Humble Processions: Reflecting on Holy Week
In the gospel text that kicked off Holy Week (Matthew 21:1-11), Matthew seems intent upon helping his readers connect Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem with his their memories and imaginations. To do this, he includes prophecy and song from the Scriptures.
Take Matthew 21:5, for example, which Matthew ties directly to a prophecy from Zechariah, saying that Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on a colt took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,
“Say to the daughter of Zion,
‘Behold, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.
Then, in Matthew 21:9, we find yet another appeal to memory. Matthew puts a section of Psalm 118 in the mouths of those who welcome Jesus to Jerusalem. Matthew tells us they cry, “God save, now!,” and, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” which harkens back to Psalm 118:25-26, which reads,
Save us, we pray, O Lord!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
We bless you from the house of the Lord.
Matthew, along with the other gospel writers, seems to want our memories and imaginations to be full of Scripture to deepen and enrich the events he narrates.
We would do well to carry on this practice, especially in a time when our memories and imaginations are being co-opted by tragedy and anxiety—to decorate the insides of our minds with Scripture (even the tragic and sad Scriptures) every chance we get, to involve not just our memories, but also our imaginations.
When we come across a reference to a dinner in one of Jesus’ parables, for instance, (and there are many dinners), we are invited to call to mind, as Robert Capon put it, "as many dinner parties, suppers, and wedding receptions as you can gather up out of Scripture: not only the final supper of the lamb (Rev 19,) but the marriage feast of Cana at Galilee (John 2), the Last Supper (Matthew 26, Mark 14), the evening meal at Emmaus on the night of Easter Day (Luke 24), the breakfast of broiled fish by the lakeside at one of Jesus' resurrection appearances (John 21), and for good measure, the Passover meal in Exodus 12, and the feast of the prodigal son.”
Calling these dinner scenes to mind deepens and enriches our understanding of each episode in light of the whole of Scripture, and even enlivens our own mealtimes.
Sometimes the easiest entry point into this practice is to populate your mind with images from Scripture and inhabit them. As you consider the events of Holy Week narrated in Matthew’s gospel, for example, imagine yourself walking alongside Jesus.
See yourselves walking beside the colt he rides upon, welcoming him into Jerusalem among the crowd, crying, Hosanna! (Matt 21:9).
See yourselves walking with Jesus in the garden, alongside the drowsy disciples he instructs to pray (Matt 26:36-40).
See yourselves walking with Jesus as carries his cross and he comes upon Simon the Cyrene, who offers to shoulder the cross on the dusty path to Golgotha. Then walk with Jesus until he can’t walk anymore (Matthew 27:32)
And after Jesus breathes his last, see yourselves walking instead with Joseph of Arimathea to petition Pilate for the responsibility of caring for and entombing Jesus’ body (Matt 27:57).
We can walk with Jesus in so many ways. The more we meditate on scripture and adorn our minds with its detail, the richer this practice becomes. We even have faith that we will walk with Jesus into resurrected life, but we cannot do this until he has done what we cannot do, which is to defeat death.
Make no mistake, we can walk with him into death. Indeed, you and I are called to do just that, and according to the apostle Paul, we have already done so, and thus can take great comfort in his death. “For you have died,” Paul says in Col. 3:3, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
Again, however, there is one thing that we are powerless to do as we walk with Jesus, and that is to descend into death to defeat it.
If the words “He descended to the dead” in the Apostles’ Creed sound odd in your ears, consider the attempts of Christian artists to capture Christ’s descent into death in icons. Take a look at the above image, for example.
Notice that Christ is trampling over the gates of death and has ahold of a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, who represent all of humanity. Notice also that holds them not by the hands, but by the wrists, suggesting that there is nothing Adam and Eve can do to pull themselves out of death. They can neither grasp for his hand nor wriggle free from death; they cannot exit by force of will; rather, they are being pulled out by the only one with the power to walk into death and to walk back out on the other side.
Christ alone defeats death. There’s not a thing we can do to make it happen for ourselves, nor a thing we can do to make it not so.
So, let’s practice. Let’s exercise our Scriptural memories and imaginations in an effort to do what Paul recommends a bit further down in Colossians 3, namely, to “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” Consider again the Palm Sunday text from Matthew 21.
This is a procession, which might lead us to consider other processions in Scripture. Perhaps the procession of the Israelites out of Egypt. We could even limit ourselves to the events of Holy Week—the procession of Jewish officers alongside Judas to arrest Jesus, perhaps. Or the procession that surrounds Jesus as he carries the cross.
Or, we could let our minds go to another procession—another triumphal entry—which the biblical account is fairly silent on, but is central to the faith we profess in the Apostles’ Creed. This is the triumphal procession of Jesus into the depths of death. He emerges, leading a procession of captives.
We might envision Jesus being eagerly welcomed into death by those who are expecting something much different than what they’re in for, perhaps not unlike the eager welcome he receives into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Rainer Maria Rilke imagines the scene this way in his poem “Christ’s Descent into Hell”:
He, expert in agony, heard hell
howling toward him, craving confirmation
of his completed pain: imagining in the end of his
torment (infinite) that of its own, ongoing.
And he, the spirit, sank into it with the full
weight of his exhaustion: strode as one hurrying
through the puzzled backward stare of pasturing shades,
raised his glance toward Adam, hastily,
hurried down, glimmered in the distance and vanished in the plunging
wilder depths.
In both instances, Jesus leaves as he always does: victorious. Even if his victory looks for all the world like defeat on Good Friday.
We are invited to join Jesus in his victory procession over death, fully aware that we have done nothing in ourselves to earn this victory, but we are no less victorious for this fact.
We must allow Jesus to walk for us the only part of this Lenten journey that we cannot walk beside him. We must allow him to trample over death in his own death.
Only then can we rejoin him as he leads the procession out of death. Call to mind again the triumphal entry where (and I love the way the NLT renders this small detail in Matthew 21:9) Jesus is said to be “at the center.”
Since we cannot claw our way out of death, all that’s left for us to do is trust, to give our “yes” to join this victory procession, whether in a clear, triumphant voice, or through tears, or through fluid-filled lungs, or muffled by a whimper—yes to Jesus.
Yes to acknowledging his entry into the story of our lives; yes to growing and walking with him and letting his word dwell in us richly; yes to carrying a cross; yes even to dying with him. Yes to allowing him, the firstborn from the dead, to grab us by the wrist, as it were, and pull us out of the death from which we are powerless to pull ourselves; yes to his being at the center of the procession that he leads out of death; and, in light of that all-important procession, yes to his being at the center of every procession thereafter, up to and including our own funeral processions.