March 27th, 2021

This Sunday is Palm Sunday, and it is also called the Sunday of the Passion, and this year the perspective is from the Gospel according to Mark. Although there is no mention within this gospel account of the Old Testament text from Zechariah [9:9-12] with the importance of Israel’s king coming on a donkey/colt, the way Jesus gets that animal is certainly significant, and the people in Jerusalem are certainly making a big deal when Jesus enters that way (Mark 11:1-10).


Perhaps within this event there is a reference back to the only Old Testament reference given by the writer of this gospel account, only in the third verse of the entire account: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord….’ And perhaps that is why this is only the ‘beginning’ of the gospel (Mark 1:1).


There was also a much more recent event that is causing some people to make a big deal of it. Within the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was a significant find, two verses of Zechariah 8[:16-17]. These verses are just a few verses ahead of the text for this Sunday from Zechariah 9. Here is a link to an article about this that appeared on the Christianity Today website:


www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/march-web-only/new-dead-sea-scrolls-discovery-bible-translation-israel.html


One of the interesting things that is noted in this article is the way that the special name for God is written. The author states that the name is in older lettering and in letters, instead of the normal way from left to right, these letters are written in the Hebrew way, from right to left. This is obviously a very special way to write a very special name. And it is sort of the opposite of the historical present, in saying that something is happening, in a sense, right now. Sometimes things that happened a long time ago are also extremely important. And sometimes this fact is being overlooked in today’s modern society.


Another recent publication that is more academic (but still very helpful) is the book, The Formation and Significance of the Christian Biblical Canon: A Study in Text, Ritual and Interpretation. It was written by Tomas Bokedal [T & T Clark, Bloomsbury Press, 2014], and he happens to be a Lutheran who lives in the UK. He devotes an entire chapter to the idea of ‘nomina sacra’, the fact that some very special words were abbreviated in the early New Testament manuscripts in some special ways. In that chapter (‘The nomina sacra: Highlighting the Sacred Figures of the Text’) he includes a chart (pages 89-90) that groups the special words into four different levels of frequency:


1. The primary group (99%-100% nomina sacra forms in the singular): God, Christ, Jesus, Lord


2. The secondary group (89%-95% nomina sacra forms) Cross, Spirit,


3. The tertiary group (23%-62% nomina sacra forms) Crucify, Father, Human being, Jerusalem, Son, Israel, Spiritual


4. The quaternary group (0%-5% nomina sacra forms) Heaven, Mother, David, Saviour (sic).
​

How interesting that the words relating to the cross are so frequent. Also mentioned within the same chapter is that a two-letter abbreviation for Jesus, along with a Greek letter that looks like the cross has a numerical value of 318, and this number was important for some early Christians. (For more detail, see pages 106-7.) With that in mind, having the Sunday of the Passion does not seem at all inappropriate.