You probably all know the story of Jones the Welsh spy. At the height of the Cold War a Russian secret agent is sent (I can’t think why) to a village in the Rhondda with instructions to make contact with a fellow-traveller called Mr Jones. The Russian has never met Mr Jones, he hasn’t been told his first name, and has no idea what he looks like. All he has is a coded message: “The tulips are blooming well today”.

The spy gets off the train at the village and thinks, “I know what I’ll do – I’ll go and ask for Mr Jones at the Post Office. The staff there are bound to know where he lives”. So he waits in the queue and, when he gets to the counter, he politely asks the man behind it, “Excuse me, but could you kindly tell me where Mr Jones lives”.

The man scratches his head and replies, “Well, now”, he says, “that’s a bit difficult. It’s a very common name round here, you see. So we’ve got Mr Jones the butcher, and Mr Jones the baker. There’s Mr Jones who runs the grocer’s shop and Mr Jones at the garage and Mr Jones the schoolteacher and of course Mr Jones the undertaker – we call him Jones the Death. Then there’s me: I’m Mr Jones, Post Office”.

The spy is a bit taken aback by all this: he hadn’t reckoned on things being so complicated. And what if the chap he’s talking to is the very man he’s looking for? So he decides to take a chance, leans forwards, and conspiratorially whispers, “The tulips are blooming well today”.

The postmaster listens, and then smiles broadly. “Ah”, he says, “You’ll be wanting Mr Jones the spy! Turn left outside the door, then go up the hill for about 50 yards, his house is the one with the green door, number 35. Shall I give him a ring so he knows you’re coming?”

That story probably betrays all the usual tired English stereotypes about life in South Wales, so I must defend myself by saying that it was featured in a major Welsh newspaper a few years ago! In any case I’m telling it to make a point: that the spy had to identify his contact by using a secret code or sign.

We’ve all done that kind of thing, especially in the days before everyone carried a mobile phone (remember them?): “Meet me by the station clock at 10 o’clock, I’ll be wearing a brown coat with a pink carnation in the lapel”. I once had to meet another Minister outside the National Liberal Club in London and was told to look out for “a surprisingly youthful 44-year old”! And just a few weeks ago I’d arranged for a present for Moira to be delivered to a local pick-up point rather than to our house, so she wouldn’t see it arriving. I had to produce both my emailed receipt and two forms of identification to retrieve it.

One of the crucial characters in the Palm Sunday story is, of course, the donkey: you might say that, if Jesus is the star, she has the chief supporting role. And we’ve all seen pictures of places where a real live donkey  – hopefully on its best behaviour! – leads the congregation into church. I have no idea if people in first-century Palestine named their donkeys, although they probably called them all sorts of things if they didn’t do what they were told! But it’s clear that Jesus deliberately chose a donkey to ride on as he made his big entrance into Jerusalem; it’s also clear that the Gospel writers felt that the fetching of the donkey was an important part of the drama as they all mention it, with Luke giving the greatest amount of detail.

Now we do know why Jesus chose a donkey to ride. It was partly so that people would make the link with the Messiah who’s mentioned in Zechariah 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Look, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey”. In other words, the donkey was yet another sign – though perhaps a rather obscure one in this case – of Jesus fulfilling prophecy and declaring who he was.

And there was another reason for Jesus to choose a donkey: it was a humble animal, used as a beast of burden by merchants or even priests; it was very different to the mighty steed that a conquering general might ride. Jesus was a master of symbolic actions, and his choice of a donkey proclaims him to be a king quite different to any other, the Prince of peace rather than a warlord. As a commentator has written, in words that seem very appropriate for our days, “The rule of God is brought near, not with the snorting and stamping of royal stallions, or with the thunderous rumbling of tanks, but in a lowly Messiah borne on the back of a humble colt, the joyful promises and songs of the prophets before him, the fullness of God’s blessing in his train.”

Having said all that, what we don’t know is why Jesus chose this particular donkey. I suppose that there could have been a man who regularly hired out donkeys to people who needed them: a sort of four-legged Hire Car business! However what seems more likely to me – although I have no proof – that this donkey’s owner was one of those cautious supporters of Jesus who wanted to help him in his mission but who preferred to keep in the background. We don’t know his name (and perhaps he didn’t want it to be made known); more surprisingly the two disciples had clearly never met him either.

So this is where we get to what I’m sure is a coded message, a form of identification which Jesus had pre-arranged. It’s interesting that the message says, “The Lord needs it”, as Jesus rarely calls himself ‘Lord’ in Luke’s Gospel (although other people use it when speaking to him). It’s also strange that the disciples aren’t told to introduce themselves when they go to pick up the donkey, but must use the message only if they are challenged. After all, a donkey was valuable – you wouldn’t want it to be stolen nor handed over to any Tom, Dick or Harry. I’m amazed that the disciples didn’t have to sign an indemnity form, take out insurance or leave credit card details, even for a one-day loan.

It’s been suggested that the disciples weren’t too thrilled by their mission, that they often grumbled about the many things that Jesus asked them to do, such as getting the bread and the fish so Jesus could create a banquet for thousands to eat; or lugging the heavy jars of water for Jesus to turn into wine. Did they think that they had to do all of the dirty work (I nearly said ‘donkey work’!) while Jesus did the exciting stuff like walking on water? So the disciples might have been a bit disappointed at being asked to fetch a donkey. But in fact their task was crucial to the Palm Sunday event as the animal they were retrieving was to play such a vital role in this story. Sometimes our service to God can seem unexciting and menial: yet it’s necessary.

This isn’t the only example of Jesus making covert arrangements during what we now call Holy Week; he does something similar before the Last Supper, which we can read about three chapters later in this Gospel. Here Peter and John – who may or may not have been the same disciples who’d collected the donkey – are told to look out for a man carrying a jar of water who will meet them as they enter the city; he won’t be someone they know but he’ll stick out like a sore thumb as carrying water was generally women’s work. The disciples are to quietly follow the man into a house and theresay to its owner, “The teacher asks you, ‘Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’” The preparations can then be made.

The arrangements for picking up the donkey may simply have been a matter of convenience, but this one sounds really cloak-and-dagger! Why was it so important that no-one knew where Jesus would celebrate the Passover? Did Jesus wants to keep his plans secret, even from the other disciples? Had Jesus twigged that Judas was going to betray him and wanted to make sure that this would occur at the time of his own choosing rather than earlier? After all, Jesus may have had his suspicions about Judas for a long time – suspicions which were fixed in place by the remark he made after Mary anointed Jesus with her valuable perfume. In any case, Passover season – with its story of escape and freedom – was always a tense time in Roman-occupied Palestine; Jesus would have wanted to keep his head down and evade any unfavourable attention from the authorities.

But we haven’t got to Passover yet: we’re still at Palm Sunday and we need to get back to that donkey! And, as I was preparing this message, I came across many interpretations of this story. One was that the donkey’s owner was sacrificially giving it for God to use as he wished, with the suggestion that we too must be prepared to offer him anything, however unlikely or valuable, that he asks for. That made me think, “Nice try, but Jesus was only borrowing the animal for the day” – and he may even have paid for it! Another thought was that nobody took the slightest notice of the donkey until Jesus rode on it, it was just part of the street-scene: hence the story shows how God can use the humblest of people and push them into the limelight. But is that really its point? And there were several commentators who pointed out that a tied-up donkey isn’t actually doing anything useful: we too need to be “untied” from our hang-ups and concerns so that we can be useful to God and society: that, I felt, was definitely reading something into the story that simply isn’t there!

More to the point, the Bible makes labours the point of the donkey being borrowed – in fact, Luke spends as much time telling us about the disciples fetching it as he does about the Palm Sunday procession itself. And perhaps that’s what needs to catch our attention. For kings or generals don’t need to borrow their steeds; they can ride into cities on their own war horses, gratified and grandiose with hundreds of people lining the streets. But Jesus did it differently; and, although many of the people who so enthusiastically greeted him that day saw him as a revolutionary leader, the potential liberator of the Jews, he himself was saying, “I’m not like that; I am in fact your Servant King”.

So, by coming into Jerusalem on a donkey, Jesus is acting out the establishment of a new kingdom – a kingdom full of bewildering surprises and remarkable signs, one which punctures all human notions of power and replaces them with divine grace. This triumphal entry reveals a king who, in a message which is sadly so appropriate today, is totally unlike the warring kings of the nations with their lust for dominion and their terrible instruments of war: he is none other than the Prince of peace. His kingdom starts with a lowly Messiah carried on the back of a humble donkey, with the joyful promises of the prophets before him, the praises of his people shouting their welcome, and the fullness of God’s blessing in his train. What we must surely pray today is: “Thy kingdom come: so bring it on. God!”