Today we celebrate the feast of Palm Sunday as we begin Holy Week.
The “story of Jesus” culminates this week and has been building in intensity. In the scriptures leading up to this, we have felt the growing tension between the religious authorities and Jesus. We have heard of their plots to harm him. We can see that his values and those of Rome are on a collision course.
What I love about our church rituals is that we return to the same stories every year. We do this because these stories are foundational to the faith. But secondly, we’re not who we were last year and thus engage the story in a different way. So for all the “familiar” stories that we hear from our scriptures, we might do well to ask, “What does this mean for me now?”
The readings for today are FULL of layers of meaning which are beyond the scope of this blog to get into, so I will focus on one particular aspect of Palm Sunday that seems important to remember.
John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg changed my view of Palm Sunday through their book The Last Week (published in 2006). Borg and Crossan suggest that Jesus’ Palm Sunday parade was a form of protest/street theater that was happening at the same time as a military parade was happening on the other side of Jerusalem.
Jesus knew that every year during Passover (one of the Jewish tradition’s holiest times), Rome paraded their military through the city just to remind people who was in charge. The Passover festivities brought out a lot of people, so Rome always got a bit nervous about crowd control and was ever on the watch for whiffs of insurrection. In response, they flexed their muscle, and they were not forgiving if you crossed them.
So at the same time that the Roman army and all of the politicians and supporters of the empire are coming in one side of the city, Jesus and his ragamuffin band of folks are coming in the other side. On the Roman side, it was the who’s who of Jerusalem. On Jesus’s side, there were people without stable housing, people who used substances, sex workers, day laborers, and people who were considered disposable by the other side of the city.
In so many ways, Jesus is aligning himself with the underbelly of empire and exposing it for what it is. What empire will never show you is that in order to have all of the military might and power and all of the wealth, there are people whose backs that it is built upon.
I often think of the anti-racist educator, Tim Wise, who spoke at Monroe Community College many years ago. During his talk, he mentioned how we often use the word “under-privileged” to describe certain groups of people but we almost never use the word “over-privileged” to describe the opposite group of people. He said that we cannot have one without the other. Jesus shows us that empire “over resources” some groups and intentionally “under resources” others. And he chose to align with the under-resourced.
What I think is also important to point out is that Jesus is not doing “Facebook activism” here or doing a protest and going home. He had restructured his life, had been doing public acts of civil disobedience and lived in a counter-cultural way – creating an alternative community of people that actually threatened business as usual and the status quo.
I often wonder how much of a “threat” my choices and lifestyle are to the powers that be!
In many ways, I think that is what Lent is supposed to do for us. It’s supposed to threaten something in our life and shake up business-as-usual. And I do not mean threaten in the sense of intimidate so much as interrupt our patterns. Lent tries to help us create an alternative space where we more deeply take up nonviolence, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, love and the creation of the beloved community. Those were the foundations of the Jesus parade that we witness today.
A few years back during the Black Lives Matter protests that happened here in Rochester and all across the country in response to the police killing of George Floyd (and locally of Daniel Prude), the leaders of the marches sang a chant that said, “Which side are you on, my people, which side are you on?”
I think the gospel today asks a similar question, “Which side of the city will you be on?”
I know that it is not that simple because we all live in deeply interconnected systems that are hard to extricate ourselves from, and we are all on a journey of awakening and change. Yet the God of the bible does take sides and time and time again sets up shop opposite the dominant paradigm.
Our “worship” and faith – if they are to be true to the gospel – ultimately lead us into the public space in order to subvert the systems of power and domination that operate in our world and work to create a viable alternative. This may be scary and difficult work, but that is our tradition, and Lent is intended to help us prepare for that witness.
Just sit with whatever comes up for you today.