Sermon for the Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, April 2, 2023
Isaiah 50:4-9a+Psalm 31:9-16+Philippians 2:5-11+Matthew 26:14-27:66
A year ago in February, Tim and I took our first trip out of the country since the beginning of the pandemic. Looking for someplace quiet and warm, we chose the Dutch Caribbean Island of Bonaire which is, rumor has it, the best scuba diving location in the world. One of the more interesting features, to me at least, is the population of wild donkeys on Bonaire. Imported by the Spaniards in the 17th century for transport and hard labor, once mechanization made them obsolete, they were left to their own devices.
This was not good for the donkeys. Bonaire is not a lush, green place. It is warm and dry, and many donkeys starve. The greatest threat these days comes from cars, and there are “Donkey crossing” signs along every road. Because so many of these donkeys are injured by cars or are dehydrated or starving, back in 1993, a Dutch woman and her husband opened a 150-acre donkey sanctuary that is now home to more than 700 donkeys. Almost every day, they receive a call about a donkey in distress or injured or sick, and they go retrieve it and try to nurse it back to health.
Animal lovers that we are, we took a break from snorkeling and otherwise doing nothing to go visit this sanctuary. You can drive through on extremely bumpy dirt roads to see the animals up close, and it was on this drive that I discovered something. Every donkey I had ever known was docile and slow. But you see, there were hundreds of them here, and they discovered that Tim and I had food with us, so these docile donkeys turned into little terrorists. They bumped up against our pick-up truck, jostling to stick their snouts into the windows. We were terrified that we were going to run over one of them. It completely changed my opinion about donkeys. I still love them, but I ain’t gonna turn my back on one, especially if I have a carrot in my hand.
There is a way of reading scripture, of meditating on the Word, called lectio divina, or divine reading. After slowly reading through a passage a couple of times, you then focus on a particular line or word or person you encounter and meditate on that. This week as I read the Passion Narrative that we just heard, and I prayed about it, I landed on the donkey that carried Jesus. I was reminded that it was a donkey that carried his pregnant mother from Nazareth to Bethlehem three decades earlier. It was probably the same donkey that carried the Holy Family into Egypt to escape the slaughter of the innocents ordered by King Herod a couple of years later. And now this one, “borrowed” from its owner, to carry the one foretold into the city of Jerusalem.
These do not appear to have been terrorist donkeys. They were work animals, doing what they had to do, whatever the human told them to do, rewarded with nothing more than enough feed to sustain them.
G.K. Chesterton, the British writer and apologist, wrote a poem about this donkey. It reads
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.[1]
This donkey starts out in a fantastical world where fish flew, ashamed to have been created with monstrous head, the devil’s walking parody. At the end, she carries the King of Kings and Lord of Lords but mistakes the crowd throwing the palms at her feet as having been intended for her. In her moment of pride, she forgets that she is the laborer, not the savior.
This is what Archbishop Oscar Romero meant when he wrote
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.[2]
We all have a role to play. Maybe, like that donkey, it is simply to carry Jesus through the streets and into the city. Maybe it is to be the betrayer, like Judas, or the faithful ones, like Mary Magdalene. As this week of the Passion unfolds in front of us, what role will you play?
Donkey crossing sign on Bonaire