Of Colts and Men

An article in His magazine risks a guess as to what A an evangelical publisher might have done if he had been offered the Bible as we know it in manuscript form. The poetry? Convert it into straightforward propositional prose. The figures of speech? Drop a lot of them, or at least get the wildness out. The Song of Solomon? Delete it. The David-and-Bathsheba account? Same treatment. The parables? Some of them need clarifying. The New Testament? Cut down on the number of paradoxical statements. Give more rules and regulations.

What this suggests is that the form of Holy Scripture is as unique as its content. Reality, mystery, and art are combined with magnificent, often startling, freedom and force.

Suppose we take one of the incidents of Palm Sunday as a case in point. The animal on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem is described by Mark as a “colt” and by Matthew, more specifically, as a “colt, the foal of an ass.” Thus a young donkey is presented as the King’s conveyor on the occasion of the Triumphal Entry. If we are bereft of imagination, this becomes a ludicrous historical footnote. If we are imaginatively alive, it becomes history emerging as thrilling disclosure.

What we have here, as one of the ingredients of the episode, is novelty. In an age when the Roman empire did so much to call the shots and set the styles, it was an astonishing thing for a leader to make a show of strength by riding into town astride a donkey. Why not an Arabian steed?

If we reflect carefully enough, we move from a happening to theology. What is often called the order of the universe is not, when seen through biblical eyes, an order of frozen rigidity, a machine whose gears and motions are all pre-set. That is David Hume. It is not Isaiah. The biblical revelation is that of a universe that mysteriously combines stability and novelty, fixity and flexibility, the enduring and the emergent. The God who is in Christ is not the prisoner of his universe but its master. He wills its continuities and he wills its surprises. “Behold, I will do a new thing” is the word that Isaiah caught from him. And the apostolic mind is equally aware of this capacity for surprise that belongs to God’s action: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” So wrote the Apostle Paul.

The colt incident has another overtone: there is harmony here. While the aspect of the ludicrous would offend the esthetes and evoke roars of laughter from the militarists, it would not so affect informed and devoutly sensitive Jews. A man receiving acclaim while he rides a donkey would remind them of their own prophets and their long wistfulness for Messiah. On them the forecast of Zechariah would not be lost: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass” (Zech. 9:9).

The congruity seen in the Palm Sunday colt-riding is rooted in a phase of older Hebrew history not often enough stressed in our day. The earliest heroes of the Jews were men of peace. Take the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. These pioneers and pacesetters were dominantly—in the case of Isaac and Jacob invariably—men of peace. The one military adventure in Abraham’s record was forced upon him. In victory, moreover, he refused any enrichment from the spoil. Thus it developed that the ideal hero of the Hebrews was not a Roman’s Mars, a Norseman’s Odin, an Englishman’s King Arthur, or a Japanese samurai. He was a man of peace. Even great David’s war record disqualified him as a temple-builder. That honor fell to Solomon.

So, on Palm Sunday, in harmony with this noble tradition, “came Christ the swordless on an ass.” It is a congruity that calls for recovery in a day when we resort to incredible ethical gyrations to justify incredibly remote and vastly destructive military operations.

The role of the colt in that brief hour when our Lord was visibly and volubly acclaimed suggests modesty no less than novelty and harmony. Both in the Zechariah prophecy and in the Matthew recollection the word is “humble.” For thousands of years the pride of princes has been the pain of plain people. In all too many cases it has been their bane as well—a bankrupting extravagance and a peace-destroying arrogance for which the people have paid dearly. One thinks of the contrast between the enormously pompous entry into Jerusalem by Kaiser Wilhelm early in this century and that of General Allenby, bareheaded and afoot, a few years later.

Humility is a rare grace that puts beauty in our characters and immunity on our heads—immunity, that is, to self-contrived haloes. It is a grace, let it be added, that may be as curiously missing from a parson in the pulpit as from a politician in panting pursuit of votes.

The colt story has also a quality of excitability that gives it an immensely piquant and practical potential. See what happens when Gilbert K. Chesterton focuses the magic of his imagination on that donkey. The creature is thoroughly fed up with the sneers of those who could see in him nothing graceful or good, only the awkward, the stupid, the laughable. So the poor creature, thrilled to be part of the Palm Sunday scene and resentful against his detractors, explodes:

Fools! for I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

Dr. W. E. Sangster of London, whose early death is still vividly remembered in Britain, once preached a Palm Sunday sermon from John 12:14, “And Jesus, having found a young ass, sat thereon.” A sentence in that sermon runs like this: “No matter how ordinary, ill-educated, disfigured, ill-born, one-talented, or obscure a man or woman may be, Christ has use for him, and he gives him dignity by that use.”

Was it not the great-souled Rutherford who exclaimed, “Blessed are they who heal us of our self-despisings”? Jesus, beyond all cavil, is the greatest of such healers.

The exciting point to be made is that whether we are disadvantaged by actual handicap (a brain less than brilliant, a body less than sound) or cultural liability (racial prejudice, impoverished circumstances, lack of formal training), the touch of Christ that is given in response to the trust of man turns negatives into positives. It converts unsuspected potentialities into unbelievable actualities.

What, for example, did John Bunyan, William Carey, William Booth, and Dwight Moody have in common? Absence of formal education and vocations of unexciting ordinariness: tinker, cobbler, pawnbroker’s assistant, shoe salesman. The donkey was not more sneered at than all these men in particular places at particular times. Yet of them, once they had been claimed in full by Christ, the world was not worthy.

William Wilberforce was a hunchback, sometimes the butt of cruel jests in the British Parliament. Yet pressed by Christ into the service of his Kingdom, the hunchback did more than most to strike the shackles from a million slaves.

Alexander Whyte, rated by many as the greatest of the Scottish preachers in the Puritan tradition, was born out of wedlock. Yet Christ lifted him a whole Mt. Everest above social stigma, gave him a name to be revered and a pastoral record nearly matchless.

The “Jesus people” of our day are written off as hopeless by many a stiff and sterile churchman. Dubbed “freaks” by the unsympathetic—and sometimes by themselves—they are exhibiting those releases from enslavement and those realities of Christ’s living, lively, loving presence that bring to mind the more dramatic New Testament conversions. Perils and posturings among them? Yes. But also bursting vitality, transfiguring reality.

It is perhaps the right time to say to a lot of frustrated people both inside and outside the churches precisely what one pastor said: “The Lord who gave dignity and prominence to a despised beast will give place and honor even to such unimportant people as we are.”

Paul S. Rees is vice president at large of World Vision International, Monrovia, California. He has the B.A. from the University of Southern California and several honorary degrees, and has written over a dozen books.

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