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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 9, 2006
Palm Sunday
Christians celebrate today Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem -- through St Stephen’s Gate, it must have been, riding on an ass. He was coming on the road from Jericho -- through Bethpage, through Bethany -- over the Mount of Olives, and down Kidron side, then up the path towards the east wall of the city.St Stephen’s Gate (a.k.a. the Sheep Gate, the Lion Gate) is not now, nor was likely then, the grandest entry into Jerusalem. Saladin came through that way, in 1187, but only after his soldiers had considerably widened the opening. The Crusaders who took Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, tried the Zion Gate first, on the south side of the city, but finally used siege engines to break through the walls all over. General Allenby famously rode in through the Jaffa Gate on the west side, when claiming the city for the British in 1917. (We have the photos.) In 637 A.D., I believe Patriarch Sophronios would have gone to the Damascus Gate, on the north side, to surrender Jerusalem to Caliph Omar. There have been quite a few more conquests of Jerusalem, triumphant entries into it, and ignominious exits, over the last several millennia -- I don’t know how they all went. We make much, and the Muslims make more, of that 1099 incident, but only the year before the Fatimids had taken Jerusalem from the Seljuks. The Seljuks having previously taken it from the Fatimids in 1076 -- and so forth. To the inhabitants of Jerusalem, these pink-skinned Crusaders from the farthest shores of Europe must have seemed like visitors from Mars. They were only used to Islamic dynastic battles. Also, the Crusaders proved somewhat rougher than what they were used to. As the late American historian, Robert S. Lopez, described one of the parties to that affair, at their earlier appearance in Sicily: “Actually the Normans were much like the ideal of the sagas and the chansons de geste -- they were adventurous, fearless, unruly, insatiable, exceedingly gallant to willing and unwilling ladies of any social class, indiscriminately hard on unwarlike peasants and bourgeois, ... and frequently very devoted to Christ, if not to his commandments.” And the people at St Stephen’s Gate, meeting Christ on his entry into Jerusalem, and throwing palm fronds before him, olive branches, and the odd cloak, were perhaps like the Normans in this last respect. They were for Christ. They were not necessarily like him. Which is not to present Christ as the gliberals paint him today -- as some kind of fatuous pacifist preaching tolerance and multiculturalism. He was the one who said, in the Gospel of Matthew, “I bring not peace but a sword,” and that he would “set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother.” In St Luke: “Do you think I come to bring peace on earth? I tell you, no.” Upon entering Jerusalem through St Stephen’s Gate, he turned left and into the Temple -- to do what? He pushed over the tables of the money changers, made a whip to scourge the sellers of sacrificial cattle and sheep, told the dove-sellers to (euphemism) “get out of here”. This is the Christ that Western man has deleted from his collective memory. The Christ who was not, incidentally, making some effete protest against the commercialization of religion. Rather, the one who, as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos before him, was denouncing the cult of animal sacrifice -- the reduction of religion to cheap acts of propitiation; the violence done to God. And the remark he makes about the “den of robbers” is quoted from Jeremiah, who had stood at the same spot, making the same point, six centuries before. The palm of Palm Sunday is the old pagan emblem of victory, but the victory prefigured is not a worldly conquest -- for Christ arrived at the head of no army. Rather, it is the victory of faith over the torture of martyrdom. The victory that Christ will win is over death, and it is from the Cross that he will conquer. I have always found something strangely comic in the narrative of Palm Sunday. Not comic, outwardly, to laugh; but inwardly, sublimely comic -- to think of the Creator of the Universe entering Jerusalem in the manner of Don Quixote. My little sermon today has been about religion and worldly power. They are two different things. They cannot understand one another. They seek different ends. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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