Palmsunday

Procession Gospel

40 Days of Lent, not only correspond to the 40 years of the Israelites in the Desert, in a certain way they also correspond to the three years during which Christ taught his apostles and prepared them for this very moment:

The Roman Missal, Third Typical Edition First Form: The Procession

Today

Let us pray.

Almighty ever-living God,

sanctify ⁜ these branches with your blessing,

that we, who follow Christ the King in exultation,

may reach the eternal Jerusalem through him.

Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

Catechism of the Catholic Church The Preparations

522 The coming of God’s Son to earth is an event of such immensity that God willed to prepare for it over centuries.

An extremely important symbol of both the pagan world and of the First Covenant is that of Kingship. All the peoples of the Ancient Near East shared a common theology of Kingship. The King was to be the “visible image of the invisible God”, enacting in his reign everything that God does in heaven. If God– in the ANE understanding had created through overcoming Chaos, the had to re-create by overcoming the physical enemies of God’s people through warfare and the promulgation of just laws that would assure that God’s law will reign on earth and thereby peace would reign. In Israel, there is of course no understanding of Creation through Chaoskampf, that is, through overcoming some primordial monster. And yet, re-creation in the biblical sense, is just that: God fought Pharao, in order to liberate his people and thereby create Israel as a royal nation. They became his people and He was their king — until they rejected God as King over them and asked for an earthly king (2 Sam 8). This is like another original sin. God in his divine humility accepted the rejection and condescended to the request, sending his prophet Samuel to anoint Saul as king over the people. The vocation of the king is perfectly expressed in 1 Sam 9:16 : and you shall anoint him to be prince over my people Israel. He shall save (yasha) my people from the hand of the Philistines.” In an echo to what God had said to Moses at the Burning Bush: “have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey,” in an echo to these very words, the Lord is now giving them a king, to work the same liberation once again: To deliver God’s people, no longer from the Egyptians, but from the Philistines, who are now occupying the Promised Land. By overcoming the Philistines in the name of God and as God’s representative, the King will restore the PL to the People of God. Saul, the first king, famously fails in this undertaking, but David accomplishes it in slaying Goliath the champion of the Philistines and in subsequently casting out all the Philistines that are occupying the country. Thereupon, just like God had brought the People of Israel to his Holy Mountain on Mt Sinai and had showed Moses the template of the heavenly Temple, the King has to conquer God’s Holy Mountain, which in the mythopoeic imagination of the OT is Mt Zion and build a Palace for God, so that God can once again dwell among his people. Remember: Kingship is about the re-creation of the world, that is, the recreation of the Original Paradise. King David does exactly that: Having slain Goliath and overcome the Philistines, he conquers the stronghold of Zion, which came to be called the City of David.

A short additional excursus is necessary at this point, as it relates to the narrative sequence of today’s Gospel: The inhabitants of the city , who were opposed to David’s kingship, had said: 2 Samuel 5:6 ““You will not come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you off”—thinking, “David cannot come in here.”” Thereupon, David said, as in answer to the Jebusites, who had taunted him “Whoever would smite the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, who are hated by David’s soul.” Therefore it is said, “The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.” (2 Samuel 5:8 ) David was probably repaying an insult by an insult, calling all the Jebusites “lame and blind.” In any event, the saying stands that David had said: The blind and the lame shall not come into the house — “the house” being an OT cipher for the Temple.” I will return to this episode when we look at the Gospel.

Having thus conquered the “holy Mountain of God “ (Ps 48:3), David knew what to do next: he had to build a Temple for the Lord, His Palace on earth, so that the Promised Land would become what it had always been intended to be: the recreation of Paradise, the place where God would dwell in the midst of His People (Exodus 29:45 “And I will dwell among the people of Israel, and will be their God.”). The Lord, however, did not give David permission to reach this pinnacle of his kingship, revealing in prophecy what is the deepest truth that no man can build a Temple worthy of the eternal God. Only God can build himself a house worthy of His dwelling. And thus the Lord promised David, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. Heb 1:5. ¶ I will be his father, and he shall be my son ( 2 Sa 7:12–14). On an historical level, this son who built a house for God’s name, of course, was Solomon, the king of Peace as his name signifies. Solomon’s kingdom was for a brief fleeting moment, the perfect realization of all the OT prophesies from Abraham to David. All the twelve tribes were united in one Kingdom, dwelling within the extensive borders of the land as God has promised to Abraham (Gen 15:xx), and most importantly: God dwelled in the heart of his people, in the Temple of Jerusalem. Israel and God were one, as husband and wife are one. Paradise had been figuratively restored, had it not been for Solomon’s subsequent sin, which gradually led to the disintegration of the kingdom and eventually the end of all the covenant promises in Exile.

Ever since the catastrophe of the Exile the OT the faith and hope were growing, fortified by multiple prophecies, that God who is the same yesterday, today and forever, will repeat his acts of salvation and be faithful to his promise to David, that one of his sons would sit on his throne and reunite the twelve tribes, establish his throne in Jerusalem and bring the Divine Indwelling back into the Temple of Jerusalem, and thereby inaugurate a universal kingdom of Peace.

It is against this expectation that we have to read and understand the procession Gospel. Matthew has prepared us for this moment since his first chapter. Jesus is the son of David that the prophets have promised. He has announced that the Kingdom of Heaven (= the Kingdom of God) is at hand, a kingdom which will be realized in the Kingdom of David as promised by the Prophets (Psalm 2; Jer 23:5; Ezekiel 37:xx; Is 55:xx; Zach 13-14). Jesus was anointed as King of Israel by God himself in the Jordan and the heavenly voice had even quited Psalm 2, thereby identifying Jesus as the divinely appointed King of Zion, God’s own son. Thereupon Jesus had overcome not Goliath but Satan himself in the desert, delivered the country from this most vicious occupation through his multiple exorcisms, had promulgated God’s law which––if it is followed brings about the Kingdom of God––, united the twelve tribes in the calling of the apostles, and is now - in this Gospel - ascening God’s Holy Mountain (one always ascends to Jerusalem! even today), in order to take possession of His royal city which is at the same time God’s holy City. An earthly king would have entered the city and taken possession of his palace. God however, takes possession of His palace which is why Jesus enters not only the city but goes immediately into the Temple, the house of His Father which on account of His Divinity is therefore also his own. But here I am running ahead of myself. Let us return to the Gospel:

Jesus sends the disciples ahead to unbind an ass and a colt, sending word that “the Lord has need of them.” First, this is an act of prophecy, as he predicts acurately what the disciples are going to find. Secondly, by calling himself Lord, which is the OT appellation of Israel’s God, Christ very self-consciously acclaims who he is. Matthew, in hindsight, understood that Jesus was consciously enacting an OT prophecy which had promised that a Solomon-like King would come, riding on an ass and on a colt, the foal of an ass.” Matthew, who presupposes an audience that knows its OT by heart, thereby triggers the rest of the prophecy which predicts that this Solomon like King Zechariah 9:10 “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.” Matthew wants us to recognize in Jesus this king who has come to inaugurate a universal kingdom of peace! Nothing less.

The people recognize Jesus’ symbolic action of entering the city riding on a colt - which moreover is also a symbolic enactment of how Solomon entered the city to ascend his throne, riding on the colt of his father David. The people, recognizing the symbolism, “spread their garments on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

This is a royal procession with the unmistakable connotation: Jesus himself has orchestrated His entry into Jerusalem as that of the promised Son of David who has finally come to take His throne and inaugurate the Kingdom of God. While the accompanying crowds acclaim Jesus as king, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, react as the Jebusites had once done when David wanted to take the city and as Herod had reacted to Jesus birth: The city was stirred . It is not clear whether they are immediately hostile. We know they will be at the end of the week. One thing is sure: they do not come to meet him as their king.

Unfortunately, the reading stops here, although the ensuing verses are vital for the proper understanding of the Gospel. Jesus not only figuratively takes possession of His captical city, he also enters His palace, the Temple and purifies it, which is exactly what one would expect any ANE king to do, if the Temple was defiled. Jesus enters God’s Temple and purifies it from its defilement, enacting a twofold symbolic act. As any good king, he purifies the Temple. At the same time, this is a prophecy of what his death and resurrection will accomplish: The destruction of the Old and the resurrection of a new Temple, the Temple of his body (Matthew 26:61 “This fellow said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.’”) The ensuing story of the cursing of the FigTree confirms this: what Jesus has done in the Temple is symbolized by the withered Fig-tree: The Temple in Jerusalem has lots its fruitfulness. It needs to be entirely cleansed and the King has to build a New Temple, which––as we already saw in Matthew 16, mentioned on the second Sunday of Lent––is the Church he has built on Peter, the rock.

The symbolic capture of the city is underlined by the allusion to story of David hating the blind and the lame. Jesus, the true son of David healed the lame and the blind he found in the Temple.

Today, we are the crowds acclaiming him as our king. We are neither commemorating nor playing PalmSunday. We are enacting that exact same even, except that we are now the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Jesus is entering, not our town, but each and every one of our hearts. When we raise our Palms, lets make sure we are not chatting with our neighbors or observing the Sunday outfit of the others, but focus on Jesus. This moment is for real, we must not let it pass. It is to the extent that I participate spiritually in the procession that he can make my heart his royal city, for which it has been predestined from all eternity. Jesus does not force himself on anyone. It is only those who accept him freely that he will in turn incorporate into his heavenly royal city.

Liturgy does not want to be play, but the drawing near to true reality, the stepping out of that half-reality in which we live — which continually dissolves and passes away into nothingness — toward the reality that is so real that it endures. Liturgy wants to be not less, but more of reality."

Catholic Daily Readings (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2009).