A Palm Sunday Misconception

This Sunday is Palm Sunday for most Christian churches. Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’ triumphal approach to Jerusalem (sometimes mistakenly called his “triumphal entry,” but as the Gospel of Mark makes clear, Jesus only approached the city on Palm Sunday, delaying his actual “entry” into the city and the temple until the next day - see Mark 11:11ff.). This is the time of the year when pastors and preachers trot out their “fickle crowd sermons” in which they fulminate about the fickle and feckless crowds who gathered on Palm Sunday to hail Jesus as their king only to turn on him a week later and, complicit in his betrayal and execution, shouted “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

Problem is, while that might make for some passionate homiletical indignation in which the preacher berates the crowd for being feckless and mercurial, that’s not what the text of the Gospel of Mark says happened at all.

The Crux of the Matter

I’m teaching an intensive graduate seminar on the Gospel of Mark this summer at Liberty University. Hadn’t taught Mark for a while, so I welcome the opportunity. Wrote my PhD dissertation on Mark back in the late 70’s. Since then, I’ve gravitated more to other NT documents. But Mark has always haunted me. The power of the story comes through in Mark in a way that it doesn’t in the other canonical Gospels, so much so that the British actor, Alec McCowen, once held audiences spellbound simply by reading the Gospel of Mark on stage in a one-man performance. No commentary was necessary. The story itself carried the freight.