When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it [Mark 11:1-2].
It has often been observed that Mark’s is the “impatient” Gospel. For example, it has no Advent story. We don’t see any shepherds. There are no gifts brought by the Magi. Luke’s Gospel gives us the story about the 12-year-old Jesus giving his parents a scare when he lingers in the Temple after Joseph and Mary return home from their Passover trek [Luke 2:42-51]. None of that is found in Mark. His Gospel just jumps into the story at the time that Jesus, about 30-years-old, is baptized by John.
And so, accustomed as we are to Mark’s fits and starts in storytelling, many of us wonder why the writer provides us with all the mundane details related to the securing of a donkey for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday. Indeed, in a Gospel lesson appointed for Palm Sunday, Mark 11:1-11 (RCL, Year B), we see that Mark devotes fully one-half of his story to Jesus’ instructions to two of his disciples. They are to go into the village ahead, to a specific spot just inside the gate, where they’ll encounter a donkey that has never been ridden. They are to bring it back to Jesus. Jesus even tells them what to say if they’re questioned by anyone [Mark 11:3].
Mark goes into all this detail and yet, he fails to tell us which of the Twelve were dispatched for this duty. Looking at the other Gospels doesn’t help identify them either. Matthew’s version [Matthew 21:1-11 is virtually identical to that of Mark. Luke includes a few minor variances [Luke 19:28-40, yet he doesn’t name the disciples either. John’s version of the story is the most curious, for he omits the details altogether and has Jesus procuring his own donkey, without aid of the disciples, after he has entered Jerusalem [John 12:14].
Noted preacher, homiletics professor, and New Testament scholar, the Rev. Dr. Thomas G. Long, has an interesting take on the issue. Long posits that the two unnamed disciples might well have been James and John, who only hours before being given the task of securing the donkey, had been busy proposing to Jesus that when the latter came into His glory, that Jesus should, of course, seat one of them to his right and the other to his left [see Mark 10:35-40]. I have a sneaking suspicion that each of the other ten, In his own way, had similarly jockeyed for position. Tom Long puts it so well:
So it is deliciously ironic that on this very public and glorious day of Jesus’ ministry, a day when he will be welcomed into Jerusalem with joyous hosannas, they find themselves engaged in a most unromantic form of ministry, mucking around a stable, looking suspiciously like horse thieves, and trying to wrestle an untamed and no doubt balky animal toward the olive groves. For this they left their fishing nets? [“Palm Sunday,” The Christian Century, Apr. 4, 2006].
To be sure, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ action of finding his own donkey is a means of communicating that He is not the sort of king that so many seek. He will not ride into town on a fancy steed, with the level of his sandals being more or less even with the heads of his followers. Instead, he will ride a lowly, inexperienced beast. Even astride the animal, Jesus will be on the same level as His crowd.
In Mark’s Gospel, however, the whole focus on the donkey scene appears to emphasize that there is dignity and importance within any task performed for the Messiah. These two disciples who drew “donkey detail” so long ago remind me somewhat of many others who dutifully arrive each week at church offices around the world, all for the noble duty of folding bulletins. The two disciples point to the all-too-often thankless activity of seeing to the church’s trash, changing its light bulbs, setting up tables for fellowship evenings, mowing the church’s lawn, and checking the church van’s tire pressure.
The tasks usually are unheralded, often they’re unnoticed. Yet they are necessary to help pull off the church’s worship, to assist in the overall ministry of the congregation. In this story of fetching a donkey, Mark is, I think, giving a shout-out to all those who help to “[p]repare the way of the Lord” [Mark 1:3b].
I’m reminded of a small group of dedicated women at First UMC (Gastonia) many, many years ago, who called themselves “the baseboard club.” Dedicated as they were to the large downtown church, the ladies met in the church kitchen for a simple lunch twice a month. They shared a bit of food, a lot of conversation, and then spent some considerable time on their hands and knees, carefully cleaning the many baseboards of the church.
Years later, during my time at Asbury UMC here in Durham (1987-1995)—my day-job was at Duke Law School, but I spent about 20 hours a week at the church—I encountered a gentile saint known as A.C. Holmes. The soft-spoken man sold refrigerators at Sears well into his early 70s. Having “come to Christ” at Asbury’s altar rail years before, he was a fixture on Sundays. He devotedly taught a Sunday School class for half a dozen widows, some in their 90s. And every Sunday, rain or shine, at 10:55 a.m., he carefully brought two small glasses of ice water to the pulpit, placing one on the left, for the Rev. Wally Ellis, and one on the right, for me. “In case you need to wet your whistle,” he’d sometimes say to Wally with a wink of his eye.
One Sunday, I asked A.C. how long he had been doing that—bringing ice water to the pulpit. He said he couldn’t exactly remember, but that he’d been doing it for quite a few years. I told him that I appreciated it.
And then A.C. said, “Well, Tom, you remember the Palm Sunday story, about how Jesus told two of His disciples to fetch him a donkey?”
I smiled and said, “Yes.”
He continued, “Well, some folks fetch donkeys and others of us fetch water. When it comes to serving Jesus, we all oughta fetch something.”
Indeed, A.C.—indeed.
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