “Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified is not confined in the past”—the past is the place of the dead—“and that his non-confinement is more than just some sort of survival in the minds or memories of Christian believers.”[3]  John isn’t saying that Jesus “lives” in our memories.  That was never, ever the claim of the early church. Ever. Instead, they claimed—and I claim here today—that what God did in and through Jesus continues unabated in and through this same Jesus. Today. “Do not hold me here,” Jesus said to Mary. We can also imagine Jesus saying the same to the Church.  “Do not hold me—there, in the past, or here, in the present.”  For he’s always beyond our grasp, always ahead of us, calling us forward into God’s future.  And so, we could say that Jesus has “unfinished business” to do in the world through us—through you and me.[4]

The good news that we proclaim to the world today is this: the absent-present-One, the present-absent-One is here with us.  Christ is risen! The absent-present-One, the present-absent-One is here within us, within our hearts, and also here, in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the wine, and yet not localized here in the elements, but there and there and there in you and you and you and here and here and here! 

The Resurrected One, the Lord of Life, is here.  And if he’s the one you’re looking for today, then listen carefully, for you will hear him calling your name.

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Image: Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), Resurrection (Noli me tangere/ Do not touch me), c.1306-07, Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua.

[1] See 2 Samuel 6:2 & Isaiah 37:16.

[2] Rowan Williams, “Between the Cherubim: The Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne,” On Christian Theology (Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 183-196.  I’m grateful for this absolutely brilliant essay on the image of the empty throne in John’s gospel.  I came across this piece more than ten years ago and have been waiting for an Easter when it seemed “right” to use it.

[3] Williams, 188.

[4] Williams, 192.

Wounded

Georges Rouault (1871-1958)

Isaiah 53:4-9

Maundy Thursday,

2^nd April 2015

Isaiah 53.  “By his stripes we are healed.” We hear this verse a lot this time of year.  Isaiah spoke of a God's suffering servant who would come and save. Centuries later, the first Christians saw in Jesus a fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision in Jesus of Nazareth.  The words of Isaiah 53 have been used to describe what occurred on the cross.  Centuries after Christ, some Christians developed a theology of the cross that insisted that in order for God to love and forgive us, someone had to pay the price for sin, someone had to be punished for our sins. Isaiah, himself, says, that he “was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole…” (Is. 53:5).  And so this text has been used to describe what happened on the cross.  It’s probably the prevailing view of the cross in the Church today.  It goes something like this: someone had to pay the price for the wrong done in the Garden, that person was Jesus, and the resurrection becomes a receipt that all debts have been paid, all wrongs between God and humanity absolved, all sins forgiven.  

This is certainly one faithful way to view the cross and resurrection—perhaps it’s yours.  But it’s not the only way to view it.

Several weeks ago I came across these words of the poet Walt Whitman (1818-1892). He said, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” I found myself really moved by these words, from his poem Song of Myself (1892). They have strong connections with what we talked about in adult ed early in Lent. We were discussing the first chapter of Rowan Williams’ marvelous book Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (Eerdmans, 2013), which focuses on the meaning of baptism. 

Williams writes that baptism means being with Jesus, which means, he says, being “in the depths,…the depths of human need, including the depths of our own selves in their need—but also the depths of God’s love….[To] be with Jesus is to be where human suffering and pain are found, and it is also to be with other human beings who are invited to be with Jesus.”  The community of baptized people—that is, the church—receives its life when it’s in solidarity with one another, including “the solidarity with suffering.”[1]

We are called to go where Jesus goes and where Jesus goes this night is into the suffering of God’s people.  He doesn’t suffer with humanity from afar, at a distance, but chooses to enter into suffering itself, bearing it, undergoing it, and ultimately transforming it—but not without going through it.

Whitman’s quote takes on considerable power when one remembers that during the Civil War Whitman tended to wounded, broken, bleeding, suffering, and dying men, torn apart by sin and evil at its worst. At the start of the war he visited the wounded in New York-area hospitals, then he moved to Washington, DC to care for his brother.  Overwhelmed by the number of wounded in Washington, he stayed on as a nurse for the rest of the war. 

As we move through Holy Week, gather at this table tonight and remember him, as we consider again the meaning of the cross and an empty tomb, Whitman’s insight into the power of grace found in suffering love is worthy of our attention.  

Empathy.  It involves empathic love.  This is how the Holy One chooses to love us, not from a distance.  God doesn’t ask us: How does it feel to suffer?  Instead, God enters into the life of the sufferer.  God does not look at our wounds from afar, God becomes the wound. And then God chooses in love to remain God, through Christ, there, in the wounded and wounding places, in the places of human suffering, sharing our pain and sorrow and brokenness, thus transforming our suffering with God’s presence. This, increasingly, is what the cross means to me.  Knowing that God is found in my own woundedness helps me to be attentive and present to the woundedness of people around me.

Jean Vanier put it so well.  Founder of L’Arche (Ark) Community, which hosts communities worldwide for the developmentally disable, and recipient of the 2015 Templeton Prize in Religion, Vanier says, “In each of us there is a deep wound…the heart of each one is broken and bleeding” for different reasons.”[2] It’s true that we are broken, but it’s a greater truth that we are loved.  And it’s an expression of grace to know both: that we are broken and that we are loved.

Christ’s wounds are my wounds; my wounds are Christ’s wounds.  And in the blessed exchange of love in the wounded places we are, somehow, mysteriously “saved,” healed, made whole.  The old hymn gets it right, one we will sing later this night:

O sacred head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down;

now scornfully surrounded with thorns, thine only crown;

O sacred head what glory, what bliss till now was thine!

Yet, though despised and gory, I joy to call thee thine.

Therefore,

What language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend,

for this thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end?

O make me thine forever; and should I fainting be;

Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to thee.[3]

What language indeed.

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[1] Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (Eerdmans, 2013), 5, 10-11.

[2] Jean Vanier, Community and Growth (Paulist Press, 1989). "In each of us there is such a deep wound, such an urgent cry to be held, appreciated and seen as unique and valuable.  The heart of each one is broken and bleeding.... An experience of being loved and accepted in community, which has become a safe place for us, allows us gradually to accept ourselves as we are, with our wounds and all our monsters.  We are broken, but we are loved."

[3]“O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” originally a Medieval Latin hymn Salve mundi salutare, was translated from German into English by the American Presbyterian minister and theologian James Waddel Alexander (1804-1859), in 1830, when he was pastor at the First Presbyterian Church, Trenton, NJ.  James’ father, Archibald Alexander (1772-1851), was the first professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, in 1812.

Hollow Hosannas?

Palm Sunday/ 29^th March 2015

Mark 11:1-19

A parade, palms, and shouts of praise.  These are the things that come to mind when we hear this story. And, yet, there’s something about this day, the day when Jesus entered Jerusalem, that’s not quite right. 

We call it Palm Sunday, but it’s never called thus in the text.  Did you notice that Mark’s text never says anything about palm branches?  Instead, he says they “spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields,” (Mark 11:8), not from trees.  The church sings its hymns, All Glory Laud and Honor to thee, Redeemer King, to whom the lips of children made sweet hosannas ring![1], as we did this morning, but there are no children singing sweet hosannas in Mark’s text. Our hymns often enhance and amplify the biblical story. Sometimes our hymns distort and diminish the meaning of the biblical story.  If I was in Jerusalem that day, with my son or daughter at hand, I probably would have made sure that we were no where near the procession route.  Why?  Because, as Mark tells it, this was a risky, dangerous, provocative parade that Jesus orchestrated here.  There’s nothing sweet about this story.  It’s bittersweet.

“Hosanna! Hosanna!” the people cried.  By the end of the week some of the same were no doubt in the crowd shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”  It’s knowing this that makes the entire story extremely odd, even disturbing.  Knowing what we know, about what transpired that week, the hosannas sound hollow.  What’s going on in this story?  What were their expectations?  What did Jesus hope to achieve with this demonstration?  What did the disciples think was going on?  What about the crowds, the onlookers viewing this spectacle? What were their thoughts?  And what do they really mean by “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!”

. . .

The more I read and reread the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and study contemporary biblical scholarship, at least one thing becomes clear (or clearer): this is carefully choreographed political street theatre.[2]  It’s loaded with symbolic meaning, the least of which is Jesus’ riding on a colt, instead of a full-grown horse.[3]  Brian Blount, one of the leading Mark scholars of our day, Presbyterian pastor and president of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, says, Mark “spends more time describing the preparations for Jesus’ entry, than the entrance itself, more time talking about a colt, than talking about the intentions of the one who will ride on it.”[4] Mark’s gospel is the shortest; he has an economy of words, the narrative moves quickly.  But here it takes seven verses to talk about the colt.  Did you notice this?  Mark has two verses describing what the people were shouting before they enter the city, then just one verse describing the entry itself.  And, this, too, is a very odd verse: “Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve” (Mk 11:11).  What was the procession for?  Nothing.  What did it really achieve? Not much.  Maybe that was the point: to get the attention of the city and to forewarn them that something new was about to occur.

The next day, in Bethany, Jesus curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit.  And then he enters Jerusalem a second time, goes straight to the temple mount, turns over the table of the money changers, and effectively takes over the administration of the temple.  “My house that be called a house of prayer for all the nations” (Mark 11:17, quoting Isaiah 56:7)!  And that’s when things start to become really ugly.  And when evening comes Jesus and the disciples leave the city again.

So, what did those hosannas really mean the day before?  Hosanna is Hebrew for, “Save, we pray!” “Save us!” “Save,” they shout to Jesus.  Save!  Save from what?  From whom? For what? They’re not saying, “Jesus save us from our sin.”  They’re not saying, “Jesus, save our souls for heaven.”  It’s not that individual; it’s not that spiritual, even.   They’re saying, “Save us, Jesus.  Blessed are you, the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!”  We have to pay close attention here to this verse. 

If Jesus is bringing in his kingdom, announcing his rule over the city, then what happens to Caesar?  If Jesus is claiming his title as a descendant of King David—which is clearly what the crowds are saying—it becomes obvious that what the people are hoping to be saved from is Roman occupation and the domination of the empire.  And all of this is occurring during Passover, when the population of the city swells with pilgrims in town to celebrate the Passover meal—which is, itself, a commemoration of Israel’s liberation from an earlier empire, from the domination of Pharaoh. 

Religion and politics combine here.  It can’t be ignored—it’s blatantly obvious. You have thousands of people pouring into the city of Jerusalem to celebrate the liberation of God’s people from the yoke of oppression, in God’s holy city, Jerusalem, this city of Yahweh’s “shalom,” Yahweh’s peace and wholeness, surrounded by legions of Roman soldiers brought up annually to the city from the main Roman garrison along the coast to make sure that the city remains peaceful. We know that the city was full of religious zealots and protests against the Romans.  And the Jewish authorities running the temple—not all the Jews, but those in authority of the temple precinct, essentially the Sanhedrin—we know were essentially collaborators with the Roman authorities.  It was their invested interest to maintain the peace.[5]  Rome rewarded them for doing so. And so into this powder keg we have Jesus’ own, carefully planned march on Jerusalem, riding in on a colt, mocking the Romans, as the people shouted “Save us, Jesus!” with the religious and political authorities looking on.  His actions the next day lead to the destruction of the temple economy. 

I don’t know why we love overlook the political dimensions of this story.  We love to spiritualize the Bible, domesticate it, and in so doing we distort it, thus making it difficult to really “hear” what Mark is saying about Jesus’ life and ministry.

Paula Fredriksen, a leading New Testament scholar, makes this clear: Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, during Passover, this religious holiday of national liberation, an entry that was directly the result of Jesus’ own commitment to the kingdom of God, “would have been understood by any Jew that the present order was about to cede to the Kingdom of God.”[6]  It’s an act of social, political, economic, as well as theological revolution.

“Save, we pray.”  But things start to turn ugly and the crowds and even some of the disciples start to turn on Jesus because they want him to save them, save Israel, on their terms. They want him to take on their oppressors and liberate them.  They want him to restore things to the way they were.  But that’s not his plan.

There’s something else we need to remember when we read Mark’s gospel.  We have to remember when Mark wrote it, around 70 AD.  And what happened in 70 AD? It’s one of the most important years in the history of the world, one of the most significant dates for both Jews and Christians.  The Roman siege of Jerusalem and, eventually, the total destruction of the temple—the same temple that witnessed Jesus’ demonstration several decades before—occurred in 70.  And we know from the Jewish historian Josephus (37-100), that in 66 AD, at the start of the Jewish Wars (66-70 AD), there was a man named Menahem, a leader in the Sicarri, an anti-Roman Jewish insurgent group.  Josephus said, he “took some of the men of note with him, and retired to Masada, where he broke open king Herod’s armory, and gave arms not only to his own people, but to other robbers also.  These he made use of for a guard, and returned in the state of a king to Jerusalem, and became leader of the sedition, and gave orders for continuing the siege.”[7] Mark wrote his gospel only a few years after Menahem’s triumphal entry, someone also claiming to be king of the Jews.  Mark’s hearers would have known about this story.  Jesus and Menahem are not the same.  Jesus comes in a different way.

. . .

Pray, save us.  We, too, sing “Hosanna!” on this day.  What does it mean for us?  What are we really saying?  Blessed in the one who comes in the name of the Lord.  Blessed is the coming kingdom.  What is this kingdom? Where, exactly, is the kingdom? The kingdom is not “up there” in some heaven, but here and now for Jesus and Mark. The focus of the gospel is on the kingdom.  Our thoughts during Holy Week are focused so much on the cross.  How could they not be?  But the cross, itself, has to be understood within the context of Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom, the kingdom Jesus came to announce and embody.  Jesus faces a cross because of his commitment to God’s kingdom, to God’s empire, which is one way to translate the Greek here.  It’s because Jesus comes bearing the kingdom—God’s empire—in the midst of false empires and principalities and powers, that the religious and political powers unite against him and seek to destroy him.  Cornel West, a contemporary philosopher of religion, said it beautifully, succinctly: “Holy Week is fundamentally about love in the face of empire.”[8] 

Jesus is a threat. His way of love is always a threat to our ways, our assumptions, our ethics, our visions for the way the world should be.  We want Jesus on our terms.  But he comes in a different way, on a colt, not a stallion. And when he calls you and me to follow him it’s an invitation to take his road, to walk his way into the kingdom, on his terms. And so, I wonder, are our hosannas any less hollow when we expect God to “save” on our terms?

These “Hosannas” offered by the crowd bother me, they disturb, even haunt me.  There’s something disingenuous and hollow about them.  Again, maybe because we know the chorus will change its song by Friday.  And we, too, risk being hollow and disingenuous when we say, “Hosanna!” “Save us” and don’t work toward the vision of God’s kingdom that Jesus gave his life to show us, which is effectively the same as saying, “Crucify him!  Crucify him!” Our hosannas are false when we’re not willing to suffer—or, at least, become just slightly uncomfortable—because of Jesus’ way of mercy and compassion and peace and generosity and hospitality grace and justice and wholeness.  What does this kingdom of God—the very things the crowd affirms in Jesus’ arrival—what does it really mean for us, today, what does it look like in places such as Ferguson; the impoverished places of Baltimore; in the halls of government and the board rooms of corporations that overlook the needs of all God’s children; in places such as Yemen and Tunisia where sanctuaries become fiery pits of hell, where ISIL/ISIS and Boko Haram—the very face of evil—inflict heavy crosses for the followers of the man who once rode on a colt; where technology is wed with the desire to self-destruct unleashing wave upon wave of grief and pain, inflicting wounds that will fester and never heal? What does the kingdom of God look like in these situations?

These are heavy questions.  It’s a heavy week.  Crosses are heavy.  But love requires honesty.  Love calls for truth.  This is the world that confronts us daily, of which we are all a part, a world of crosses and crucifixions, a world that still turns on its savior, a world the savior came to love and heal and save, a world the savior continues to love and heal and save.  In such a world, I want to offer honest, heartfelt hosannas.  Don’t you?  I want mine to be different. Ours have to be different.  The hosannas we can offer to the Lord, the hosannas we sing, the kingdom we pray for and hope, is the kingdom given in the Risen Christ.  Heartfelt hosannas are risky, dangerous, and often provocative.  This is what’s required of a disciple of the Risen One.  To sing “Hosanna!” to him means we have given our hearts, again and again, to his way, to his life, his truth, his vision for the world, his love for the world.  It means aligning our wills with him so that it might be “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).  Blessed—blessed, indeed—is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna!  Hosanna!

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Image: Emmanuel Nsama, Triumphal Entry (1969), mural in the chapel at Njase Girls Secondary School, Choma, Zambia.

[1] “All Glory Laud and Honor” is an English translation of a Latin hymn text “Gloria, laus et honor,” written by Theodulf of Orléans (c. 750/60- 82) in 820.  The hymn is based on Matthew’s (21:1-11) account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.

[2] See Ched Myers’ masterful commentary Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll:  Orbis Books, 1994), 294ff.

[3] A colt is a male horse not more than four years of age.

[4] Brian K. Blount and Gary W. Charles, Preaching Mark in Two Voices (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 187.

[5] For more about Jerusalem during the time of Passover and the complex relationship between the Roman and Jewish authorities, see Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem (HarperOne, 2007).  See also Richard Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).

[6] Cited in Blount, 189.

[7] Cited in Myers, 289.

[8] Cornel West, https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=870874972971952.