What Do We Want To Be Saved From?

Every year the feast of Palm Sunday marks the transition to Holy Week. This week represents what we might call the “high holy days” of the Christian faith and it begins the culmination of our Lenten journey.

As I have spoken of before, a major shift came for me when I read Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The Last Week (2007) many years ago. In fact, their work shifted a collective understanding of Palm Sunday for many folks in church circles and actually made Jesus’ actions take on a whole new meaning than what we may have thought before.

Borg and Crossan said that every year during the time when Jesus lived, the Jewish population would converge on Jerusalem for Passover. The faithful would come from all around to celebrate what is, perhaps, the most important story in Hebrew history – their liberation from bondage in Egypt.  And every year, the population of Jerusalem would swell to almost 4 times its size with people coming in for Passover festivities. 

But along with the celebrations of Passover, certain groups within the Jewish community also dreamed of overthrowing their current occupiers – the Romans. The Passover festival conjured not only a celebration of prior freedom but a thirst for freedom from Rome. While Rome allowed those it conquered to practice religion and customs, they were brutal to anyone who messed with their politics and money. 

So every year, during the Passover celebration, the Roman governor would ride into Jerusalem from his coastal residence west of the city. He would ride in with war horses, chariots, and tons of soldiers in a massive parade that went right through the city. The message was clear to the Jewish people: You can celebrate Passover all you want, but do not resist us or you will feel what we can do. Furthermore, Rome considered its emperor to be god, so they were sending a secondary message as well – that their “god” was more powerful than the Jewish god.

On the East side of Jerusalem, however, Jesus had his own parade. Borg and Crossan suggest that Jesus was being very intentional about what he was doing, and it was meant to be a public demonstration/protest against imperial rule. Jesus’ parade highlighted nonviolence and the emergence of the beloved community as an alternative to Rome.  And believe me, Rome noticed.

Furthermore, the people who were on Jesus’ side of town were all of the people who were rejected, outcast or wanted to stay as far away from the police or military folks who were on the west side. These were the people whom the status quo was already crushing.

So when we wave our palms on Palm Sunday and say “Hosanna!” ( a word that means “save us”), we probably should be asking, “Save us from what?” What, exactly, are we asking Jesus to save us from?

This is not an individual question. This is a collective question. And if we think about the people whom Jesus was with in his street protest, what would they want saving from?

My friend, activist and theologian Ched Myers says that this passage – like so much of our church experience – has become domesticated and subjugated by the American empire. Rome is not the threat anymore. America is, and our churches (by and large) have aligned with the practices of empire (even if we say we’re about something else). So in order to authentically represent Jesus’ actions on Palm Sunday in our churches as we “celebrate” Palm Sunday, we need to do some critical reflection and “re-contextualize its symbols into our political moment, and re-place our witness back into public space.”

Maybe we can think about that for a minute.  Where would these demonstrations/protests be happening?  Against what “powers”?  Who would Jesus be in these protests or demonstrations?  And are these already happening in our midst but we did not recognize them as such?

Jesus knew that by doing what he was doing, he was taking a significant risk. He was becoming visible for the sake of justice and that he would become a marked man.  But that didn’t stop him. Love was a greater force for him, and I think he wanted his followers and the world to see that “another world is necessary, another world is possible and another world is happening (Grace Lee Boggs).” (To see a beautiful woodcut of this phrase go here.)

Jesus’ parade/protest/uprising was trying to embody and live into the alternative to the crushing systems. His rag-tag community tried to embody hospitality, generosity and belonging. They tried to practice mutual aid and living into a gift economy. They worked to make sure people had what they needed and privileged the healing and well-being of the most vulnerable. And they confronted the powers and principalities that did harm with nonviolent direct action.

Every year, Palm Sunday raises so many questions for me about my own life and about the collective life of the “church” – and especially these times that we are living in.

I know that many reading this will be part of the “No Kings” events that are taking place all across the country this weekend. Public protest is good and necessary. And as I read from a Black organizer that I follow on Facebook, “as long as our actions and events involve little in the way of personal risk and/or true disruption to the current systems, there is little chance of changing the course that the regime has set us upon.”

Jesus’ Palm Sunday demonstration was not a “one and done” kind of event. He was and had already been in solidarity with those on the margins and had been taking risks for years before this event happened. Jesus understood that so many of the people he walked with faced life-threatening situations. And so he “chose life” (the command coming from Deuteronomy 30) and aligned with the powerless and marginalized – and not with the culture of death.

One of my mentors in the social work world is Paul Kivel. He wrote an article many years ago called “Social Service or Social Change?” In the article he asks two questions that continue to haunt me to this day: What do you stand for? (meaning what are your values) and Who do you stand with? (meaning whose interests do you align with). And I think his questions offer something important for us on Palm Sunday.

I’m guessing that many who stood on the west side of Jerusalem that day would say they value justice, peace and freedom. And yet they may have found themselves somehow uncomfortably aligned with the imperial powers – deferring to them, going along with them, passively accepting them.

I know that there are many days where I feel this in my own life. I want to be on the east side more fully, but I have many fears because the consequences are real.

Jesus, however, keeps inviting us to his gathering. He keeps saying, “Another world is necessary. Another world is possible. Another world is happening.” He may have been the parade leader, but we, too, can be part of this parade. The beauty of this parade is that it is a “come as you are.” No qualifications. No prior experience needed. No titles. No pomp or circumstance. Just a willingness to offer what you have in your life and be open to transformation.

Today as we mark yet another Palm Sunday, we pray that our lives and the church (as a collective) may keep living into the spirit of Jesus’ life and work – offering the world an alternative to the imperial model of domination. May we remember that another world is necessary, another world is possible and another world is happening and find ways to keep aligning ourselves with this energy more fully.