Thread by @theboyonthebike

On Palm Sunday:

The King comes riding into Jerusalem on the back of a borrowed donkey. The man rides like an apology, a slapstick parody of power, a send-up of pomp & circumstance. The man rides under the weight of all our collective loneliness, as well as his own...

With no stallion, no army, & no pretension, Love himself rides solo in the parade of powerlessness. Royalty, at last, has no entourage. With apologies to Dante, this is the original divine comedy, a moment more Mel Brooks than Michelangelo. Yet the man of sorrows is not a shtick.

He is the embodiment of all our dreams, & the incarnation of all our wounds. He is not just the lone rider of some apocalyptic Johnny Cash song—He is the song of songs, he is music itself. He is the only one to ever actually bear the weight of the world on his sagging shoulders.

There is a fire in him, a flame of love. But there is also a terrible tenderness—eyes as big & black & open as the face of the sorry beast that carried him. Christians call this scene “the triumphant entry,” but the man makes triumph into a joke, b/c the parade is a death march.

If this is triumph, this scene radicalizes the term—evidently, triumph must look an awful lot like being triumphed over. As his body jiggles on the donkey, fumbling through the stone streets of the holy city, the people wave palm branches, and shout “Hosanna in the highest!”

Palm branches flail in rapid motion, a mid-eastern forest of Hallelujahs. Yet underneath it all, runs an ancient sadness. God is on his way to die, as vulnerable to the elements as any other man or woman has been.

His chest, like his heart, is open—the hen with her breasts exposed, her wings extended, longing to gather her chicks under her wing. But soon, her sacred breast will be wounded; her open chest taken as an invitation for her ripping.

But Love does not protect himself from spears or spit or swords. Rods and whips and nature itself will have their way w/him, nails driving into dirt olive skin like an animal. His body will be bent and twisted like a rag doll, a puppet. Still he rides into Jerusalem, vulnerable.

He keeps coming the way love always does: defenseless.