The Closet Professor

Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.

—Zechariah 9:9

The first recorded Palm Sunday dates back to the 4th century in Jerusalem. The ceremony wasn’t introduced to Western Christianity until about the 9th century. According to the gospels, Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem and people welcomed him as their king thinking he’d release them from Roman oppression. Days later, he was crucified. When I think of Palm Sunday, I think of Jesus riding on a donkey and entering Jerusalem. While Jesus is the central character of the Palm Sunday story, the image of the young donkey that carried Jesus into the city makes me think about what the donkey symbolizes in our faith.

Palm Sunday commemorates the story of Jesus’s triumphal entry on the back of a young donkey into Jerusalem shortly before the Jewish holiday of Passover. According to the Gospels, people lined the streets to greet him, waving palm branches and shouting words of praise. Conquering kings typically rode in chariots or on the back of stallions, but Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey going against what people would expect from a king. The people of Judea would have been familiar with another king who rode on a donkey to prove his humility before God. When King David was very old, he wanted to establish his favored son Solomon as his successor. So he arranged for Solomon to ride on David’s own mule, in the company of Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet. 1 Kings 1:38-39 says, “So Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet, Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, the Cherethites, and the Pelethites went down and had Solomon ride on King David’s mule, and took him to Gihon. tabernacle and anointed Solomon. And they blew the horn, and all the people said, ‘Long live King Solomon!’”

While in modern American culture, donkeys are often considered to be a stupid animal and are commonly the pun of many jokes. When people are made fun of, they are sometimes compared to a donkey as an insult. For the Jewish and Christian faiths, the donkey is a symbol of humility and peace, but it also represented the fulfillment of a prophecy from Zechariah 9:9. In Judaism, this passage from Zechariah is taken to refer to the Messiah, a spiritual king who would peacefully redeem Israel.

The donkey expresses the idea of peace and ordinariness, as well as God’s omnipotence who, if he wants to, makes something great of the most ordinary thing. In Christianity, the donkey becomes a symbol of Christ himself, given how the animal patiently suffers and bears others’ burdens. Horses, on the other hand, tend to be associated with royalty, power, and war.

The donkey in the stories about Jesus’s triumphal return to Jerusalem was tied up and had to be untied by the disciples. Why does Luke and Mark emphasize the word “untie” several times? There is a lesson we can learn from this. We are often tied, aren’t we? We are tied down by many things — by guilt, anxiety and concern. Some of us are tied down with the need to forgive, but we cannot bring ourselves to do it. Others are tied down to obsessions or addictions. We may be tied down to our smartphones and tablets, unable to put those devices down.

We need to let go and let God untie us from our fears and give us boldness to show love, peace, faith, or joy. We need to be untied from whatever weighs us down. Palm Sunday is not just a celebration of Christ as the King of Kings, but a celebration of Jesus as our liberator from dependencies and afflictions — a celebration of the role Jesus plays in our lives. We need to be free to experience Jesus in our lives. We are meant to ride with Jesus: to follow him on his journey into the very presence of God.

We cannot fully commit to God when we are tied. We must be released by Jesus like the disciples who untied the donkey. We must surrender our burdens and our weights to God, much like the owner who surrendered his donkey to the two disciples. By relinquishing our own burdens, we can help others in their time of need and worship God freely by living a life exemplified by Christ.