Emotions ran high. A husband and his wife had quarreled. Both were nursing their hurt feelings in defensive silence. As they were driving to attend a family wedding in a distant city, the angry tension between them was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Then the silence was broken. Pointing to a donkey standing in a pasture beside the road, the husband sarcastically asked, “Relative of yours?”
The wife quickly replied, “By marriage!”
The braying donkey is an ugly sight, an object of amused contempt. When a person plays the fool, brings himself to the point of embarrassment, we say, “He made an ass of himself.” In modern communication, the ass is a symbol for awkwardness, dumbness, blundering ineptness.
Yet, an ass plays a key role in the drama of Palm Sunday which marks the beginning of Holy Week (April 10-17), climaxing with Easter. What is this? The Messiah, King Jesus, riding on an ass?
Jesus isn’t breaking new ground here; the prophets of Israel had a very distinctive method of getting their message across. When words failed to move people they did something dramatic, as if to say, “If you will not hear, you must be compelled to see.” That is what Jesus was doing. His action was a deliberate dramatic claim to be Messiah. The prophet Zechariah had said,
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. (9:9 KJV)
The picture is one of blatant contradiction. The people were looking for an emperor-like Messiah. How can this be the one? a king on an ass?
We see here the nature of the kingdom Jesus brings: the peaceable kingdom, where, as Isaiah described it, The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. (Isaiah 11:6) In that peaceable kingdom love reigns and compassion flavors all action.
19 I will rejoice over Jerusalem
and take delight in my people;
the sound of weeping and of crying
will be heard in it no more.
20 “Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
23 They will not labor in vain,
nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,( Isaiah 65:19-23NIV)
Now and during the coming Holy Week, think of the Messiah and the Kingdom Jesus came to bring. Test your actions and relationships, your political theories, your feelings about war and welfare and hungry people, and folks living in shacks – test all these feelings against Jesus’ acted out announcement of the Kingdom. Don’t forget the donkey.