Commentary on Luke 22:14—23:56

Palm Sunday is a difficult Sunday to preach. Sermons regularly crack under the dissonance of a text that rings with celebratory “Hosannas,” even as it heads toward the horrors of state-sponsored execution. It doesn’t help matters that, for many congregations, watching children wave palms in a bewildered pre-Easter procession is the whole point. The preacher’s job is to illumine something more, especially when preaching from Luke’s gospel—because in Luke 19, there are no children or palms. In Luke 19, there are not even “Hosannas.”

What ties Luke’s account together with the entry narratives of Matthew, Mark, and John is a shared citation of Psalm 118:26—and of course, a donkey. Matthew and John make sure readers see the animal’s connection to Zechariah 9:9, but Luke keeps the connection implicit. The donkey may be part of the story’s melodic line, but Luke seems intent on playing that melody in a different key.

Preachers and poets alike have been fascinated by that donkey. There are more than several well-loved poems about the animal that Jesus rode into Jerusalem.¹ But like our gospel accounts, they rarely read its significance the same, some reflecting the animal’s unlikely moment of glory and others wondering at its ignorance or fear.

Nickole Hill’s The Donkey Elegies is less concerned with the donkey’s interior life or its symbolic echoes in Christian tradition. She is after a grittier, social history of the animal.² Listing what donkeys have carried “on their backs” over centuries, she names the stories of the laboring Mary³ and Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem—but also describes carts weighted down with dead soldiers or pallets of bricks, burdens too heavy for any creature. She recounts ways that donkeys have been literally worked to death. The poem reflects on the suffering we choose to see and the suffering we don’t, insisting on the holiness of created life.

Hill’s attention to creation’s sacredness and suffering fits Luke’s account well, in part because of the pericope’s final line. If Jesus’ followers were silent, he tells the religious leaders of his day, “the stones would cry out” (verse 40). It is a phrase that foreshadows the lament over Jerusalem that follows. The city will be left without “one stone upon another,” Jesus weeps, “because you did not know the time of your visitation from God” (verse 44). Interpreted by his tears, the cries of stones sound anything but triumphant.

But the phrase does more than foreshadow grief on history’s horizon. It testifies to the cosmic significance of the present. All creation is included in this entry procession—human and nonhuman alike. Palm branches may be missing in Luke’s account (an absence attributed to Luke’s avoidance of nationalistic overtones⁴), and yet there is something of creation’s groaning (Romans 8:22) in the procession, even as there are echoes of angel song (Luke 2:14).

The familiar carol “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” imagines a day “when the whole world sends back the song which now the angels sing,”⁵ giving glory to God in the highest heaven and celebrating peace on earth. It would seem that the vision is coming to pass in the triumphal entry—except for one stark omission. Jesus’ disciples speak of “peace in heaven,” (19:38) but not yet of peace on the earth—or for the earth. It is, perhaps, Luke’s acknowledgment that the next week in his account will hold very little earthly peace.

Luke uses the word “peace” in his gospel more than all the other gospel writers combined. But the scope and cost of this peace are lost on Luke’s disciples. Like them, preachers could proclaim this paradoxical account of a lowly king as if the peace of God has already arrived—a spiritual peace in heaven, with little material reality. But, similar to Hill’s poetry, Luke’s account is after a grittier, material point. Jesus’ kingship is meant to overturn the world, not justify it—which means that some truths need shouting aloud. What truths is creation waiting for us to speak?

God has not given up on God’s people. This is the proclamation at the heart of Palm Sunday.  But if creation is holy—its beasts and its rocks and its war-torn cities—what paths of peace does this promised king call us to travel?

There is, of course, another central touchstone tying together the gospel accounts of the Jerusalem entry—and that is Jesus himself. Just preceding the Psalm 118:26 blessing of the one who “comes in the name of the Lord” is the psalmist’s well-known reference to “the stone that the builders rejected” (Psalm 118:22). When the world goes silent at the foot of the cross, this Stone will also cry out—the cornerstone of peace in heaven and our call to peace on earth.

Notes

1. For example, G. K. Chesterton, “The Donkey,” The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (Dodd Mead & Company, 1927), 297; Mary Oliver, “The Poet Thinks About the Donkey,”  Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006), 44.
2. Nickole Hill, The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020).
3. Which is an image that Luke does not gift us.
4. Fred Craddock, Luke (WJK, 1990), 227.
5. Edmund Sears, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” The United Methodist Hymnal (United Methodist Publications, 1989), 218.