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Reading: Matthew 21.1-11
When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of
Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of
you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie
them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, “The
Lord needs them.” And he will send them immediately.’ This took place to fulfil
what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,
‘Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey
and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large
crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees
and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed
were shouting,
‘Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!’
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’
The crowds were saying, ‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.’
Picture: Christ’s entry into Brussels in 1889 by James Ensor (Getty
Museum)
The artist and the painting
The painting with which we begin our journey through the events of Holy Week is
the work of James Ensor. Ensor was born in 1860 in Ostend, the son of an English
shopkeeper and a Flemish mother. He was legally a British citizen until the age
of 69, but lived all his life in Belgium, where he died at a ripe old age in
1949. Although not a painter whose name is widely known, he is regarded as one
of the most influential artists of his time. His most original work dates from
the 1880’s and was, at the time, highly controversial.
Ensor became fascinated with African art, taking from it a sense of primitive
energy and expressive power. He was drawn, in particular, to the African use of
masks, and masked characters begin to dominate his work. He called them his
‘suffering, scandalized, insolent, cruel and malicious masks’, and through a
series of raw and shocking pictures he offered a critique of contemporary
Belgian society.
He saw human life as a kind of hideous carnival of caricatures. Society for
Ensor was made up of a crude, ugly, and chaotic parade of barely human figures.
All was tawdry; everyone was acting out a part, playing at being something they
were not, living a grotesque lie.
Establishment figures in church and state, and radical would be reformers were
equally the target of Ensor’s satire. He saw no authentic humanity, no truth, no
beauty, and no integrity. Cultural life and the arts, politics, religion and the
home were equally chaotic and dehumanized: full of misdirected and tumultuous
energy. To convey his vision of this twisted carnival world he worked with bold
colours, aggressive brushstrokes, palette knives, spatulas and the wrong end of
the brush. He freely distorted form and space in order better to convey the
unsettling reality of a disorientated world.
Ensor was in no way conventionally religious; but in common with many artists he
found the figure of Jesus compelling. For Ensor Jesus was the one figure who
could demonstrate integrity, humanity, and truth; so with his new technique he
began to explore a series of Christian themes and subjects, culminating in 1888
with the painting we are looking at now, Christ’s entry into Brussels in 1889.
The picture was intended for exhibition in 1889, but was regarded with such
horror even by radical artists that it was not displayed outside the artist’s
home until 1929. Ensor based his painting on Matthew’s account of Jesus’ entry
into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and by bringing it up to date he provided both a
commentary on contemporary society and a profound meditation on the meaning of
the gospel.
Jesus is being escorted into Brussels by a Mardi Gras parade. The parade
represents all aspects of Belgian society. In the vast crowd we can identify
specific characters: real people, recognisable, but caricatured in grotesque
fashion like the cruellest of political cartoons. For example, in the centre
foreground, dressed as a bishop and holding a drum major’s baton, is a
politician, Emile Littré. Littré was an atheist and a social reformer. By making
him a bishop Ensor hits two targets in one: church leaders and atheist
politicians cannot be told apart. They are all full of their own self
importance; they think of themselves as leaders, but really they are swept along
by the mindless crowd; they do not set the tempo, but march to the beat of
life’s turbulent cacophony. Church and state, capitalism and socialism, are all
elements in the one hideous carnival of life. There is nothing important to
choose between any of them.
Jesus is the only figure who is not masked, or a clown, or a grotesque, or a
caricature. The parade is meant to be in his honour and in his name; but he is
isolated and ignored, lost in the crowd, a small and humble figure, gently
riding a donkey and barely able to avoid being trampled by the unseeing and
unthinking herd.
So Ensor presents us with a stark contrast: a vulnerable figure of pure goodness
and integrity, and a numberless crowd of flawed and warped humanity all hiding
behind masks and costumes which reveal rather than conceal their weakness. The
crowd is supposed to be celebrating the arrival of Jesus, taking him to the
heart of their city, but in fact they have no idea of his real importance. The
parade is said to be in his honour, yet he might as well not be there at all.
The crowd do not know him. The people marching around Jesus do not see how he
shows them up and exposes their vanity.
Matthew’s account of the entry into Jerusalem
Now all this is not just the twisted vision of a radical artist: Ensor’s insight
is true to Matthew’s gospel. One of the most important characters in this gospel
is the crowd. John’s gospel barely gives the people at large a line; but in Mark
and Luke the crowd, the people, do have a place and assume a measure of
significance. It is, though, in Matthew that the crowd really takes on a
profound significance.
Matthew is interested in discipleship. He explores what it means to follow
Jesus. The Twelve are an important part in this extended study, but they are
always compared and contrasted with the crowd. When Matthew talks of the crowd,
he almost always uses the Greek word ‘ochlos’, a term which has many of the
connotations of English words like ‘mob’ or ‘the masses’. Matthew’s crowd is not
an ordered or disciplined assembly, it is a great swirling throng of humanity.
When Luke speaks of the crowd he varies his language much more and at least as
often uses the word ‘laos’, the ‘people’, the ‘community’. But Matthew prefers
to convey the sense of a swirling mass, excited by the presence of Jesus,
attracted and amazed by all he says and does, but not really moving in step with
him.
The crowd appears first in chapter 4 of Matthew’s gospel, when Jesus begins his
public ministry and great crowds begin to follow him, the crowds to whom he
addresses the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5 to 8. From then on Jesus is
rarely without a crowd, despite the fact that several times he tries to withdraw
from them.
The crowd looks on Jesus with consistent awe and astonishment. They marvel at
the healings he performs; they are amazed by his authoritative teaching. For his
part, Jesus looks on the crowd with compassion and sympathy. In chapter 9,
seeing that they are like sheep without a shepherd, harassed and helpless, he
calls the Twelve and sends them out. He teaches the crowd in parables, stories
which they can easily understand at one level, but which nonetheless seem to go
over their heads at the level at which they convey real truth. When the crowd is
hungry, Jesus feeds them. Although he despairs of their lack of real faith,
Jesus continues to heal their sick, and as he begins his final journey to
Jerusalem in chapter 19, the crowd follows him first to Jericho and then on to
the gate of the holy city itself.
When we get to Matthew’s account of the entry into Jerusalem it is important to
note how he differs in his account from the other gospels. Mark simply says that
as Jesus rode on his donkey towards the city ‘many’ spread their garments on the
road along with the leafy branches they had cut down on the journey. Luke
describing the same scene says that the people who praised God and spread their
garments were the ‘whole company of the disciples’, which sounds more like the
core group who followed Jesus. But in Matthew it is ‘a very large crowd’, crowds
who go on ahead of Jesus and crowds who follow behind. Matthew engulfs Jesus in
a torrent of excited people.
Mark and Luke give no real sense that the arrival of Jesus in itself had much
impact in Jerusalem; but Matthew says that the whole city was in turmoil.
Everyone in the city is asking the crowds who Jesus is, and the crowds chorus
the answer ‘This is the Prophet Jesus’. A tidal wave of humanity has rolled into
Jerusalem sweeping Jesus in to tumultuous acclaim. But what a contrast was to
follow.
In Matthew’s account of the passion Jesus is very much on his own. The crowds
have ebbed away, and with supreme irony when Judas arrives at the Garden of
Gethsemane the word Matthew uses to describe the company he has with him is the
familiar word ‘ochlos’. Jesus is surrounded again by a crowd, but now the mob is
hostile. When he is arrested all his disciples abandon him and flee, and
although Peter follows at a distance to the High Priest’s house, there is no
contact with Jesus, no look exchanged between Jesus and Peter as there is in
Luke. Jesus is quite alone with his accusers. And when Jesus is at last
crucified his followers are nowhere near; only some of the women who had come
from Galilee are mentioned, and even they are kept at a distance. When Jesus is
buried in Matthew the burial is arranged and undertaken by Joseph of Arimathea,
not by Jesus’ followers and friends: two of the women watch what is done to his
body and where it’s laid, but they take no part in the burial. And this sense of
isolation, of the absence of warmth and friendship and love and support, is then
intensified still further in the cry of dereliction: ‘my God, my God, why have
you forsaken me?’ the last words in Matthew which Jesus speaks before he dies.
It’s clear in Matthew that we are meant to take these last words as an
expression of utter isolation, because Jesus has no one else to talk to, and
because the recurrent theme of the taunting from every person around him has
been to question his relationship with God. Everyone is against Jesus in
Matthew, there isn’t even a penitent thief, and everyone sees his death as
evidence that God is not with him. And Jesus feels utterly alone, forsaken even
by God.
As Matthew explores the nature of discipleship he opens up the question of what
it means to follow Jesus, to be with him. The crowd follows Jesus, the twelve
and the core group of disciples follow Jesus, but they do not stay with him, and
Matthew poses the question as to whether they were ever really with Jesus at
all.
What does it mean to say that God is with us or that we are
disciples?
For Jews and Christians alike the scriptural understanding of God is held in a
creative tension between the language of presence and the language of absence.
It begins with the idea of omnipresence: the idea that God is present
everywhere, throughout both space and time. This is a comforting idea. It means
that God is always with us, always close, always aware and available, and that
sounds re-assuring. It seems very good to know that wherever I am, I am held
fast by God; that whatever time it is, God is wide awake and watchful. Yet this
is not the whole truth about God’s presence in the world.
It’s important, of course, that we don’t deny the basic truth that God is
present throughout space and time. There are no ‘no go’ areas for God. There is
no time when God is not. There is only any space or time because the Lord and
Giver of Life is present: there is what there is because God calls it into being
and gives the gift of life. Apart from the Holy Spirit there is no life, no
existence. God is essentially and fundamentally with us or we are not. It is
just that this is not an adequate account of the presence of God, and by itself
it isn’t true to scripture.
We can begin to understand the issue like this. If we emphasise only those parts
of the Bible which speak of the presence of God, which bring God close to us, we
are in danger of making God too small. In technical terms we’re failing to take
account of the transcendence of God; in non-technical terms we’re losing the
‘wow’ factor. ‘God is with us’ becomes ‘God’s a mate, a pal, one of us’. God can
be measured by our minds, described and understood. We lose the awe and wonder
from our worship and become too comfortable in God’s company, too complacent in
our discipleship. Heaven becomes like earth with less sin, and God is no more
challenging than the next person, no more noticeable than anyone else. We begin
to think about God in the way we think about each other. We make assumptions
about God which make him think and speak like us, make him like what we like,
feel disgusted and outraged at things we hate or fear.
Paradoxically bringing God closer to ourselves in this way actually takes the
reality of God further from us. The Bible regularly reminds us not to be too
familiar with God, not to imagine we can really understand him, and not to
assume that his thoughts are like our thoughts or his ways like our ways:
perhaps the most striking place is in the final chapters of the Book of Job. Job
is confronted by the awesome reality of God’s creative power and then Job humbly
concedes:
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore
I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.
In other words Job had never really been in the presence of God, he had no
relationship with God; Job had believed that God existed, but he had not had
faith, he had not engaged with the reality of God. God had always been with Job,
but Job had never actually noticed. Only now, when confronted by the sheer
transcendent majesty of God, can Job at last see God, recognise God, acknowledge
God. And when he does, he experiences the power of God’s presence and it changes
him and he comes to see the truth of his own life.
This leads us right to the heart of the matter. It’s the problem of failing to
understand what ‘being present’ really means. Sloppy talk of presence forgets to
explore what it takes to be somewhere. It takes for granted the notion that
‘being present’ means ‘turning up’. In other words it assumes that being present
is an all or nothing thing, and that whether or not I’m present just depends on
me and where I am at any given time. So if God turns up everywhere, God is
present everywhere.
But actually that won’t do. Presence is more than turning up, and presence is
not an absolute thing. Presence is a property which an individual person cannot
have alone: real presence is something which happens in relationship, it’s a
property which requires communion, inter-action, mutuality. It’s a property of
people and things which are connected. Someone has to notice I’m here before I’m
really present, and someone has to care. If I come to your party, and neither
you nor anyone else speaks to me or even notices I’m with you, then, in what is
actually the only important sense, I’m not really there at all. I’m not
participating in what is important about that occasion, not being caught up in
the events, the atmosphere, the interchange and conversation that define a
party. All that is true of me is that I was in your house when the party was
going on.
The meaning of ‘presence’ which matters when we come to God is this kind of
presence. I can say, quite accurately, that here and now God is with us, but
it’s only an interesting and important thing to say if I mean that we, here and
now, are in communion with God, interacting with God, having faith in God, being
open to the Spirit of God. If that’s true, then we and God are present to each
other and all is creative potential. But if we have not noticed that God is with
us, if we do not engage with God, then all that can be said is that God was in
church when we were holding a service: and that would mean our claim to be
offering worship to God was mistaken, we were not worshipping God at all.
We will explore this sense of the presence and absence of God again in the next
talk about Jesus in the Temple. For now we can simply observe that when Matthew
has great crowds swarming around Jesus, but then shows every one of them
deserting him and falling away, Matthew is exploring the truth that it is part
of the condition and lot of fallen humanity to fail to discern the presence of
God and to fail to connect with God. When there is no reciprocal relationship
there is no real presence.
The crowds follow Jesus in the sense of tagging along. They hang around a man
who offers them health and powerful preaching, captivated and spell-bound, but
they do not open up to him, they do not engage, they do not know him. Instead
Matthew shows them fitting Jesus into preconceived ideas: Jesus is a prophet,
Jesus is the Son of David; but they are making him in their own mould, not
allowing him to break the mould and make a new creation. They have never
understood the full significance of their own scriptures, so they try to fit
Jesus to their own expectations. If only they could know him, if only they could
see him as the key to the meaning of the prophets. Then they would stay with him
instead of sweeping him into the city on a tidal wave of hysteria that soon
fades to nothing. The crowd have not become disciples for all the time that they
have spent with Jesus, and neither have the Twelve.
Drawing the threads together
This, to me, is what Ensor’s painting is all about. The chaotic carnival
procession is sweeping Jesus into Brussels, but nobody is actually paying any
attention to Jesus. The crowds do not notice that he doesn’t look like they do;
they do not see that he alone is wearing no mask, no make up. They are so puffed
up with their own importance, so preoccupied with their own agenda, that they do
not notice his humility, his gentleness. They do not recognise God himself in
their midst, because they expect God to look more impressive, more powerful,
more like their own fantasy of what they would like to be. Ensor’s crowd has
already deserted Jesus, despite the fact that they believe they are parading him
into their city. He is not present to them: he is there, but they are not with
him. There is no interaction or communion.
If the crowd knew Jesus, the crowd would no longer be an ‘ochlos’, an
indistinguishable mass of humanity, it could become a people, a community. From
the ‘it’ that is the mob could emerge, one by one, precious and unique
individuals. If the people in the crowd engaged with Jesus, they could grow
beautiful, true to the ideal of humanity he embodies, leaving behind the warped
and twisted caricatures they have become. They could take off their masks. If
the crowd were in communion with Jesus, they would stop sweeping him along in
their midst, going to where they want to be, flowing down like liquid to the
lowest level; instead they would follow behind on the true Way, the upward path
that leads to peace and personal integrity.
And the challenge for us this Lent as we read again Matthew’s account of the
entry into Jerusalem is this: are we really any different from the mindless
carnival crowd? Is Ensor’s vision of a grotesque Mardi Gras parade still
painfully true today?
Questions for group discussion or personal reflection
Read Matthew 21.1-16 and compare it with Luke 19.29-46. Is
there a real difference in the way the two gospels tell the story? If so, what
do you think the difference means? Does the account of the role of the crowd
in Matthew given in the talk seem to fit the text?
Reflect on your own discipleship: in what ways does Jesus
seem present or absent? How authentic is your discipleship? Is your
relationship with Jesus changing you?
Do you recognise anything in Ensor’s description of human
life as a chaotic wave of flawed people hiding behind masks and being swept
along by convention and habit? Is this too pessimistic a view of human
society?
Reflect on your experience of Church life: is the life of
your church community shaped by real engagement with God? In what ways, if
any, would it be fair to say that the church is really different from a
secular organisation? Do we wear masks in church? Does the church follow
Christ or try to carry him where we think he ought to be going?
How would you try to draw, paint or re-tell the story of the
entry into Jerusalem? What would the Entry of Christ into Welwyn in 2008 look
like?
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