What would happen if Jesus showed up today? James Ensor's vast, unsettling canvas draws us into the noise and masks of Christ's Entry into Brussels — only to find him quiet, haloed, and nearly alone.

Matthew 21:7-11

James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 is one of the most prophetic and deliberately uncomfortable paintings in Western art — a roaring carnival of masks, banners, and institutional power pressing toward us, and somewhere near the back, almost lost in the noise, a haloed figure on a donkey who calls the whole procession into question.

The painting is social commentary as much as spiritual vision. The figures leading the march are not villains so much as archetypes — the politician, the clergyman, the military officer, all caught up in the momentum of their own causes. The banners cry out for reform. The energy is enormous. And yet Ensor places Christ not at the head of this procession but behind it, surrounded by a clearing of empty space, his face quietly human amid the caricature. This is the tension Matthew's Palm Sunday holds as well. The crowd shouts Hosanna and sweeps Jesus toward Jerusalem — but the city asks, who is this? The procession has already outrun its subject. Ensor saw this pattern not as a first-century failure but as a permanent human habit: we recruit the sacred to march behind our agendas, and call it faithfulness.

Look at the painting slowly. Let your eye travel the front of the crowd before it finds Christ. Notice what the banners promise. Notice the masks — not sinister exactly, but not quite human either. Notice how much of the canvas belongs to the parade, and how little to the one it ostensibly honors. Ensor is not asking us to find ourselves in this scene so much as to recognize it. Where have we seen this procession? Where does it march today — in our institutions, our movements, our religious cultures? And what does it mean that Christ rides through it, neither leading nor fleeing, simply present and unco-opted?

This is where the painting becomes an invitation to honest stillness. Not only to look at the crowd, but to feel it. Where does this procession march in your own world — in the institutions you inhabit, the causes you carry, the religious cultures that have shaped you? What is being proclaimed in the banners? And where, in the middle of all of it, does Christ ride? What is the voice that refuses to be conscripted by the noise — and what might it be saying to you today?

This painting unsettled me in ways I am still sitting with. Ensor doesn't let anyone off easily — not the crowd, not the clergy, not those of us who think we are paying attention. Malcolm Guite's petition at the end of his poem became my own: May Jesus come and break our resistance, and make his home in us. Amen.