The Not-Very-Triumphal Part of the Triumphal Entry
Soul Friend,
Here we approaching Holy Week. These are heavy and holy days.
These are days that invite our slowing. I wonder, can you give yourself that gift right now? Maybe just close your eyes, connect to your breath, let gravity have its way with you. Feel your connection to the earth, as earth. Feel the breath lifting you, then setting you back down, gently. Sense how elemental you are: earth and sky, water and fire. Human and earthy. Eternal and holy.
Let yourself be here, just as you are. Right here. Right now. Let the sanctuary of your body and being be at one with the Breath of Life moving through you.
*
Today I am inviting you to focus on a moment of Jesus' "Triumphal Entry" that is rarely spoken of, his stop overlooking the city of Jerusalem. Luke shares a moment the other three Gospel writers skip. And it's easy to see why. It's an uncomfortable scene.
Having just received a hero's welcome, their leader —for whom they have waved palm branches, laid down their cloaks, shouted hosannas, and on whom they have also unconsciously foisted the projections of a people seeking to outsource their own agency to a spiritual and political savior— this leader veers his little donkey off the path to an overlook facing the city of Jerusalem. As he beholds the city, Jesus weeps. The people are in a celebratory mood, and the hero is overcome by tears. He sobs, and maybe even wails. Luke does not use the Greek word that described how Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, dakruo, which means to weep silently, but chooses instead the verb klaio, which means "to sob, to wail aloud."
I have seen many women and men cry silent tears. I first saw my dad cry those kinds of tears when I was little girl watching the movie version of Old Yeller on a Sunday night in our basement. I witness many of my directees shed silent tears, though most move to stop the flow when it starts. I've held my friends as they cry, and through their shoulders may shake, they typically make little sound. And the same is true of me. Even in private.
When was the last time you saw an adult sob in public? Or wail? Have you ever done so?
And, what leader does this in public? Especially in the midst of a celebratory parade?
Jesus does this in public. It's awkward and unsettling. Three out of four of the Gospel writers would rather forget about it, but not Luke. He wants us to witness this moment of incredible vulnerability and to hear what Jesus wails amidst his sobs. Listen.
If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side.They will dash you to the ground, you and the children in your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you. (Luke 19: 41-44)
Jesus is like a parent watching an avoidable trainwreck headed toward their cherished child. He is envisioning the terrible suffering that will soon come upon his beloveds. He so wishes it could be otherwise. And it could have. But now it is too late. His beloveds didn't recognize Divine Presence when to do so would've changed the trajectory of their future. What anguish, even despair.
Jesus wishes that they had known what would bring them real peace. The Greek word Luke uses here for peace is eirene, which comes from the Greek root eiro, which means, "to join." The kind of peace Jesus is talking about is a peace that means "to be set at one again," a peace resulting when all essential parts are joined together. The peace that springs from wholeness. He is speaking of what Richard Rohr calls, "at-one-ment."
[Ever on the quest to sweeten bitter and unripe theology, Rohr says, "Salvation is much more about at-one-ment from God's side than any needed atonement from our side." You can read more on that here.]
Jesus is sobbing because God came for a personal visit to his beloveds—the kind of visit where the one who loves you says it straight and over and over again. The Divine came and said bluntly: "You and I are one, just like God and I are one. I am in you and you are in me. I am the light of the world. And you are the light of the world. Carry the same trust I do, connect within me with these deep roots of Reality itself. Together we will do more than you can imagine."
Divine Presence made a personal visit and the people didn't recognize the Divine, much less take in the Divine's message of union, and how to live rooted in the One.
On his triumphal entry, Jesus wept, and, Soul Friend, the Christ on his way to resurrection weeps still. The Christ of Jesus, and the Christ in all who have rooted into his Reality, weeps for all the suffering that awaits us, personally and collectively. His shoulders convulse and he sobs because we did not understand what would truly bring us peace. She wails still because of all the personal visits Love made that we never recognized. He weeps because we did not dig for our capacity to carry the same trust Jesus did, to connect within him in the deep roots of Reality Itself. She weeps for all the times we couldn't really believe Jesus when he proclaimed our at-one-ment. Christ weeps beholding the devastation that is here and the devastation to come to our beloved community.
I like to think that in Linda Richardson's depiction of Jesus weeping, the woman he is holding is Mary Magdalene.
What other companion could hold this grief with him? As poet Steve Garnaas-Holmes so eloquently writes, Mary Knew. Mary, who anointed him in preparation for his death, she alone of the disciples had radically accepted his path. And she stayed with him, through it all. Mary was the beloved who had taken Jesus at his word, as evidenced by her complete and lasting freedom from seven demons. And it is for this reason, she is known as the apostle of the apostles, the first to see Jesus resurrected, the first commissioned to spread the good news!
Her witness is the most credible because she had been there, in body and spirit for the worst of it. It was Mary who became the arms of God for God. It was Mary who felt in her own body his shuddering shoulders. Mary Magdalene radically accepted that despair is a sacred part of the path toward new life and she both welcomed and became a personal visitation of the Divine: at-one-ment.
Hadewijch of Antwerp writes:
The lover who longs to understand Love
Will gladly endure anguish
And will adorn himself with Love's nature
And purify the paths by despair.
Lack examines the depths of Love:
Victory reveals her wealth.
Hadewijch asserts that our path is purified by despair. On its face, it seems such a strange notion. But this is a particularly feminine wisdom. It is the wisdom that comes of bringing new life into this world, through a body wracked by pain and moments of despair, and then the joy that overcomes it all. A woman who has given birth or midwived the births of others, knows in her cells the depths of Love.
When we, like Jesus, open ourselves to fully experience our despair and to be held in the arms of Divine Love in that despair, Love flows down to places it hadn't yet saturated before. And that Love purifies us. It anoints us. It protects us.
Poet David Whyte writes:
Despair is a difficult, beautiful necessity, a binding understanding between human beings caught in a fierce and difficult world where half our experience is mediated by loss, but it is a season, a waveform passing through the body, not a prison surrounding us. A season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition.
Refusing to despair about despair itself, we can let despair have its own natural life and take a first step onto the foundational ground of human compassion, the ability to see and understand and touch and even speak, the heartfelt grief of another.
Soul Friend, what if the the ground of Reality is human-divine compassion? What if compassion is the ground of our peace? And, what if we must welcome despair to come to such sacred union? What if despair, too, belongs in our story of Triumphal Entry?
What if, when despair rises in you you could welcome it? What if you could let it move through you? Let it become the Divine Visitation it is? What if you could let yourself be embraced and experience the only thing that can truly bring you, and us, peace: at-one-ment?
What if God's Realm is that near?