Palm Sunday – Peculiar Faith

Shelter to Storm, Crown to Cross: On the Road in Holy Week

We begin a symbol-rich journey tomorrow morning on the first day of the holiest week on the Christian calendar. Much of Holy Week can feel like we’re engaged in a religious version of historical re-enactment—tracing and “performing” the events of the last week of the life of Jesus—but if so, it’s certainly not chronologically tidy.

Biblical accounts of the Gospel likewise resist theologically neatness, too, which makes it almost impossible to focus on what we might want to believe about whatever it is we happen to be doing on any given day of this week—if you observe a service of Tenebrae on Wednesday, for example, you’ll likely be reflecting on the Cross, even though we haven’t had the Maundy Thursday observance of the “last supper” yet.

In addition to the biblical, liturgical, and doctrinal complexity, we now face the cultural chaos of the wider world: bombs falling in the Middle East; “No Kings” rallies around the United States; a new Archbishop of Canterbury “enthroned” for the Anglican Communion; and planetary ecosystems devolving into climatic chaos faster (much faster) than scientists had predicted (and that’s a short list).

The title of that wonderful 2022 film notwithstanding, we can’t think of “everything everywhere all at once,” but we can take one step a time, with biblical stories in one hand and liturgical texts in the other—and especially with the deep breathing and gentle accompaniment of companions to travel with us along the road.

Even more, I’ve realized over the years that the Holy Week journey is made richer by choosing just one image or a single vignette or a narrative arc among the many stories we’ll hear and then letting that carry me through the week into Easter Day. This year, I’m intrigued by the image of a road, and a particular one at that: the one from the village of Bethany to the city of Jerusalem.

The lectionary this year has been giving us a series of stories from John’s account of the Gospel on these Lenten Sundays, and last week’s was one of my favorites: the raising of Lazarus from the dead (11:1-45).

The small village of Bethany—just about four miles or so from Jerusalem along a road that crosses the Mt. of Olives—was apparently a place of rest and renewal for Jesus in the home of Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. That quiet spot was sufficiently removed from the urban hustle-and-bustle of Jerusalem (including all the religious intrigue and imperial adornments) that I can easily imagine Jesus relishing that spot as a place to take a deep breath and leave his worries behind, at least for a short while, whenever he spent time with that family of friends.

Having lived for many years in the metro-urban San Francisco Bay Area, moving five years ago to Michigan in the lakeshore resort of Saugatuck felt luxurious. This beautiful shoreline region certainly qualifies as a type of “Bethany” for me, and I am so grateful to be living and working in a place that offers both comfort and renewal in so many different ways, not least the trees, and dunes, and the lake itself.

Tomorrow morning, Palm Sunday, the lectionary Gospel narrative pivots away from the Bethany of renewal toward the Jerusalem of confrontation. This particular day on the liturgical calendar, the one that begins Holy Week, carries a rather awkward liturgical title: “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” Well, which is it? Do we engage with the story of the suffering and death of Jesus (his “passion”) or his so-called “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem as people waved palm branches? Like so much else in Christian traditions, the answer is both.

Palm and Passion belong together, not as juxtaposed opposites but as mutually informing symbols—even though their convergence on a single is something of an historical accident. Back in the sixth century or so, when some Christians, especially in remote areas of the vast Roman Empire, could not attend Good Friday services, the story of the crucifixion was mashed together with the story of the palms on the Sunday before Easter, that way everyone could reflect on the death of Jesus before celebrating his resurrection.

Yes…and: the palm-strewn entry into Jerusalem is not really a victory lap, and the “triumph” is not removed or separate from the “torture” that soon follows. The historical “accident” of Palm Sunday is actually more closely attuned with the very heart of the Christian Gospel than it might at first appear: it speaks directly of God’s deep solidarity with us, not just in comfort but also in confrontation, not only in shelter but also the storm. (I love John August Swanson’s painting of this story, which he names only as the “entry” into Jerusalem, no “triumph,” which includes a stormy sky to greet him.)

“Entry into the City,” John August Swanson

As our liturgical calendar pivots this week from “shelter to storm,” leaving the safe harbor of Bethany behind and into the turbulent sea where religion and imperial politics mix, I’m particularly mindful of the importance of this shift for those of us (myself included) who live so comfortably, actually insulated from the wider world of pain.

As war continues and oil fields burn (on the far side of a vast ocean) and spring temperatures break all-time heat records (climate chaos all the way on the other side of this country) and the island nation of Cuba sits in the dark (still securely south of the U.S. border), very little of the world’s trouble seems even remotely close to the Blue Star Highway—the lovely two-lane road the marks a kind of border between this shoreline resort and the world “out there.”

Reflecting on that road—together with the one from Bethany to Jerusalem—the Sunday of the Passion is indeed Palm Sunday precisely because Jesus refuses earthly power of all kinds in favor of a costly solidarity with the most vulnerable—and in this case, those dominated and oppressed by imperial power; Cross displaces Crown.

I’ve actually walked much of that road between Bethany and Jerusalem myself, back when I was (much) younger and testing a career in archaeology. The terrain is hilly, the route curvy; when walking from Bethany, it’s not always easy to see the city around bends in the road or through scrubby olive trees, but one trusts the journey anyway.

We embark on the Holy Week journey knowing that Easter is just a week away—or rather, we know it’s on the calendar. Trusting the promise of Easter is another matter, and more difficult, and frequently fraught with all sorts of cultural and personal entanglements (I try to stay liturgically focused but can’t stop thinking about the canker sore on my tongue and an achy jaw from a long session in the dentist’s chair this past week).

“Kaleidescope Cross,” Kathy Manis Findley

I’m grateful for the liturgies of the Prayer Book at a time like this; I myself am not responsible for generating the words and gestures to evoke hope, much less joy—the stories and the rites bear that up, thank God.

But this much I must do, and not alone but with others: decide to walk the road, to leave Bethany’s shelter for Jerusalem’s storm. What will that ask of me and require of us, now, in these days? That’s the question to carry with us…

On the Good Road into the Heart of God

“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.”

Those familiar words of course come from the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in the very first chapter of Luke’s account of the Gospel.

Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to include this song from Mary, and he features it right up front, setting the tone for how he wants to tell the story of Jesus, especially to frame his telling with the dynamics of power.

Every human society, every community, all relationships exhibit in various ways those dynamics. The schools we attend, the money we make, where we live, the gender we manifest, whom we love, the color of our skin—all of these and more are infused with varying degrees of social and political, even religious power.

Modern Western society trains most of us to think of power as residing in just one place at a time. Many of us suppose that power is something like an object that passes from one location to another, like a football that gets passed from one team to the next so we know who the winners and the losers are in this game of life.

Power is obviously much more complex than that; it’s never merely a zero-sum game, as if when one person has power, everyone else has none.

Power is much more fluid, resembling a stream, or a river—always moving, always changing, sometimes showing up in the foaming cataracts of a waterfall and at others as a quiet eddy circling around a shallow bay.

Luke appreciates these complexities about power and repeatedly contrasts the power of empire and the power of God; he does this in nearly every encounter with Jesus, in nearly every parable Jesus tells, and in all of the relationships he chronicles.

Luke shows us how power can intimidate, control and dominate, even oppress entire communities with a coercive force. He also shows us another kind of power—the power to heal, to comfort and console, and perhaps especially the power to welcome and embrace, something we might call the “power of belonging.”

This power to welcome in a loving embrace hardly ever gets noticed like all the spectacular displays of coercive power. For Luke, “welcome” and “belonging” stand in stark contrast to imperial power—the kind that divides and fragments, the kind that creates categories of competition, rendering every encounter as a moment of exchange and potential aggression, even hostility.

I am always intrigued by the moment in Luke’s account of the passion when Luke rather casually mentions that the trial and torture of Jesus created a friendship between former rivals: Pilate and Herod—the Roman Governor and the Judean King (Luke 23:12).

Whenever we deal with Jesus, Luke seems to say—even when we stand opposed to him—an energy of “welcome” emerges, creating friends from enemies.

The holiest of weeks for Christians began just yesterday, with “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” That awkward moniker signals just how odd the day itself is, actually one of the strangest on the Christian calendar. This mashup of what seem like competing liturgical goals creates significant religious whiplash as we shift rather jarringly from the so-called “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem to the abject suffering on the cross.

“Jesus Enters Jerusalem,” Patrick J. Murphy

How tempting to suppose that such a shift yanks us from a moment of celebratory power to a moment of power’s absence. But Luke urges us to suppose otherwise, with different kinds of power circulating through these moments.

In the story about the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (Lk. 19:28-40)—the iconic “Palm Sunday” story—Luke doesn’t give us any palms. There are no palms in Luke’s version of Palm Sunday. We might recall in that Mediterranean society that palm branches were often used to celebrate a military victory, and in ancient Israel, they marked the royal power of King David.

As Jesus enters the “City of David,” Luke narrates that entry with the conspicuous absence of any symbols of royal power. And yet, as Luke says, the crowd of disciples joining him on that road were praising God for all the “deeds of power” that they had seen in Jesus—the power to heal, the power to console, the power to welcome.

Switching our liturgical gaze to the scene of execution, we don’t see a moment of complete powerlessness; Luke would have us to see something quite different (Lk. 23:1-49).

In his tortured weakness, Jesus nonetheless exercises his power to pardon—he asks God to forgive all his executioners, and that moment appears only in Luke.

Luke is also the only gospel writer to give us the touching exchange between Jesus and the thief who was crucified with him. Jesus is dying and in the kind of pain we can scarcely imagine; and still, he declares with confidence to the thief, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

There’s an old story about this Gospel moment, and it is told in various versions. The story goes like this: that thief showed up at the Pearly Gates and stood before St. Peter.

“So,” Peter says to the man, “did you earn a degree in theology to get here?”
“Oh no, sir, I never studied theology.”
“I see. But you do understand how atonement works for the sake of salvation.”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t know about such things.”
“Well, then you must have lived quite a virtuous life to be standing here.”
“No sir; I was a convicted thief.”
“Why then,” Peter says, “why are you here?”
“Because, the man on the middle cross said I could come.”

The power of “welcome” in the midst of weakness is at the very heart of God.

That’s where we’re headed on this road through the holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar: we’re going right into the very heart of God, where the power of love can change the world.

We speak often in the parish I’m privileged to serve about the importance, even the primacy of extending a bold hospitality as a vital component of our shared ministry. In our life together, we aim to welcome everyone, no exceptions whatsoever. And we do this because we are convinced of this: there is only love in the heart of God.

I was not raised to believe such a thing about God’s own heart; I fear very few were. The world would be a different place, nearly unrecognizable, if this were the “good news” of the Christian Church.

I’m grateful to Christian songwriter Zach Williams for that line from one of his songs, which captures with such elegant beauty what I have struggled for so many years to express and to live: There is only love at the heart of God—nothing else, only love—and the power of that love welcomes all, everyone, home.

The Unbearable Nearness of God

I wouldn’t call myself a monarchist, but I do admit to a certain fascination with the regalia of royal courts. The peculiarities of Mark’s account of the Gospel help me to understand why this might be: monarchs can be kept safely at a distance (mostly) but God remains surprisingly and (often) uncomfortably close.

Palm Sunday—and/or “Sunday of the Passion”—is always rather jarring as we pivot quickly from the cheers of a jubilant crowd to the jeers of an angry mob. This year felt even more unsettling with Mark’s version of the stories.

“Palm Sunday Procession,” P. S. Solomon Raj

The so-called “triumphal entry into Jerusalem” isn’t very triumphant in Mark’s version (11:1-11). Shockingly, there aren’t any palms being waved about; Mark gives us just some leafy branches on a dusty road out in the countryside.

This little parade with Jesus doesn’t even happen in Jerusalem at all but near the tiny village of Bethany; he enters the big city almost as an afterthought and then turns around and goes back to Bethany.

Noticing this made me wonder what kind of insights Mark’s distinctive features might offer. I easily began with Mark’s emphasis on Bethany, a village around four miles outside of Jerusalem. For some time now I have appreciated what each of the Gospel writers suggests about Bethany: this was a haven for Jesus, where he could breathe. This is where Jesus could relax with some of his closest friends—the two sisters Mary and Martha together with their brother Lazarus lived there. This village, that house was a place of intimacy and tender care.

In today’s lingo, Bethany was a place for framily—good friends who have become something like a family.

Skipping ahead to the “passion,” there’s another curious detail to notice from Mark. While many will recall “Simon,” a man from the city of Cyrene who carried the cross for Jesus, Mark tells us a tiny bit more about him: he was the father of “Alexander and Rufus.”

If those names don’t ring any bells, they shouldn’t. Today we have no idea who Alexander and Rufus were what became of them. But back then, Mark’s readers must surely have known those two brothers—you know, that guy from Cyrene, Rufus and Alex’s dad, that Simon carried the cross for Jesus.

When we know someone directly caught up in a drama, we feel caught up in it, too. That seems to be Mark’s point: this is not a story we can keep at a distance; we are all entangled together in it—including God.

By focusing on that tiny village called Bethany and telling us about Alexander and Rufus—you know, Simon’s boys—Mark invites us to see the nearness of God. What we mean by “God” is not restricted to remote mountaintops, in other words, or inaccessible temples. God is woven into the ordinary routines of everyday life.

Ordinarily, I’m happy and reassured to find God in the ordinary, but the “Sunday of the Passion” also directs my gaze to the violence lurking just beneath the surface of everyday routines. I used to think Palm/Passion Sunday overplayed its liturgical privilege with such a swift pivot toward the cross; but as Hannah Arendt would remind us, such evil is really quite banal indeed, and violence rather ordinary.

I wonder if this is why Mark seems so fond of God’s nearness—not only or even necessarily for the sake of hearing “comfortable words” but for the sake of finding God outside the ring of respectable relationships, even in scandalous encounters.

I’m sure Mark loved the figure of the Roman centurion for those very reasons. As Jesus dies on the cross, it’s not the religious insiders who see God hanging there; it’s the “unclean” outsider, the soldier, the colonizer and oppressor, the executioner who finally appreciates that Jesus somehow embodies the very presence, the nearness of God.

Mark appears to relish flipping “insider” and “outsider”—or I suppose it’s even better to say that Jesus relished this. The foundational elements by which human societies are almost always stratified—family, ethnicity, gender, wealth, geography, to name just a few—these are routinely cast aside at nearly every turn in Mark’s account of what Jesus said and did.

I thought about this five weeks ago, when Lent began with Jesus in the wilderness. Mark is the only Gospel writer who includes “beasts” with Jesus in that desert. Jesus is accompanied by those animals, Mark says, not attacked by them.

Not family, not ethnicity, not religion or status or power, not even species—none of these can dissolve the nearness of God. I’m glad for this—and then I wonder what it means for how I should live.

St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Philippi is one of the earliest texts in the Christian Testament of the Bible. This letter to the Philippians includes a fragment of one of the very earliest Christian hymns, and we often hear it on Palm Sunday (2:5-11).

Early on in Christian traditions, what got Jesus killed is what Christians themselves tried to live, and that’s what that hymn is all about.

The Philippian hymn praises Jesus for refusing to exploit divine power and instead choosing to live as a humble servant. That’s the “mind of Christ,” Paul says, the posture toward social status that we ourselves must adopt.

Mark doesn’t give us a “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem; there are no palms, no emblems of royal power in Mark’s story. There are only leafy branches strewn about on a dusty road, apparently just recently cut by field hands—and that road leads to a cross.

All roads lead there eventually, toward death. But being on this road with Mark, during this week with the Church, and traveling toward that cross—I might actually live with the nearness of God.

Audienced

“Hosanna” is a shortened form of a Hebrew phrase, a plea that means “save us, deliver us!” Christians hears this word every year on Palm Sunday, and this year from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (Mt. 21:1-11).

Jesus has come from Galilee and has just crossed the border into Judea. He has brought a large crowd with him, and as they march into Jerusalem together, the crowds cry out: Hosanna! Save us! Deliver us!

How very strange to see these jubilant marchers become a hostile mob shouting “Crucify!” The jarring shift happens every year at the beginning of Holy Week; in Matthew’s account, these crowds were no longer marchers but bystanders (Mt. 27:11-66).

I remember hearing, many years ago now, an NPR commentary about the news coverage of O. J. Simpson’s infamous attempt to flee policy custody in a white Ford Bronco. The commentator linked the development of cable news shows to that June afternoon in 1994 as people lined Los Angeles streets and sat glued to their television sets.

“We are becoming,” that commentator said, “audienced.”

As if gathered in bleachers to watch the big game, or perhaps more comfortably at home, safe on our couches, we now view the world from a distance.

This all sounded a bit melodramatic to me back then. But the situation has only grown more severe: the Internet, the World Wide Web, smart phones, social media. We can watch acts of gendered violence or racial hatred on our phones, as if going to an afternoon matinee, and then head out to dinner. Migrants and refugees, shooters in schools, factory farms and ecosystem destruction—for all this and more, we are more surely bystanders; we have become “audienced.”

I thought of that analysis as I pondered Matthew’s stories for Palm Sunday. Rather than wondering how the crowd could turn so quickly from adulation to accusation, I suddenly realized instead that these were not the same people; these were different crowds.

Some of the people in each crowd probably overlapped, like a Venn diagram. But by and large, those marchers and those bystanders were not the same people. This startled me; it was like seeing a black-and-white movie rendered into brilliant Technicolor. It changes so much, nearly everything.

So who were these people who processed with palms into Jerusalem, who marched with defiance into the Holy City so long ago?

Once you start asking that question, Matthew readily supplies the answer: they were not the clergy, like me, the religious leaders who worried about proper piety and strict observance of religious standards; nope, they weren’t marching.

Neither were the wealthy merchants who worried about disrupting the business cycle and shrinking their profit margins. In the very next story, Matthew shows us the moneychangers who stayed in the temple; they weren’t marching.

The Romans were certainly not out there, not the soldiers or the imperial officials; they were worried about a riot and disturbing the peace.

All of these—or at least most of them—audienced themselves that day; they chose the sidelines; they decided to be bystanders, simply to “stand by” as the parade passed by.

Well, then, who exactly were these people who marched so audaciously with Jesus into Jerusalem?

Mathew’s pretty clear about this throughout his whole account of the Gospel: the marchers were most certainly the poor—or to be clearer, the ones with nothing left to lose. They ripped palms off the trees and tossed them in front of Jesus like a party had just come to town. And the working classes and day-laborers were out there with them; not today’s electricians or plumbers but the stable cleaners and fishnet-menders. Let’s not forget the prostitutes and sex workers (all those “dirty” people), and probably a good number of tax collectors, who usually didn’t have any friends—these were the ones shouting Hosanna!

“Save us!” they cried, as Jesus rode a donkey into the Holy City, as if he were a king.

These were the ones who had come with Jesus from Galilee, the ones who had shared meals with him (even though they weren’t supposed to); the ones who got into boats with him and sat on hillsides with him while he broke bread and multiplied fish and had finally found their place, with him.

Hosanna!

These parade-goers were the “outside agitators,” the trouble-makers who had nothing to lose if the empire fell, or the system collapsed, or the banks crashed; to the contrary, they had everything to gain from the coming Kingdom of God—and they had already tasted it around tables of shared meals.

Hosanna!

As I think back on every congregation I have been in over the years, including the one I am now privileged to serve as rector, all of us have quite a lot to lose; it’s unlikely any of us would have been in that parade. And this isn’t accidental.

There are powerful forces in this world—imperial, corporate, moneyed—forces that will not relent in trying to “audience” us, to make us passive, acquiescent, and comfortable. That’s how they make profits and secure their power—it really is as crude as that, and it always has been, which is why the Palm Sunday narrative is a classic.

I am now plagued by another question: who am I in the Gospel story? Or more importantly, who do I want to be? (Just being able to ask such questions is itself a pricey privilege.)

As most Christians around the world enter our holiest of weeks, do we want to be mere bystanders—audienced—in the Gospel? Or, do we want to be “discipled”?

To live the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to follow a road toward the Cross, not merely to watch from the curb. It’s not an easy road to travel, not at all (even though it’s carved by an unimaginable grace). We can’t take very much with us on this road and we have to leave a lot behind; it’s pretty scary.

And I’ve come to see (far too slowly over the years) that the only way to travel this road is to do so with others, with companions—a lovely word that refers to those with whom we break bread.

Of all weeks, this one just now beginning is the time to resist that worn-out and utterly toxic supposition of modern Western society that we must always fend for ourselves, buck up and undertake arduous journeys on our own strength.

Traveling with others not only—as the old cliché has it—makes the burden lighter, it’s also how we learn why love is worth the truly hard work and also just how much we’re willing to risk for it (the answer is everything).

Yes, this road to the Cross is a hard one, and it’s scary. This also is true: it’s the only road that leads to Easter.

So let’s walk it together.

Follow the Jackass

I never thought much about donkeys growing up. I mean, why would I? It’s not like I saw many—or any—in the western suburbs of Chicago. But I did think a lot about horses; they were in all my storybooks about heroes and adventures. Horses seemed quite obviously more noble than donkeys.

There are some cultural reasons for these biases: Donkeys are usually the butt of jokes, they provide a convenient stand-in for the outsider, or the underachiever, or simply the useful nuisance we keep around to do the stuff we don’t want to do ourselves.

Let’s not forget the MTV Television series called “Jackass” and the ridiculous movie spinoffs it generated (I may have seen one). Those movies were about stupid humans, but the film’s title betrays the deeper human disdain toward the lowly donkey—the jackass.

Today there are roughly 40 million donkeys in the world and the vast majority of them—more than 90%—are found in rural societies and serve as pack animals, for transportation, and in roles of agricultural labor. Working donkeys are most often associated with those living in poverty, rarely ever with the wealthy or the powerful.

Every year on Palm Sunday we celebrate a “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem as if a hero had mounted a white horse to ride into our lives and save the day. But that is not the story that launches us into the Christian Holy Week.

The donkey, all on his own, makes perfectly clear that Jesus is not a military commander, nor a rival of the Roman Emperor or even the provincial Governor. So why were the crowds cheering his arrival? Let’s be clear: they were not mocking him but cheering him.

It has taken a very long time for me to let go of the “triumph” of Palm Sunday and appreciate what the donkey teaches (I wish so desperately to know that dear creature’s name). Here’s the lesson I need to learn: Jesus on a donkey is an image of God’s deep solidarity—with the laboring classes, with the downtrodden and forgotten, with those oppressed by Empire.

More specifically for our own day, that image signals God’s solidarity with migrant farmworkers; with women of color who are single mothers working two full-time jobs; with the indigenous people of this land who are still unable to find justice with our own government.

Those are the ones lining the streets of Jerusalem and cheering the arrival of Jesus on a donkey. Perhaps, they think, just maybe, God has not forgotten them, maybe (hope beyond hope) God is standing with them.

But there’s still more to say about this story: God is also in solidarity with the donkey. After all, this beast of burden plays a starring role in this opening chapter of what we Christians call the holiest of weeks.

A donkey leads us into Holy Week!

So after we shout our “Hosannas!” it’s time to follow the Jackass into new life.

What might that look like?

Let’s start modestly. Let’s remember that this so-called “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem features a city whose holiness is shared by at least three of the world’s great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The calendar this year all but begs reflection on those religious intersections. Even as Christians enter Holy Week, Muslims have already begun observing the holy month of Ramadan, and Passover begins this Friday—Good Friday.

While religious folks pray for peace in the world—and rightly so, and especially right now for Ukraine—religious folks have our own peace to make with each other. We need to work for peace with other Christians, with our Jewish neighbors, and with Muslims all around the world.

It matters that Jesus entered Jerusalem, that Holy City, not on a warhorse or as a general leading armies or in the garments of victory, but on the back of a donkey.

It’s long past time for us Christians to stop referring to this moment as “The Triumphal Entry”; this story should be called the “Parade of Solidarity.”

Poet Sylvia Sands writes so beautifully about this, about Jesus riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. All over the world, she writes, donkeys are beaten, starved, tortured, and worked until they drop.

And Jesus chooses that creature to accompany him on his entry into Jerusalem, to lead the “Parade of Solidarity.”

This is how our Christian holy week begins, not in triumph, not even with a whispered hint of domination or any kind of “victory” but rather with the lowly, humble, usually disdained little donkey plodding his path into an ancient city.

The Church has mostly forgotten this but queerly retains it in our lectionary texts and calendar images: the holiest of weeks marks a path of new life for us, if only we would follow the jackass.

Another poet, Steve Garnaas-Holmes, prays in precisely that direction: “O God, give me courage to follow the Foolish way, / to go the way the world discourages, / the way of love.

“May Jesus,” he writes, “riding into a set-up / on his little donkey, lead me.”

The donkey is leading Jesus where we must follow if we wish to live. It’s where God desires to be in communion with us, where God is always already in solidarity with us and with the whole of God’s creation.

Those are lofty ideas and rather far removed from how most of us live day-to-day—but not so for the donkey.

Sylvia Sands poetically imagines that one, first-century donkey being so grateful for that one man’s gentle touch on his reins; and for that one man’s sweet voice on the road; and for that one man’s improbable invitation to join him in the work of redeeming love.

We are invited to that same work of love, to travel along that same road, and to take our lead from a donkey.

The Squeaky Gate: Holy Week and Social Transformation

“Cosmo, you’re gonna die.”

That’s one of my favorite lines from the film “Moonstruck.” The line comes from Olympia Dukakis’ character, Rose. She says it to her husband, who has been seeing another woman. Cosmo quite sensibly replies, “Thank you, Rose.”

Left unaddressed in that great exchange is whether there might be anything worth dying for, or whether it matters if there is, and how it might make a difference, to anyone.

Those are some of the profound themes of this “holy week” that Christians in the West are living through just now. The Internet machine is abuzz with images for this week, ranging from the traditional to the kitschy, while clergy scramble to find ever better ways to tell that familiar story (in more worship services than they usually care to count).

In a high-tech, globalized world of smart phones and Google glasses, the story of this week can seem not only familiar but a bit quaint if not worn-out and tired. Returning to this story year after year feels a bit like the cattle gate I encounter in the regional park every day with my Australian shepherd dog, Tyler. When I unlatch it and swing it open, the hinges squeak…loudly.

Tyler looks up at that latch every time as if the sound annoys him. The story we Christians tell in this holy week can seem just as old and squeaky.

But there’s more than one way to tell that story, and the wonderful sermon I heard two days ago on Palm Sunday reminded me of just one of those ways. The preacher, Christine Haider-Winnett, is also the co-president of the Women’s Ordination Conference, an organization founded in 1975 to advocate for the full inclusion of women in the Roman Catholic Church (watch Christine talk about her work on HuffingtonPost Live).

Christine invited us to see the so-called “triumphal entry” of Jesus into Jerusalem as a protest march, an uprising against the imperial power of Rome. In contrast to the parades of soldiers on horses with spears and swords, Jesus rides in on a donkey with palm fronds. She reminded me, in other words, of where to look for God this week – in movements of resistance to institutional and state power.

As the Supreme Court of the United States hears two cases this week on marriage equality, Christine helped me find traces of that first century uprising in the rallies for justice taking place throughout the country. (My friend and colleague Susan Russell wrote about this very thing.)

But Christine reminded me of something else as well: my own privilege as a man who can be ordained in my church and who also enjoys the comforts of an upper-middle class lifestyle. The institutional power of the Church and the imperial power of the U.S. have treated me pretty well indeed.

The squeaky old story we Christians tell this week invites me to walk beyond the gates of my privilege. They invite me to walk not just with Jesus but with all those with whom Jesus would walk today – and that’s a long list.

If the palms from this past Sunday can serve as signs of resistance to empire, the cross this Friday reminds us of the cost of that resistance. Telling the story that way requires courage, something I can rarely muster on my own. That’s why I’ll be gathering with others this week. I need to hear the old story told in multiple ways and I need help in figuring how to live because of it.

Like Cosmo, we’re all going to die. So this week urges me to live a life that matters, and that could well come with a hefty price tag. That’s why this coming Sunday matters, too. Love-making and justice-work are never wasted efforts. As Christians will declare on Easter, love will always have the last word, which will also become the first word for new life.

I actually like that squeaky gate in the regional park, even if Tyler finds it annoying. Beyond it I see green pastures and clustered trees full of birds and creek-lined gullies. This week I hear the voice of God in that squeak: walk this ancient path; cross through the gate; I’ll go with you.

When I say something like that to Tyler, he’s always glad he listened.

Holy Fools for a Holy Week

Carrying his cross on the way to his death, Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me but weep for yourselves and for your children” (Luke 23:28). Indeed.

I’m sure Trayvon Martin’s mother has been weeping of late (read more). So has the mother of Dalton Lee Walker, a twelve-year old boy who took his own life a few days ago because of bullying, and on the very same day the documentary film Bullying opened nationwide (read more about that here). If she could, Shaima al Awadi would be weeping, not only for herself but for her four children. But she can’t. She was beaten to death in her San Diego home with something like a tire iron this past week. Why? She’s Iraqi and Muslim (read more here).

I’ve been reflecting this Lent on the powerful and poisonous confluence of male privilege and white supremacy – what it looks like, its effects, and what it will take to dismantle it for the full thriving of women and therefore also of the planet.

Now that we have arrived to Holy Week, I believe those reflections have been rather foolish. Isn’t it just a fool’s errand to dismantle centuries of white male privilege? Yes, it is. And I am happily a fool to try.

Palm Sunday this year, the beginning of Holy Week, is also April Fools’ Day. What a great coincidence for reflecting on the absurdity of marking with elaborate rituals these ancient, first-century stories – as if they mattered, is if they still speak today, as if they might actually change the world.

I think the best way to journey through this holy week is to don a jester’s cap and embrace the foolishness of the whole thing. Here let me offer two reasons why.

1. Religion is always vulnerable to being co-opted by empire.

In some ways, this is obvious, but far too often, not obvious enough. First century Palestine was an occupied province of the Roman Empire. Those political dynamics are reverberating throughout the gospel texts in ways most readers usually don’t notice.

I worry, for example, that talking about the “triumphal entry” of Jesus into Jerusalem (as most Christians do on Palm Sunday) is terribly misleading. I was reminded recently that on the Jewish feast of Passover, the Romans typically staged a military parade in Jerusalem to underscore their control and power. A leading military figure would ride at the head of the parade on a horse followed by the armored might of centurions and soldiers. (Read this provocative and insightful post about all this here.)

Put the story of Jesus into that context: He climbs on to a donkey, not a horse, and basically waddles into the city, not followed by soldiers but by the people. This is a moment of deep political mockery worthy of a 1990s-style ACT UP protest. The donkey didn’t even belong to Jesus – he had to borrow it. And the only armor his followers had were the branches of palm trees.

If ever there was a biblical precedent for April Fools’ Day, this is it. Jesus was making a profound joke, but with a point: Don’t take Rome so damned seriously.

Of course, and to put it mildly, one mocks imperial power at one’s own peril, especially when the very next thing you do is wreak havoc in the local IRS office, which is exactly what Jesus did with those money-changers’ tables in the temple – the prime location for religion’s co-optation by empire.

Now here’s something interesting: early Christians took this resistance to empire as an essential part of their faith. Just one example comes from a remarkable critique of the Roman household. Some early Christian writers critiqued the hierarchical ordering of the Roman household, which should be a microcosm of the Church, as the body of Christ, not the empire. (I blogged about this recently; read more here.)

This was an amazing leap forward for the liberation of women in the midst of a deeply patriarchal society – and not surprisingly, Rome did not look kindly on disrupting the configuration of the imperial household. Empires never look kindly on such things – not then, and not today.

Sadly, that kind of religious critique nearly disappeared in the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the empire.

So as we walk through Holy Week, we would do well to note that the State will always rely on religion to support its imperial power. At the very least, to follow Jesus into Jerusalem means that we must not remain silent about what happened to Trayvon Martin, Shaima al Awadi, and Dalton Lee Walker.

2. The Cross is Foolish

Let me count the ways. St. Paul, no less, wrote that the cross of Christ is just foolish, a stumbling block, silly – and therefore the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). I won’t pretend to know what Paul really meant by that or to understand it. But there’s a huge elephant sitting in most “liberal” or “progressive” Christian living rooms – the doctrine of atonement. And that doctrine is lurking around every corner of the rites and stories of Holy Week.

I read recently that one of the key reasons why younger generations stay away from Christian churches is the trouble they have with that doctrine. I have trouble with it, too! But I’m troubled mostly by how just one view of it has dominated American culture. Especially during this week, I think it’s important to remember that there is not just one such doctrine of atonement in Christian history or even in the Bible; there are many. And there are also many other ways to reflect on the significance of the Cross quite apart from notions of atonement.

That said, I believe reflecting on judgment, atonement, and forgiveness is essential for our 21^st century life, but those topics have been so twisted and distorted as to make that task nearly impossible. Let’s set that aside for a moment and consider something equally foolish.

I find it helpful to think about Jesus in this holy week as the radical companion. In that way I believe Jesus reveals something truly astonishing about God – the God of solidarity.

If you want to find God you could, of course, look anywhere, but you might want especially to look among the poor, the misplaced, the homeless, the suffering, and the grieving. You might especially look among all the victims of imperial power. That’s how I read the Bible.

Earlier in Luke’s gospel, in the Transfiguration story, the disciples of Jesus are discussing the “departure” that Jesus must undergo in Jerusalem. That word translated from the Greek as “departure” is εξοδον. That’s the very same word that Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible used to refer to the exodus of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt – yet another empire. I cannot believe this is just a linguistic coincidence.

Remember, Moses fled Egypt only to return in a decision to engage in radical solidarity with his people, to set them free. Here I believe Luke is inviting us to see in Moses and now also in Jesus that the same passion for solidarity belongs first and foremost to God.

Jesus models this with the choice he made about his own life. He could have, for example, chosen the path of a Levitical warrior to liberate his people by force from Roman occupation. I say “Levitical” warrior because the culture of tribal warfare from which that biblical book arose was constructed on an economics of patriarchal masculinity in which topping one’s enemies – with violence, if necessary – demonstrated covenantal faithfulness.

But Jesus chose instead to follow the path articulated by the prophet Isaiah. In that book, the Levitical warrior becomes the “suffering servant,” and rather than topping one’s enemies, that servant leads all the nations instead to God’s holy mountain where they learn war no more and beat their swords into ploughshares (Isaiah 2:4).

Indeed, Luke has Jesus quote not from Leviticus but from Isaiah at the beginning of his ministry: “God has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom for the oppressed” (Luke 4:18-19).

Both Moses and Jesus chose the path of radical solidarity, not for the sake of suffering but for the sake of freedom. The God who enters our struggle with us does so to lead us out – from death to life.

I believe that’s exactly what Luke’s Jesus meant when he said this incredibly foolish thing: “Take up your cross daily and follow me.” If we live for ourselves alone, we will die; if we live in solidarity with others, especially the vulnerable, the poor, the fearful, the oppressed, and the suffering, we will live – both in this life and the life to come.

That’s the remarkable path Jesus blazed for us to follow – surely for the sake of Trayvon, Shaima, and Dalton Lee, among so many others.

But do note: That path is costly. It comes with great risk. It is thoroughly foolish, not least because we will have to give up much to do it. But if we do, that path leads to unimaginable life.

May this week change all us so that we can, with God’s amazing grace, change the world. I know. That’s just foolishness…..and thank God for it.