In Which Parade Are We Marching?

April 13, 2025 - The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. Today is Palm Sunday, and also, in case you were somehow elsewhere over the last ten minutes or so, today is the Sunday of the Passion. It is one of the two days in this Holy Week on which we mark the death of our Savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As I mentioned in the eNotes this week, putting both of these stories in the same service is a jarring combination. It is one of celebration at the beginning, of singing “all glory, laud, and honor to our Redeemer King,” and then of sorrow at crowds who would reject him, yelling “crucify him,” and one of mourning our Savior’s death. What are we to make of this juxtaposition, this stark contrast between the two stories?

Well, as I also mentioned in the eNotes and in case you’re very much confused by it all, this combination is a relatively new one, one suggested by Pope Pius XII in the early 1950s and then officially made official in the Catholic Church in 1965 with Vatican II. The Episcopal Church and most other Protestant denominations combined the Passion with Palm Sunday soon after, in part because so few Christians show up for services outside of Sunday mornings. I do encourage all of you to come back for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday this week, both services are at 6 pm. Write that down.

But the combination today does present us with an opportunity: it provides us with a chance to see these important stories at the same time, to ponder them together, the praise of Jesus as Messiah and then his rejection and death at the hands of those he came to save, all within the space of one week. Scholars have countless opinions as to how this came to be: some say Jerusalem was the home to so many differing factions, there were surely some who loved Jesus and others who wanted him dead all along. Others argue that it wasn’t until the full implication of Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem hit home that his supporters began to see him as too dangerous to associate with in the face of Roman occupation. As they fled, his detractors won the day. Others throughout history have very wrongly blamed a specific people group for Jesus’s death, some arguing that the turncoat Jews today still hold blame for welcoming and then killing God’s Son. That’s a belief the church has officially dismissed for generations, but it is one that still somehow lives in hearts poisoned by hate for the other. More on the poison of hate in a minute.

Here we have Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem and Jesus’s death. They are both important, substantial stories for us this morning. There was a lot to read, there’s a lot to consider, a lot to discuss. While we’re at it, let me just give us some more to think about... Allow me to introduce a third story to our morning; I promise it won’t take us too far into brunch, I only have four pages. It’s a story some of you have heard before, one that has gained more attention in the last century of Christian scholarship, one mentioned in this morning's New York Times, one of another triumphal entry possibly taking place at a different gate. We know of the Biblical story, our first one this morning read in the chapel, of Jesus’s entry through the east gate into Jerusalem on a colt or a donkey with palm branches and cloaks, with disciples singing praises so that the very stones did not have to shout out. But at another entry, the main gate on the western side of Jerusalem, Pilate was likely entering Jerusalem himself at about the same time.

As the Roman governor of the region, Pilate would have led a military procession into the city at Passover, both to maintain order and to emphatically remind the people of who was really in charge. This parade would have been a show of power: there would have been soldiers, chariots, horses, and plenty of pageantry. People would have been dressed and armed for battle; scholar Marcus Borg writes that Pilate might have been on “a war horse, a white stallion” in full regalia. This was Pilate’s biggest chance to assert his and Rome’s authority before the most important religious celebration of the people that he and Rome were subjugating. This was his chance to remind them that they may have their God, but ultimately, Caesar was their Lord.

With that parade happening on one side of the city, Jesus, of course, hosts a very different sort of parade, through what was likely the back, secondary gate. His triumphal entry, or his fulfillment entry as I think it might be more accurately named, it comes on a colt or a donkey, an animal small enough that some suggest Jesus’s feet were likely dragging on the ground. There are no soldiers, no chariots, no official pageantry, just a whole multitude of his disciples, common people, laying down their cloaks and praising their Lord who they had seen do unbelievable things and tell amazing, life-changing stories. This morning’s Psalm, written in King David’s time, where we sang “welcome the king” and where they wave palm branches, it is echoed in Jesus’s entry, as are many different Old Testament passages. He is fulfilling their prophesies, the ones they hoped to see fulfilled in their Messiah, just maybe not in the way they might have expected.

In his entry, with this kind of parade, Jesus is emphatically claiming his authority, his kingship. Jesus is fulfilling those prophecies and letting them know that he, Jesus, and not Caesar... Jesus is their long-awaited Messiah and their Lord.

But his sort of Lordship is not like Pilate’s, it is not like Caesar’s. And because it is not like theirs, not like what they expected from a Messiah, so many rejected it... and to be fair, so many of us reject it still today. See, Jesus’s parade was so different because his Kingdom is different. The kingdom of God that he tried to show them throughout his life is one of abundant, unceasing love, of self-sacrifice all the way to the point of his death on the cross. The kingdom of God is one where all are welcome, not because of their strength or power or jobs or influence or the money in their bank accounts, but because all are made in the image of God. The kingdom of God is not built on peace through strength, or protection of ourselves at the expense of others, or on putting one nation first, but it is a beloved community of all humanity, no matter your country of origin or your papers or your gender or your age or your race or your ethnicity or your sexual orientation. This is a radical concept, this kingdom of God. It is one we Christians now belong to and try to live into every single day. And Jesus, well, he’s just a radical King.

He was so radical that they rejected him then, and now today, we see some Christians rejecting him altogether in the name of Christian nationalism. “It’s too much to ask, Jesus, this way of love, this abundant welcome, this beloved community... we need to set some boundaries,” they unintentionally say. “Let’s make sure we define who is in and who’s out, let’s respect the proper order of love, let’s make sure we let people know they aren’t welcome because they’re not like us, not here. Let’s then elect leaders who will fight for us Christians with strength and influence and power, because Jesus’s ways aren’t cutting it for us Christians anymore, they’re not getting the job done.” I have dear friends who are now unabashedly on the Christian nationalism train. Some of you do too.

They are there, in part, because hearts are so easily poisoned by hate for the other. For them, the other is the non-Christian, the liberal, the immigrant, the transgender. This is a tale as old as time: Cain murdered Abel in the earliest of Jewish stories. We easily hate those who might somehow be a threat to us, to our security, to our way of life, especially when we do not know them. But we are all guilty of doing the same to our opponents; all of our hearts are so easily poisoned by hate for the other. It is easy for all of us to both sing out “glory to our Redeemer King” on Palm Sunday, then to fully reject his kingship, his way of love when it comes to the other, because all that is simply too much to ask.

Today, in both of these stories, Jesus shows us the better way. He shows us we must not march in our side’s version of Pilate’s parade; we must not subjugate or hate the other. We need no swords for this life. We only need to love: humbly, sacrificially. And we need to see Jesus as King, no other.

May this Holy Week help us all do just that.

Amen.