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Jesus enters Jerusalem on ‘Palm Sunday’ in Mark 11

This Sunday in the lectionary is Palm Sunday, the week before Easter, and here in Year B we are offered the choice between reading the account in Mark 11 and John 12. I am going to look at Mark 11, since we have been doing a lot in the Fourth Gospel in recent weeks, and the account in Mark makes some important connections back with ideas that we found in its early chapters. We perhaps ought to note from the outset that the festival of ‘Palm Sunday’ is a later construction of the church; Mark makes no mention of palms (which are only found in the account in John 12.13), and the idea that this occurred seven days before Jesus’ resurrection relies on counting back in Mark’s chronology, which is more likely to be a narrative creation of Mark than a historical schedule.

It is worth remembering the events that have immediately preceded this reading, since they put this event in its theological context. On the one hand, Jesus has just come through Jericho where he has healed blind Bartimaeus, who has unequivocally identified Jesus as ‘Son of David’, a title with clear messianic implications. As Jesus approaches Jerusalem, the secrecy around his identity is cast off, and his explicit claims to be the anointed one of God become clear. On the other hand, the episode immediately before that is the dispute between the disciples about who is greatest. Jesus puts an end to their argument with one of the most important statements in this gospel:

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10.45).

As at the beginning of the gospel, where the sonship of Jesus proclaimed at his baptism wove together ideas of royal enthronement with suffering servanthood, the juxtaposition of these two episodes makes it clear what kind of king Jesus is.

Our passage begins by commenting that ‘they’ came near to Jerusalem; the language of ‘coming near’ is perhaps better than ‘approached’, since the latter terms suggests the city would be visible to them, when in fact the Mount of Olives would obscure their view. But who are ‘they’? We are given a clue by the parallel phrase in Mark 10.46, when ‘they’ come to Jericho. This would certainly have included both Jesus and the Twelve, but we know they did not travel alone (Luke 8.1–3), and by now they are accompanied by the pilgrim crowds, all heading to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. Mark later confirms this (in verse 8) and this is important for understanding the strange dynamic of adulation and rejection that Jesus experiences once he arrives at the city.

Mark mentions both the villages of Bethphage and Bethany, where Matthew only mentions the first of these. Bethany is well known to us from the Fourth Gospel as the home of Lazarus, Mary and Martha, and it is clearly a place that Jesus knows and in which he has friends. The site of Bethphage is not accurately known (despite the fact that you can locate it on Google maps!), but perhaps it is the name of the village (‘house of unripe figs’) that is significant for Mark, given Jesus’ blasting of the fig tree as a symbol of the unfruitfulness of the temple later in this chapter.