Jesus’ Triumphal Entry on a Donkey | S4 E2

In this episode of The Extraordinary Story, we follow Jesus on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and discover the raw power of Jesus alone on a donkey. We’ll learn why a donkey is a more kingly steed than a chariot. We’ll learn what it means that God’s kingdom is already, but not yet. And we’ll learn what the wrath of God looks like from God’s perspective.

This is The Extraordinary Story, a podcast that tells the story of the life of Jesus Christ. God himself entered the confusing maze that is our world to transform it into a path that leads to him today and always. The Extraordinary Story is brought to you by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. I’m Tom Hoopes. I’m writer in residence here at Benedictine College.

So, how to get across what I mean to say about Jesus’ power at the triumphal entry into Jerusalem? If this was a video, maybe I’d start with an image from that old Planet of the Apes movie where the time traveler comes across the Statue of Liberty on a beach and realizes that civilization has collapsed. Or to be more contemporary, I might show an image of the ruined earth from the Matrix or from Wall-E. To be more poetic, I could start with that Shelley poem about the crumbled statue alone in the desert whose pedestal says, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair.” Because this is the way of all worldly power.Whatever is won by violence or by prosperity or through technology will be wiped out one day by the overpowering subtle strength of reality. All that will be left in the end is the air and rocks and fire and God and you and me.

The sons and daughters of Jerusalem in the first century AD found this out the hard way as they saw their land conquered and destroyed in their history by rough men and their armies. But all that’s left of those conquerors is a little more than rubble like Ozymandias. The one conqueror whose kingdom still continues to this day is the last one that they would have expected. A carpenter on the back of a donkey plodding into town intending to die.

In this episode of The Extraordinary Story, we will see what real power looks like. Because this begins the story of that single week where all history changed due to a conqueror who commanded no army, had no weapons, made no attempt at self-defense, but did nothing but teach and pray and suffer and die. I’m going to read the passage from John about the triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

“When the great crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they took palm branches and went out to meet him and cried out, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel. Jesus found a donkey and sat upon it as it is written, ‘Fear no more, O daughter Zion. See, your king comes, seated upon a donkey’s colt.’ His disciples did not understand this at first, but when Jesus had been glorified, they remembered that these things were written about him and that they had done this for him. So the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to testify. This was also why the crowd went to meet him, because they had heard that he had done this sign. So the Pharisees said to one another, “You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the whole world has gone after him.”

So that’s the passage. The big moment has arrived in this passage. Jesus has been headed to Jerusalem relentlessly, tirelessly, unstoppable since the transfiguration. And now he’s there. He plans to conquer, but in an entirely new way. Jesus was not the first king to enter Jerusalem, but the other king’s entrances were totally unlike his. We hear about King Nebuchadnezzar entering and destroying the temple five centuries before Jesus. You can imagine King Nebuchadnezzar draped in gold. He buried his father in gold plates and famously built a giant golden statue for his people to worship. Second Kings chapter 24 describes how Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian army besieged Jerusalem for years, driving it into horrifying poverty. Finally, in 586, The king of Babylon carried off all the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold in the temple of the Lord, which Solomon, king of Israel, had made as the Lord had foretold. Then King Nebuchadnezzar took King Jochaiakim and all of his family and installed a new king in Israel, King Zedekiah. Later, when King Zedekiah refused to pay tribute to Nebuchadnezzar, he killed Zedekiah’s sons in front of him and then gouged out Zedekiah’s eyes, so the last thing he would see was the death of his own sons. Then this cruel King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple. Well, that’s real power, according to the world.

Why did the Lord allow his great temple to be destroyed? The prophet Jeremiah tells us the Lord’s answer to that question, “Because they have abandoned my law, which I set before them and did not listen to me or follow it, but instead followed their stubborn hearts and the bowels, as their ancestors had taught them.” The Temple of Solomon was built during the 10th century BC in 957, then destroyed in the 6th century BC in 587, and then a more modest building was built again in the same century in 515 BC. Jerusalem saw two more military rulers into the city after that. Alexander the Great entered Jerusalem in 329 BC as a giant man wearing a plumed helmet atop an enormous white war horse. Seeing this great man who conquered the world from Greece to India, the city leaders quaked with fear. He demanded taxes and got them, but he spared the city, perhaps because his teacher, Aristotle, taught him to admire monotheism. Then Roman general Pompey the Great entered Jerusalem in 63 BC, not long before Christ, perhaps in the war chariot he’s often depicted in. He massacred thousands of Jews who attempted to defend the temple, then captured the city and entered the temple’s Holy of Holies, desecrating it but taking nothing. He was probably looking for the statue of a god there, which he didn’t realize the Israelites don’t have.

Each of these ancient pagan kings came to Jerusalem dressed for battle and had their way with it. But then Jesus entered around the year 33 AD, unarmed, riding on a donkey and Jerusalem had its way with him. Yet it was Jesus, the man of peace, who was defeated, not the great man of war who destroyed, who had the lasting victory. We tend to think of Jesus’ donkey as a sign of humility because it’s an inferior beast, it isn’t a war horse. But it is actually a sign that he is an even greater king.

The Gospels cite the prophet Zechariah’s prediction about the Messiah King’s entry into Jerusalem. Zechariah says, “Shout for joy, O daughter Jerusalem, behold, your king is coming to you, a just savior is he, humble and riding on a donkey.” This is actually a more powerful image than those military conquerors. The prophet Zechariah says of this new conqueror that will come, “He shall banish the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem. The warrior’s bow will be banished, and he will proclaim peace to the nations.” In fact, archaeologists have found ancient arrowheads in the style of the Babylonians buried in Jerusalem.

But Jesus didn’t need the warrior’s bow. He was more powerful than those who pushed themselves brashly forward. As Psalm 20 puts it, “Some boast of chariots and some of horses, but we boast in the name of the Lord our God.” The prophecy of Zechariah also proclaims that this donkey rider will have a kingdom greater than Alexander’s or Caesar’s. His dominion will be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. He also says that this will come about by the blood of his covenant.

It’s because of these prophecies of the king on a donkey that the gospel sends so much time explaining how Jesus got his donkey in the first place. Mark quotes Jesus saying, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, why are you doing this? Say, ‘The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.'” Matthew has a very similar story.

There are lots of theories about what all this means. Prosperity gospel practitioners like to say that Jesus owned lots of property and animals, and his people just had to summon the donkey to its wealthy owner’s side. The text doesn’t say that. In fact, it seems to suggest the opposite, that Jesus was not traveling on a donkey and therefore had to get one. Mark makes the point that Jesus had to send the donkey back, and Luke makes clear that Jesus didn’t own the property that he was using in Jerusalem. Others say that Jesus and his disciples were part of the Essene sect, the Qumran community discussed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, who thought the Messiah would come soon. The theory is, this semi-secret group would have developed passwords to shield themselves from authorities who oppose them. We simply don’t know whether that’s true or not. But I think both explanations do say something true about Jesus.

As a man, Jesus was poor, but he was not merely human. He is divine, the second person of the Trinity, through whom all was made, and as such, he does indeed own the donkey and every donkey, Jerusalem and all its properties, and he is indeed the object of the Essene’s expectation. But he owns it with a quiet, constant, subtle power of God, a power as unstoppable as the do, and he commands it with the quietness of providence. One way or another, he has arranged that his disciples will find a donkey and knows that he is able to claim the animal with a word. You get the sense that Jesus is the master of this creature and all creatures, this circumstance and every circumstance, this moment and all time. When Jesus needs a donkey, he gets a donkey. But Jesus also told them that he came to serve, not to be served. And so it’s also appropriate he would enter the city on a donkey, a beast of burden and not a war horse, a beast of dominance. After all, Jerusalem is not far from Bethlehem, a city where Jesus first arrived by donkey in the womb of his pregnant mother, and where the shepherds adored him in a stable, and where the Magi from the east came and hailed him as a king.

In his Gospel’s telling of the tale, Luke paints this moment as the fulfillment of the angels’ Christmas prophecy. “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to people of goodwill,” the angels declared. And at his entry to Jerusalem, the people proclaim “peace in heaven and glory in the highest.” And at first, this all seems to go better for Jesus than for the previous conquerors too. Jesus didn’t have to fight for the city. Instead, Mark says, many people spread their cloaks on the road. This is a sign of homage due to royalty. They cried out, “Hosanna,” which means “save us” or “hail, savior.” They announced the kingdom of our father David. And they say “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” from Psalm 118. You have the sense that the victory promised by the Psalm has arrived.

Matthew reports that the whole city was shaken and asked, “Who is this?” The crowds reply, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth and Galilee.” They don’t say ‘a’ prophet. They say ‘the’ prophet. So this donkey rider is the prophet Moses predicted, the priest who came to establish a new covenant and the king who would claim David’s kingdom, which would reach the whole world. And this is a great time to review where we have been so far on this topic of the kingdom of God that Jesus brought. Because the image of Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem to shouts of acclaim is a great illustration of Christ’s kingdom, a kingdom which is “already but not yet.”

Father Jose Noriega, formerly of the John Paul II Institute in Rome, is often on campus here at Benedictine College, and he used that phrase, “already but not yet,” to describe the kingdom. And he compared the kingdom of God to D-Day and V-E-Day in World War II. June 6th, 1944 was D-Day when the allied troops successfully invaded Normandy to free occupied France from the Axis powers. Once that happened, all the pieces were in place to gain the final victory in World War II in Europe. But a year of hard battle still had to come first. The victory was “already but not yet.” In the same way, the kingdom of God is already here in Jesus Christ coming to earth in the incarnation leading us through the maze. And the kingdom of God is “not yet,” in that he wants that kingdom to spread over the whole world to win hearts back to him before he comes again. The catechism says that even though the kingdom has come in Christ’s death and resurrection, it still lies ahead of us. The kingdom is brought near in the Word Incarnate, in Jesus Christ himself coming into the world, but the kingdom is “not yet.” It will come in glory when Christ hands it over to his father.

To explore exactly what that means for us, consider the first kingdom, the Paradise of Eden. Bishop Robert Barron describes how Adam was the first human being to share in God’s kingdom. He says, “God wants to rule his king, but precisely through his viceroys, namely human beings made in his image and likeness. But by listening to the serpent, Adam becomes a bad king, not defending this flourishing garden of life, and the garden devolves into a desert. But now in Christ, we are under the lordship of the true king who wants to Edenize the world.”

Eden shows us the way God wants our life in the maze to look. When we freely chose a different path, he said about the work of winning us back. Now he wants to win us over, establish his sacraments worldwide, and change the confusing maze that is our world into a royal road to his kingdom. What would that look like? We know the answer by heart because we’ve memorized the Our Father.

“Thy kingdom come” means “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The mission of Jesus throughout his life was to reestablish an Eden, a kingdom where his Father’s will is done. First, Jesus became a newborn king, one that would invite us to be born again into his family because, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Jesus began his ministry by announcing that the kingdom of God is at hand. He taught that the kingdom belongs to the poor, and made the kingdom more enticing by comparing it to great treasures, abundant crops, and huge hauls of fish. In his most dramatic announcement of his identity and impending death, he gave St. Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven as leader of this new church, and then was transfigured on Mount Tabor to show his glory. All of these images come together when Jesus enters Jerusalem and is hailed as king by the people. The new Eden is being established at last.

We’ll see how clear this re-edenization, this return to paradise will become in the weeks ahead. As Jesus dies for sinners, he will turn to the repentant thief and say, “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” The early church hoped to follow that thief into paradise, into this Eden. As St. John puts it in the Book of Revelation, “To him who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is the paradise of God.” St. Paul saw this new Eden when he personally was, caught up into paradise, “whether in the body or out of it, I do not know.” And he found it indescribably beautiful. St. John described what the re-edenized world will look like, a “new heaven and a new earth,” a new Jerusalem where the dwelling of God is with men.

So, there’s a lot going on as Jesus enters the city in front of the adoring crowds and heads to the temple. In fact, one of my unexpected favorite episodes of The Extraordinary Story was about Jerusalem and the Festival of Booths, also called the Feast of Tabernacles, which I didn’t really know much about before. We talked about how the people would sleep outside the temple in booths, and we talked about how the temple itself was a representation of Eden, depicted with animals and foliage. The Book of Leviticus explains that feast in a way that sounds very much like Palm Sunday and Holy Week: “You shall take on the first day the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook. And you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days. You shall dwell in booths for seven days, that your generations may know that the Lord brought them out of the land of Egypt.”

You may remember that when Jesus’ relatives asked him to go up to Jerusalem for the temple, he said “no,” but went up privately. Well, today we are seeing what his relatives wanted him to do in the first place. They wanted him to openly proclaim himself the Messiah and take what was his. Maybe this was the day his relatives finally believed him when they saw him enter this way hailed by the crowds, establishing a new Holy Week. Remember, at the earlier Feast of Booths, instead of entering the city as the Messiah, Jesus went privately but then cried out in the temple, comparing himself to a source of living water, precisely when the temple was flowing with water. He called himself the Light of the World, precisely when huge candelabras were being lit to fill the temple day and night with light. He said he and his Father were one and the Pharisees tried to kill him, and his ministry escalated after that. He forgave the woman caught in adultery, and healed the man born blind. Most recently, he raised Lazarus from the dead and gathered enormous crowds of followers. He was showing us his mission to reverse the fall, to forgive us and restore our innocence, to heal our corrupted sight, and to overcome the ultimate effect of the fall, death. And people saw that this was exactly what they longed for.

He didn’t incite a crowd in Jerusalem, he brought a crowd with him. John in our Gospel said, “So the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from death, continued to testify. This was why the crowd went to meet him, because they heard that he had done this sign. So the Pharisees said to one another, You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the whole world has gone after him.” No doubt, they wish they had been more successful in stopping him in the first place, and were anxious for another more successful chance to stop him. So, they plotted against him. But Jesus doesn’t go on defense, he goes on offense.

In Matthew’s telling of the story, he comes straight at the Pharisees by making a beeline to the temple to cleanse it. Just as Eden was the place God dwelled with man, the temple was a little Eden, a place where God could stay with his people. So to see the temple violated for Jesus was like seeing Eden violated all over again. Matthew says, “And Jesus entered the temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, ‘It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer, and you have made it into a den of robbers.'”

What was happening in the temple is that in order to facilitate the sacrifices necessary for Jewish families, animals were being bought and sold. The problem is, through this trade corruption had entered the temple gates. Priests and merchants were gouging a captive market for sacrificial animals and demanding fees to change money from various regions. What was supposed to be a place of pilgrimage and self-giving had become a place of profiteering and self-seeking. Worse, it was all happening in the part of the temple set aside for Gentiles to worship, crowding them out. We talked a lot about the cleansing of the temple before, when we discussed John’s Gospel. But there’s a great contrast here with what other conquerors had done.

They desecrated the temple, destroying what it was. Jesus purified the temple to return it to what it should be. Those other conquerors saw the temple as a place to plunder. Jesus saw the plunderers in the temple and set out to stop them. In John’s Gospel, he drives them out with a whip. The humble donkey rider is finally driven to rage. In the Dr. Erasmo Leiva commentary on Matthew, Fr. Simeon recalls a passage in Jeremiah in which God says, “I have grown tired of relenting.” Those are ominous words when they come from God. “I have grown tired of relenting.” Jesus is meek and humble of heart and gentle, but he’s also the just God of wrath who separated the sin of Adam and Eve from Eden. But in Luke, we actually get an interesting take on the wrath of God. We get to see how God describes it when he withholds his wrath from Jerusalem.

On the way into town, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and says, “The days shall come upon you when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you and hem you in on every side and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” And that sad prediction of Jesus came true. Titus came a few decades later in 69 AD and entered Jerusalem with catapults, battering rams, and siege towers. He destroyed the temple and made a cataclysmic fire, but not before stealing the treasures of the temple, as depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome. This was the destruction of the temple that was predicted to come if God’s people rejected him. But then Matthew offers this very telling addendum: “And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the son of David!’ they were indignant. They said to him, ‘Do you hear what they’re saying?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Yes, have you never read? Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings you have brought perfect praise.'”

We can be very grateful that Matthew included these details. First, that he included the cures. Matthew is telling us that Jesus didn’t just come to restore the sacred space of the temple. He was interested in restoring all of us and making us each into a sacred space, our bodies into temples, places where we could meet God in our very lives. And then there’s the detail of the children calling out Hosanna to the son of David. It’s like little kids imitating what the adults have just said, and it infuriates the Pharisees. Luke records that one of the Pharisees in the multitudes said to the teacher, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” If we think children should be sheltered from the truth about God, Jesus doesn’t.

And just as John the Baptist said Jesus could raise sons of Abraham from these very stones, Jesus says the stones themselves would cry out if his followers didn’t. And this brings us to the theme of what real power looks like. Not the world’s power that will be reduced to rubble, but the power that can transform rubble at a word. And with that, Jesus left the scene, says Matthew, “and leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there.” Well, as Jesus departs the scene to wait again for another day, so will we. There’s a lot more ahead on day two of the climatic final week of Jesus Christ’s Extraordinary Story.

The Extraordinary Story is written by Tom Hoopes and produced by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Benedictine College is transforming culture in America through our mission of community, faith and scholarship. If you enjoy this podcast, please follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Leave a review and share with a friend. Help us tell others about the Extraordinary Story.