Reading: Mark 11:1-11
I wonder what images were floating through your mind as I read the passage from Mark’s Gospel about Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Whatever they were, they were probably coloured by memories of hearing this story in your infancy, or maybe our own stained-glass window which depicts the scene, (see front cover) or perhaps by Hollywood presentations of it. Your mental picture might even have been influenced by the numerous sermons you’ve heard over the years, all of them emphasising the great humility Jesus showed by choosing to enter into Jerusalem in this way.
But one thing is certain: if your mental image included a donkey then you weren’t really paying attention to the actual words I was reading today, because nowhere in his account does Mark mention a donkey. Matthew does – he has Jesus riding on two animals at once, which is something of a feat even for Jesus – but Mark tells us that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a horse. The New International Version of the Bible from which I read uses the word ‘colt’, which is simply a young horse, but the actual Greek word is ‘polos’ and Arnt and Gingrich’s Manual Lexicon of the New Testament tells us that from the time of Homer – a good few centuries before Jesus – this word has always meant ‘horse’, and that ‘horse’ is the preferred translation of the word as it is used in this passage in Mark.
And it’s not any old horse either. At the beginning of the piece, Jesus instructs his disciples to go into the city where they will find a horse ‘on which no one has ever sat’, and bring it to him. Think about this for a moment. A horse on which no one has ever sat is an unbroken horse, an untamed horse, and if you have ever lived on a farm, or if you have ever seen a cowboy movie, you will know precisely what this means: the animal that Jesus had deliberately chosen was more like a ‘bucking bronco’ than a harmless seaside donkey. And although the Gospels tell us nothing about Jesus’ skill in horsemanship, it must have been considerable because he brings the beast under sufficient control that the crowd, instead of sensibly running for cover, stand calmly by and throw palm branches in his path.
And should we want any more evidence that this period of Jesus’ life was not characterised by the passive humility that centuries of sentimentality have heaped upon it, the next two incidents in Mark’s narrative will provide it. Jesus curses a fig tree so that it withers and dies, and then he goes into the Temple and drives out the market traders and overturns the tables of the moneychangers – John’s Gospel tells us that he took a whip to them. Neither action is that of the donkey-riding, ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’, about whom we learned in Sunday school.
These three related incidents – the horse-riding, the cursing of the fig tree, and the casting out of the moneychangers – are intrinsically unlikely, the first two for obvious reasons, the third because the Temple precincts were very closely guarded, and Jesus would have been given the bum’s rush before he could have done any significant damage. But remember – and I cannot stress this principle enough – the more unlikely the scriptural story the more we need to look beneath the surface meaning to find out what it is trying to tell us. We have to stop asking the wrong questions. These are spiritual parables not historical reminiscences, and they do not simply ask us to ‘believe’ in them, but to respond to them. We should approach them as poems to be explored rather than as incidents to be amazed at, or, as we liberals tend to see them, as dubious stories to be dismissed as exaggerations.
It is my firm conviction – the reasons for which I shall detail on some other occasion – that Christianity began as a Mystery Religion, and that, like all the Mystery Religions, it presented its foundational stories in both an ‘exoteric’ and an ‘esoteric’ way. A story’s exoteric meaning is its obvious narrative meaning, its ‘outside’ meaning, the meaning, if you like, that you could draw a picture of. The esoteric meaning is the ‘inner’ meaning, the meaning which only yields itself to imaginative contemplation. The Gospels – and Mark’s Gospel in particular – regularly show Jesus taking his favoured apostles to one side where he teaches them the real meaning of things, and St. Paul tells the believers in Corinth that they have only been fed milk so far, because they are not yet ready for solid food. The ‘milk’ is the outside meaning; the ‘solid food’ is the inner meaning, which in two millennia of obsession with history, Christian orthodoxy has neglected to teach us.
To grasp the significance of Jesus’ horse ride, we need to consider the role of the horse in the actual and the symbolic worlds of ancient people. The horse was the human being’s greatest ally among the animals, since it was his principle, if not his only, means of land transport. Without the horse, human movement and activity were restricted; with it, we were able to undertake the arduous process of subduing the natural world, since the horse gave us the capacity to add strength, speed, and physical endurance to our considerable mental powers. The horse was everywhere invested with qualities of nobility, loyalty, and power. Men loved horses for their utility and versatility; women, then as now, were subconsciously attracted to them for the pure and beautiful virile energy that they display. Horses are magnificent creatures, as I was reminded while watching the police horses in the St. Patrick’s Day parade last Thursday.
But they are not born as our natural allies. They are born wild and turbulent; they instinctively rebel against human dominance, and in order for them to be any use to us at all they have to be brought into subjection. Their natural uncontrollable energies have to be harnessed to a will that is stronger than their own. They have to be ‘broken’ and when raw power is brought under the control of intelligence, a formidable alliance is formed.
In such a context was born the mythological image of the centaur – half man, half horse – which married the twin qualities of intelligence and strength. And it is not too difficult to see how the centaur came to symbolise the human being – part god, part animal; part creative intelligence, part destructive passion. The great artist Picasso was asked, toward the end of his long life, how he felt now that age had robbed him of his not inconsiderable physical passions. “It’s like being unchained from a wild animal,’ he replied. ‘Chained to a wild animal’ is not a bad description of any human being in the full flush of youthful vigour; some of the animals to which we are chained are wilder than others, but all of us must admit that there are parts of our nature which are difficult to integrate, that we are complex, composite, ambiguous creatures. The 18th century English poet Alexander Pope describes this dual nature of the human being in his Essay on Man:

No one has described the ambiguous, centaur nature of the human being better. We are all centaurs. For the most part, the centaurs were portrayed in mythology as wild and savage creatures, all the more dangerous because their dominant bestial power was mixed with human ingenuity, but one of their number, Chiron, was a friend to humans, and so great was his wisdom that many young people were entrusted to his care. ‘The wise old centaur taught them to make music, to hold themselves with grace in dance, to wrestle, box, and run, to climb the high rocks and hunt the wild beasts in the mountain forests. They learned to read the omens in the heavens, and to find those plants which could offer an antidote to infection and pain. The youths Chiron educated learned to laugh in the face of danger, to scorn sloth and greed, and to face all that came to them with courage and good cheer. They grew up skilful and strong, modest as well as brave, and were fit to rule by having learned how to obey.’
(The Mythic Journey, by Greene and Sharman-Burke, page 246)
Indeed, Chiron taught what he himself had accomplished: the marriage of passion with intelligence, which produces the outstanding, heroic, undaunted, creative human being.
It is images such as this which will enable us to understand the spiritual meaning of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. In sedately riding an unbroken horse into the holy city, Jesus symbolises the mastery of the bestial by the spiritual, the mastery of what we might today call the ego (or, in Freudian terms, the Id) with its selfish cravings, by the powerful forces of self-knowledge and self-control. Jerusalem is the city of peace – salem is the same word as ‘shalom’ in Hebrew and ‘salaam’ in Arabic – and in order for us to enter symbolically into the holy city of peace, individually and collectively, we must attain the same level of mastery over those troublesome aspects of our animal nature that Jesus is shown exercising in this little story. And it is the objective of all spiritual practice, in whatever tradition it comes down to us, to attain this level of control over the wilder aspects of our nature, to become one who, in George Bernard Shaw’s words ‘is a real force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy’. (Wisdom of the Ages, page 219) In short, we should strive to become creatures of will, not of whim.
But being in control of our passions does not mean eliminating them. This is why the next scene in the gospel story is so important. Jesus’ violent reaction to the traders in the Temple is not the automatic behaviour of one who has allowed his instinctive reactions to get the better of him momentarily. He is not likely to repent of his action subsequently with a shamefaced, ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ type of apology. Jesus is in control of himself, and so his anger is not the ‘red mist’ of animal rage, but the justifiable, studied, and willed expression of indignant condemnation, which all of us are called upon to exhibit when circumstances warrant it. Our passions, our desires, our bodies, are only our enemies when they control us; when we are in control of them, when they are our servants, they are the source of the greatest of human qualities and joys. As William Blake says, ‘Energy – passion – is eternal delight’.
Which brings us to the third of our trio of stories – the cursing of the fig tree. I spoke about this in February in a sermon on prayer, so I won’t say very much today, but the incident illustrates the god-like power of the human being, the ability we have to bend the natural world to our will. We stand ‘in the middle state’ as Pope tells us, between the bestial and the divine. We are the product of the earthly forces of evolution coupled with such extraordinary mental and spiritual powers that, in the words of Psalm 8, we are ‘a little lower than the angels’. As the pagan philosopher Epictetus said:
You are a distinct portion of the essence of God in yourself. Why, then, are you ignorant of your noble birth? Why do you not consider where you came from? Why do you not remember when you are eating, who you are who eat? And whom you feed? Do you not know that it is the divine you feed, the divine you exercise? You carry a God about with you. (Wisdom of the Ages, page 31)
Controlling and integrating our animal passions, while exploring a utilising our divine potential, these are the connected themes of these apparently unconnected episodes from Mark’s Gospel. Can you imagine what a different world we would have if, instead of forcing ourselves to ‘believe’ these stories, we actually tried to live as they suggest we should?

Rev.Bill Darlison
Palm Sunday, 20th March, 2005 Dublin Unitarian Church