A Chorus of Beings: Liturgy of the Branches (Palm Sunday) Year C
Laurel Dykstra
This week’s offering for eco-preachers focuses on the so-called Palm Sunday lections and draws from the work of a number of Wild Lectionary contributors and supporters. The practice of reading the Passion on the Sunday before Easter can overshadow the powerful portrait of an animate creation’s joyful disruption of extractive empire. In a raucous interspecies chorus, the human organizers’ street theatre is amplified by participants animal, vegetable and mineral.
Commentary
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reprinted from Bill Wylie-Kellermann
This entrance Psalm of thanksgiving had a liturgical role in the Passover Celebration (and so is rightly reflected in these gospel entry passages), but is even more prominent in Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles/Booths. The shout, Hosanna! Save us! – was sung each morning by the Temple choir. It was here that the liturgical bundles, included the palm branches as named (v.27) were lifted. In the liturgy they were audibly shaken at the thanksgiving acclamation (v. 1) and again at “Save us, we beseech you.” (v.25)
Also announced is the cryptic and explosive line, “The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” (v. 22) With ‘stone’ we are introduced to another creature and kin.
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Trees and Branches (Vegetable)
In this Palm Sunday reading there is no mention of branches at all. Matthew has branches from trees, Mark has branches from the fields and only John has palms.
Based in part on the time of year when Palestinian trees leaf-in, there is significant scholarly work “to suggest that an originally Sukkot-based advent of Jesus into Jerusalem was ultimately re-tooled to fit the Passover-timing of the crucifixion.” (Perkinson, 2024)
While Dong Heyon Jeong (2019) says that part of the disruptive quality of the flash mob was the spring cutting of branches barely in bloom would have harmed crops and consequently profits.
He notes elsewhere (2023) that in the subsequent passage in Mark (11:12-14, 2021), the cursing of the fig tree, Jesus struggles with the vegetality (plant wisdom) of his own message. “Jesus’s humanity cannot fully shun the colonial and anthropocentric desire to interfere, manipulate and commodify plants.”Verse 29 mount of Olives -this is the only mention of trees in the passage. James Perkinson describes the setting as an ecotone between “citified settlement and rural micro-ecologies bordering wilderness” where species intermingle alive with possibility.
Equine and Human (Animal)
Luke does not say this is a donkey/ass but the word colt is repeated four times.The allusion to the vision of Zechariah 9 is made explicit in the Matthew 21:1-3 version of this passage.
Interpreters typically contrast the humble (Zech 9:9) donkey with the war horse of roman imperial procession. But Perkinson, claims that more than a beast of burden or a sign of exploited subsistence farmers, the donkey summons a memory of pre-monarchic nomadic horse cultures and acts with Jesus as a hybrid partner recalling and pointing toward a future wild autonomy.
Similarly, Dong Hyeon Jeong, focused on the Mark 11:1-11 version, says that the “Jesus-colt assemblage” or colt-messiah “reconfigures, even if only for a fleeting moment, the commodified role of a colt into an actant who (re)defines the being of the messiah.”
Given that training (breaking) a donkey to ride takes 2 years (Jeong 2019) there are certainly questions about creaturely autonomy and how Jesus physically and the gospellers symbolically, use this animal. Is Jesus some kind of donkey whisperer or is this parody of a Roman procession made more ridiculous by Jesus barely hanging on to a terrified, bucking and balking colt? Might Jesus’ statement of need for the colt also be an admission that salvation, that messiahship, cannot be a single-species endeavour and that he seeks mentorship of the wild ass (as in Job)?
Ched Myers characterizes this scene as “carefully choreographed street theatre”, Bill Wylie-Kellermann calls it liturgical direct action. Both the import of palms, if they were present as in John, and the “Lord needs it” exchange as the colt is untied, indicate pre-planning and coordination between local organizers and those who have come to town for the demonstration.
Dong Hyeon Jeong refines Myers’ analysis, likening the event to a proto-flash mob, a “decentered, originary, and subversive” activity that occurs as though at random, “combining anonymity and unanimity.” The flash mobbers shout Ps. 118:25-6. Jong describes how the event “fails well” and “fails queerly” achieving maximum disruptive impact with minimum harm to participants.
Stones (mineral)
Verse 40 turns the interspecies chorus of wild liberation into an interbeing chorus with the promise of shouting stones. The stones here resonate with rejected corner/cap stone of Psalm 118:22 as with the recurring references to the divine as a steadfast rock.
Teaching and Preaching Ideas
Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral
How are the more than human players are treated in today’s gospel? Bill Wylie-Kellermann’s questions about how we use plants, Dong Hyeon Jeong work on both vegetal wisdom and Jesus’ relationship with the donkey and James Perkinson’s exploration of donkey as mentor for reclaiming wild freedom will all preach and none offer easy answers. But starting with these hard questions and moving to the possibility of branches from field and forest, human and donkey and even shouting stones, crying out Hosanna in an interbeing chorus, animal, vegetable and mineral, is a powerful way of reflecting on our own interspecies relationships, our own place in creation. If we imagine Jesus welcomed into and celebrated in our own watershed what are the animals, plants and landforms that would greet him. Is that reflected in our worship? What would it sound like? What would it smell like? How would we imagine a full and joyful procession of all creation in praise? How/does being part of such a chorus of praise, being one species of many, change how we as humans might see ourselves? Does it change how we relate to those other beings that praise God with us?
On Trees and Nations
reprinted from Bill Wylie-Kellermann
It is disputed, if, or to what extent, Palm trees even grew in Jerusalem. John’s account therefore suggests a certain level of organization and planning for this street demonstration, with this element being brought from afar, most likely up from Jericho. For the feast of Sukkot (Tabernacles/Booths), palms were part of the bundled branches used in the liturgy, but much like ordinary current practice for Palm Sunday, these were shipped in and purchased.
The Palm was a national symbol for Israel. It was minted following the Maccabean revolt as an image on the half-shekel. (Even today the Israeli ten-shekel coin reclaims the image). After the destruction of the Temple, Rome celebrated by its own coin, with Judah lamenting captive beneath a palm. Was Jewish nationalism conspicuously at play in the march? It’s certainly true that nationalism can serve as a form of resistance and source of struggle with empire. Or was it the emblem of a discipleship confusion, one which lingers even past resurrection into the Book of Acts: “Now will you restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) Or even both.
One wonders whether the day will come when, like the demeaning appropriation of Indigenous tribes for sports team logos, we regard the association of certain trees with nations as a similar appropriation. Another way the powers lay claim to the plant community? What do the palms think of their nationalistic deployment? Even the olives, so massively uprooted, with the Palestinian nation? Or are they simply such kin, so beloved of a people, that they’d willingly lend themselves to joint struggle and resistance?
(In Canada right now the Elbows Up movement is waving the maple leaf and Canadian flag in mass demonstrations in ways that serve both nationalism and resistance to empire.)
Interspecies Flash Mob
In a time when environmentalists and progressive communities of all kinds are looking at messages, tactics and organizing and asking questions about what effective action means, bringing a “movement lens” to the texts of Holy Week is a powerful way to engage. Preachers can demystify the so called “Triumphal Entry” by exploring how it might have been planned and organized. Dong Hyeon Jeong’s idea of the flash mob is particularly compelling as we consider how in conventional terms it failed to triumph or how it is a refusal of triumph. As retaliation against activists, organizers and critics of authoritarianism grows more extreme with deportations, disappearances, alternative forms of covertly organized joyful disruption that “fail queerly and often,” allowing participants fight again another day are desperately needed.
Sources and Resources
Dong Hyeon Jeong, Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry” as Flash Mob Event Molecular “r”evolution in Mark 11:1-11, Bible and Critical Theory VOLUME 15, NUMBER 2, 2019, p 109-127
https://cpb-ap-se2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.auckland.ac.nz/dist/f/375/files/2019/12/Dong-Hyeon-Jeong-article-FINAL.pdf
Dong Hyeon Jeong, Embracing the Nonhuman in the Gospel of Mark. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2023.
Ched Myers, Palm Sunday as Subversive Street Theatre https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2021/03/26/palm-sunday-as-subversive-street-theatre-sixth-sunday-in-lent-mk-111-11
James W. Perkinson, Political Spirituality in the Face of Climate Collapse: Of Monsters, Megaliths, Mules, and Muck, Palgrave Macmillian, 2024
Judy Steers, Wild Liturgy: Coats and Branches https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2019/04/02/wild-liturgy-coats-and-branches/
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, Palm Sunday: Into the Thick of the Palms
https://www.salalandcedar.com/wildlectionary/2024-3-palm-sunday
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, Seasons of Faith and Conscience: Explorations in Liturgical Direct Action, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008)
Contributor Bio
Laurel Dykstra (they/them) is the founding priest of Salal + Cedar Watershed Discipleship Community, a church that worships outdoors and seeks to help Christians in the lower Fraser watershed grow their skills for Climate Justice. They also serve as vicar of St. George’s, Fort Langley. Laurel’s latest book Wildlife Congregations is on interspecies loneliness, and finding hope in an age of mass extinctions.
Image Description
Tulip the donkey who has participated in several Salal + Cedar outdoor nativity pageants. The head and neck of a grey and brown donkey fill the frame. The donkey is facing left and is wearing a green harness. There is chain-link fence in the background.