Riding into Jerusalem

Therefore God has highly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name.
Philippians 2:9

Around the year 112 Pliny the Younger, the Roman governor of Bithynia, wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan in which he reports on the activities of the Christians in his part of the empire. He writes that in their religious assemblies the Christians "sing a hymn to Christ as to a god."

The New Testament contains a number of such hymns, of which the most renowned is today's first reading. The hymn's expression of the Christ event can be divided into three strophes. The downward movement of the event has two steps: 1) the "emptying," in which Christ gives up the form of God and takes on the form of a servant (2:6-7), and 2) the "humbling," in which Christ, as man, undergoes the further humiliation of becoming obedient unto death (2:8). The third strophe, the upward movement, expresses God's reaction (2:9-11).

The understanding of human existence as a state of slavery finds a clear parallel in a Gnostic parable about a soul which falls from its heavenly existence into the world of matter:

Being a son of kings, you took upon yourself the yoke of a slave.

The author of the hymn stresses the reality of the incarnation: Christ did not merely look like a man; he was a man: he was "found in human form." Christ's humanity was not a mere veil concealing his divinity.

If the first part of the hymn has to do with the incarnation of a divine being, the second part reflects the Old Testament pattern of humiliation and exaltation. Christ is exalted to the heavenly world not so much because that is where he belongs, but rather because of God's gracious act. The Old Testament character of this portion of the hymn is underlined by the citation of Isaiah 45:23.

During the New Testament period humiliation came to mean subordination to the order of this lower world and an obedient recognition of the contingency of human existence. In submitting to this contingency, Christ became subject to death, which is an integral part of human existence and expresses its limitation in the most radical way.

In the gospels the Christ event, which is expressed poetically in the hymn, receives narrative form. Today's reading, The Entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11:1-11), marks the moment of destiny for Jesus. He hears acclamations which confirm what the heavenly voice had declared at his baptism (Mark 1:11).

In our recessional hymn we will sing:

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die.
But the concluding verse of the gospel suggests something rather different:
Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the Temple,
and when he had looked around at everything,
as it was already late,
he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.
(Mark 11:11)

Of course, the ultimate consequence of Jesus coming to Jerusalem was the crucifixion, and death, with its finality and inevitability, always threatens to overshadow and eclipse "life's little day."

But from the evangelist's description of the Entry into Jerusalem we know that the event was marked by joy and jubilant exultation. So let us give Jesus his day in the sun and rejoice with him in his triumph. Soon enough "the night will come, when no one can work" (John 9:4).

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April 13, 2003