There’s nothing particularly surprising about Jesus going into Jerusalem, going towards the Temple. This isn’t his first time. St. Luke tells us that Joseph and Mary took him every year for Passover, St. John’s Gospel places him there during other major feasts. But it is clear from the way people are acting in today’s Gospel that there is something extraordinary about his return. That, begs the question: return to what? What does it mean for us to make this return-journey with Jesus?
A return, of course, implies a first time, a first arrival, and it’s interesting that St. Matthew doesn’t speak about Jesus being presented in the Temple as a baby, he doesn’t talk about preteen Jesus with the teachers of the Temple. He has another emphasis in mind. Indeed, the first time Matthew shows Jesus going to the Temple, it is Satan who takes him there. It is Satan who places Jesus “on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you…so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”[1] So this return to Jerusalem that we read about today is first of all a return to that moment of temptation, the temptation to protect oneself by invoking our special privilege. Do you know who my father is? Do you know what my Father will do to you if you do something to me? These are words that we cannot put in Jesus’s mouth. He does not say them. Jesus has decided not just to put on humanity, but to become the kind of human that has no powerful family to watch out for him, the human that doesn’t have an army to slaughter his enemies or doctors to cure him or lawyers to get him out of trouble. He is going to be the sort of human that, when he wants to get somewhere, he either has to walk or ask to borrow a ride—even, borrow without asking. He is going to walk among those who have nothing but the coats they are wearing on their backs, and when they want to give him something, they give him just these coats. God has not come to earth to make a treaty with our armies or to consecrate our emperors. He has come to be poor with the poor so that it will become clear with a clarity which damns us that what we do to the least of these, we do to him.
Notice, though, here is how Jesus undoes the temptation: not just by rejecting Satan’s offer of power, but by dwelling with these people, with us. The way out of temptation is never to merely run from evil: it is to embrace and chase after goodness. The temptation of privileged conceit is undone by the goodness of lovingkindness, of friendship. And Matthew is explicit about this. Think about how Jesus, as he enters Jerusalem, does not dash his foot against a stone, and it isn’t because his daddy said so. It is because walking among these people, Jesus has loved them, and love inspires love, love inspires us to care for one another: so they are the ones who protect his feet, they are the ones who make his path soft with garments. It is that sort of looking after, it is that sort of love and friendship that protects the presence of Jesus here on earth. These people have become the angelic ministers of the Father, and the Church points to that truth any time it celebrates the Eucharist, joining together the Holy, Holy, Holy of the angels with the Hosanna of these people.
That friendship and love are going to look very fragile in the coming days, not just during this Holy Week, but, I suspect, in the coming months, the foreseeable future. I don’t deny that. All I know is this: if love is fragile, it is also tenacious: it does not stop its work. Pay attention, in the coming days, to how Jesus never tires of offering his friendship. He is going to wash feet that run off to betray him as soon as they are clean. He is going to spend his dying moments befriending a thief. And when his soul descends into hell, he is going to search through every flame and darkness until he finds all of God’s children, cowering in their corners, clothed in their burial garments. He’s going to say to them, “Don’t be afraid. Come back with me. Let us return to the city whose gate, from now on, will always open.”[2]
[1] Matthew 4:5-6.
[2] Cf. Isaiah 60:11.
0 Comments