A few months ago, I was asked to teach Sunday School for the Ecclesia-Wingard Class at my church. This group of folks are some of the most loving, welcoming, warm, funny people in our congregation. They as a group and individually are core members of our church family. Many of them were the first to welcome me in my earliest, tentative days of church-going. And some of them have been Methodists for twice as long as I’ve been alive.
So, after gratefully accepting the invitation, I immediately went into panic mode: What on earth do I have to share with these wonderful, knowledgeable folks that they haven’t heard 1000 times?
And then I realized that I had agreed to teach Palm Sunday, the day that essentially sets the stage for the most important week of the Christian year.
What do I possibly have to say about Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem before his crucifixion that these wonderful, knowledgeable folks haven’t heard 1000 times.
As I took deep breaths and waited for my heart to slow down, I cracked open every Bible I owned and started combing through the four accounts of Jesus riding in on a donkey that first Palm Sunday.
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The first thing that jumped out to me was the heading of nearly every passage in all four gospels: “Jesus’ Triumphal Arrival.”
Triumphal…
I meditated on that word and what associations I had with it. Brave. Courageous. Overcoming…
Which obvious led me to the writings of Our Lady of Understanding Human Courage, Dr. Brene Brown.
Brene Brown’s research, writing, and speaking centers around what she calls “wholeheartedness”: the state of living in courage, openness, and vulnerability. (The greatest of these is vulnerability.) Throughout thousands of hours of interviews, she’s learned that the most courageous, healthy, and successful people are open, authentic, and unafraid to fail. Character, she says, is not built by avoiding failure, but by stepping directly into it and learning how to rise from the fall. She busts big myths–such as “vulnerability equals weakness”–and offers deeper truths, such as “vulnerability equals courage.”
I’ve long been a student of Brene Brown. Her work has shaped my outlook, recovery, and professional life. I use her work in every yoga training I offer and with nearly every client I see.
So it’s no surprise that I can’t help but see the Jesus story through a wholehearted, vulnerable lens.
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First, I think we can all agree that signing up for your own death–parading into a city where you know you will be violently killed–is a vulnerable act in and of itself. There’s no way Jesus wasn’t feeling afraid and exposed as the citizens of Jerusalem drew King Herod’s attention to his arrival. As resigned as he was to this inevitability, he no doubt felt all the natural emotions anyone would have felt in his tragic position.
Interestingly–and more subtly–Jesus gives us insight into his emotional state as he approaches Jerusalem in the gospel chapters just before the triumphal entry.
In the gospel of Luke, one of Jesus’ last interactions before he arrives in Jerusalem is with Zaccheus. In that story, Jesus calls Zaccheus–who would have been hated by the locals–out of the tree to talk to him. Here, Jesus risks his own reputation with crowd by doing something he knows they’ll hate. He opens himself up to criticism and rejection by his followers. Brene Brown says that criticism and rejection are deeply vulnerable experiences. Jesus goes on to ask Zaccheus if he can stay in the man’s house that night. Jesus asks for help. “I have nowhere to stay. Can I please stay with you, eat your food, use your bathroom.” Jesus makes himself vulnerable to Zaccheus and receives assistance when he needs in, in the days before he knows he will die.
The plot thickens in the gospel of John. The writer of that gospel gives us more detail about Jesus’ travel into Jerusalem, saying he stopped Bethany and Bethphage on his way. There he saw his friends, siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Except that Lazarus, a beloved friend of Jesus, has just died.
And Mary and Martha are pissed.
They tell Jesus that, if he had been there, their brother wouldn’t have died. They all but blame Jesus for Lazarus’ death. It is clear that they are disappointed in Jesus. He has let them down, and they have no problem telling him so.
So what does Jesus do? Does he snap his fingers and make it all better and bring Lazarus back to life, like the magic God-king he is? No. He goes to the body and–in my favorite verse in the Bible (which also happens to be the shortest and easiest to remember)–he weeps. He cries in mourning over his dead friend, and perhaps also over the ways in which he let down his other friends Mary and Martha. Here, Jesus is fully, vulnerably human. He owns his humanity and shares it openly before performing the type of miracle that only he is capable of.
Then, a few days later, he gets on a donkey and rides to his fate at the hands of the Roman empire.
Jesus didn’t arrive in Jerusalem triumphant. He arrived fully human: grieved, disappointing loved ones, and dependent on others.
And if we are to believe Brene Brown’s research, that is the biggest triumph of all.
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My conversation with the Ecclesia-Wingard class is winding down. I’m barefoot in my Sunday best and a little sweaty after running back and forth to whiteboard to enthusiastically make my points.
These wonderful people have blown me away with their own vulnerability in the last hour. They’ve shared stories of what they were taught as children and times when vulnerability was hard or served them in some way. They’ve trusted me and each other with some very tender moments, and they’ve willingly dived with me into my unorthodox interpretation of the Palm Sunday story.
And frankly, I’ve felt pretty darn vulnerable myself. I was more than a little intimidated stepping into this particular teaching role. I doubted I’d have anything to share, or that I might embarass myself. But together–sweetly interdependent and open, in the way Jesus modeled for us–we’ve created a beautiful morning in this space.
As we finish, the sweet man who sits behind us in church every Sunday–a retired Methodist minister of 44 years–says, “I wish we’d had this when I was in seminary.. And I went to Yale!”
While I’m flattered, I know the compliment isn’t about me. It’s about how powerful conversations become when we make room for vulnerability, both ours and everyone else’s. And that true courage and triumph are about feeling the fear or discomfort or awkwardness and doing the right, true, authentic thing anyway.
Just like Jesus taught us to do.
