Sermon 04.13.2025: Palm Sunday: Protest is an Act of Faith

As Jesus enters Jerusalem, he is greeted by raucous crowds. It is a celebration of him. It is also a counter protest to Rome. The crowds have gathered and are crying out "hosanna", which means "save us". 

Save us from injustice. Save us from cruelty. Save us from crushing poverty. 

Jesus does not silence the crowds. And he responds to their cries by weeping over Jerusalem and by turning over tables in the Temple.



Scripture

Luke 19:29-48

When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’” So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They said, “The Lord needs it.” Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.” Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.” Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.

Sermon

We’re told a multitude of disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice, as Jesus entered Jerusalem on a colt. They cry out, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”. 

They are quoting Psalm 118. 

But the connections in the two texts goes much deeper. These texts are each subversive in their own way. They use perfectly acceptable behavior in ways that turn the status quo on its ear. 

Perhaps this is language we’ve grown up hearing, so it doesn’t feel particularly subversive to us. But gods in antiquity were detached, angry, fearsome, and stern. Gods were not described as either being “good” or as being full of “steadfast love.” The Hebrew root of “steadfast love”, or “hesed”, is the word for a mother’s womb. The powerful love that gives and nurtures life. 

So, by describing God’s love as good, nurturing, steadfast, and eternal, the Psalmist is making a radical claim. And even if we might be familiar with his language choices, don’t think the claim isn’t still radical today. We live in a world where people, even people in this very room, live as if they are unloved or unlovable. Or we live as if we believe that God is out there, just waiting to judge and condemn us. 

Friends, hear the good news in Psalm 118. “O give thanks to the Lord, for God is GOOD; Gods steadfast LOVE endures FOREVER!” 

And the Psalmist doesn’t just leave us with that claim. The psalmist reminds his listeners that God has saved in the past and then turns to the future, making claims and requests of God. “Save us, we beseech you, O Lord!” In this psalm, thanks and praise and cries for help are all mixed together in the same breath. 

Out of my distress I called on the Lord;

the Lord answered me and set me in a broad place.

With the Lord on my side I do not fear.

What can mortals do to me?

The Lord is on my side to help me;

I shall look in triumph on those who hate me.

It is better to take refuge in the Lord

than to put confidence in mortals.

It is better to take refuge in the Lord

than to put confidence in princes.

This psalm is often sung at Passover, when the Hebrew people remember the formative events of the Exodus story. And the act of remembering the past is not just to remember the ‘good ol’ days.’ 

We remember the past to create a new and better future. 

Remembering subverts the world of death and pain in which we often find ourselves by insisting that the God to whom we give our praise and thanks is not done with creation. 

God has provided help for God’s people in the past. And God is the God whose steadfast love endures forever. So, we’re called to remember as an act of faith for a future in which God will deliver and save again. 

So, when Luke’s audience heard the account of the entry into Jerusalem, “blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”, they would have heard the connection to Psalm 118. 

By quoting Psalm 118, Luke is making a claim about how God is acting through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “O give thanks to the Lord, for God is good; God’s steadfast love endures forever.” This entry into Jerusalem, this beginning of our most Holy Week, is bathed in the language of God’s saving, steadfast love that endures forever. 

Luke takes the subversive Psalm 118 and runs with it. He gives us a lot of details about how Jesus orchestrated this event. Why do we care where the colt came from? We care about it because it shows that Jesus planned this entry with great detail. This was not a spontaneous moment in Jesus’ life. 

Every year, the Roman governor of Judea would ride up to Jerusalem from his coastal residence in the west to be in the city for Passover—the Jewish festival that swelled Jerusalem’s population from its usual 50,000 to at least 200,000. The Roman governor would come to town during a celebration of Liberation with a visible reminder of his military might and power, to make sure nobody got any actual liberating ideas while they celebrated the liberating holiday of Passover. Roman governors did not want their occupied citizens remembering the past in order to make a better future.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan describe it this way in their book, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Last Days in Jerusalem: 

“A visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot solders, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.” 

Additionally, tradition claimed that the Messiah would enter into Jerusalem for the final battle for salvation from the Mount of Olives, at the other end of town from the Roman governor. So Jesus begins his “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. But rather than entering on a horse, as the governor was doing on the other side of town, or surrounded by an army, as the governor was, Jesus enters on a colt, surrounded by children and disciples. 

Jesus takes all of the traditions of kingship, of messianic deliverance, and honor and turns them upside down, an act of civil protest. 

The crowds spread out their cloaks. They run ahead and follow behind, shouting, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” And since they are talking about Jesus as the king, and not the Roman Caesar, their words are treasonous, calling for an overthrow of an immoral regime. 

The Pharisees try to get Jesus to silence the crowd with their treasonous claims. No doubt they feared the way the current administration would punish them for this act of speaking out. They didn’t want to be on a watch list of the Department of Justice. They didn’t want their funding to be cut. We understand the Pharisees because we see it playing out today in our own country as universities, businesses, and law firms try to stay on the good side of a government that is supposed to be for all of us. 

Jesus’ entry on a colt unmasks the charade of power the governor is enacting across town that would tell us that political might and wealth will have the final say. 

We know how the story will play out for Jesus. Unlike the crowds, caught up in seeing Jesus through their preconceptions and their hopes he would overthrow Rome, we know that he entered the gates of the city to suffer. We know that he entered the gates to die.

And just as we are called to believe that God’s steadfast love endures forever, so are we called to believe that we are to follow Jesus through the gates of the city. We enter with him into his radical claim that God is not yet done with this world. 

We remember the past actions in order to re-member the future. 

We claim that the suffering and death of this world do not win, even if that’s what we see around us. 

We claim the powers and principalities of this world do not win, even if they seem to be winning right now. 

It is God’s love that endures forever, even beyond death on a cross. It is God’s love that triumphs. 

So, we enter the gates of the city with Jesus. 

We find concrete actions that show the world that their preconceptions are wrong. 

We stand up for the downtrodden. 

We have solidarity with the outcast. 

We give our voice to those whose voices are being silenced.

We invite people to join us in love, rather than out of fear. 

We care for our environment and our earth as if stewardship is different than domination.

We show the world we help ourselves by helping others. 

We protest, with our lives and our bodies. 

Many of us have attended protests in this country, in support of or in opposition to whoever is in power, in support of causes that matter to us, in opposition to larger societal harms. 

I’ve been thinking about the contrast between how the governor and Jesus entered the gates of the city, and it has me noticing the contrasts in how followers of Jesus often enter the gates today. 

To be clear, none of us, as followers of Christ, perfectly live into our call to follow where Jesus leads us. I want to own my own failure in this regard as we consider this. And I recognize it is a fine line between protesting unjust situations and disrupting legal events. How we navigate that line is worth conversation. Jesus’ protest was a peaceful one, not a January 6 style mob. 

But Palm Sunday was protest. It was intended to be a contrast between the power of Rome and the power of God. It was intended to remind people of the liberating power of God that was celebrated in Passover, as they remembered liberation from slavery in Egypt in the time of Moses. If God could defeat Pharaoh back then, surely God could defeat Caesar right now. 

And if you aren’t sure Jesus would do something so political as protest, I will remind us of what Jesus does after the parade. He looks out at the beautiful city, and he weeps and then he rages. 

Jesus cries out, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes… Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there.'

Jesus looks at Jerusalem, and her particular political problems—Roman occupation, poverty, an unjust tax system, etc.—and first weeps and then rages. He wants them to recognize the things that make for peace. But instead, they cheer for deeds of power. He wanted them to recognize the colt as an animal of peace, not war. He wants them to follow a God of love, but they have commercialized God’s house and are using it as a way to make profit. 

Jesus will protest Rome’s injustice. He’ll also protest the ways his own people seek to mirror Rome’s injustice. Jesus is not partisan. And we would do well to remember today that Jesus’ radical message is bigger than any political party’s platform. Jesus is not partisan, but he sure is political, because the lives of the people he loves and died to save are played out on a political stage. 

Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem marks the beginning of Holy Week. We will gather again on Friday night for Good Friday worship at 7pm. 

On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the innocent and blameless to protect their own status and power. We remember the past to create a new and better future. 

And then on Easter, we’ll gather again in celebration, because on the third day Jesus was raised from the dead, revealing not only human injustice but also unmasking the lie that might makes right. 

We still live in a country confused and distorted by power and greed. It did not begin at the inauguration in 2025. It has been a part of us all along. But when we see people turning against their neighbors, and capitulating to demands of a would be king, we see, again, the reason Jesus protested. 

When we see due process being erased, we see, again, the reason Jesus protested. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.

The current rhetoric is leading us to construct a modern false idol out of power and privilege. We protest against the idolatrous notion that we can ensure the safety of some by sacrificing the hopes of others. No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being, and we must seek the common good above all else. 

As a nation, we have always been struggling with which gates are the right ones for us to enter. 

Do we enter the gate with the parade of military war horses and political power? Or do we enter the gate, waving palm branches and praising God’s way of peace? 

The crowd that Luke describes was making a sacrificial claim. By cheering his triumphal entry from the Mount of Olives, by throwing cloaks on the ground as they cheer, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!”, the crowd is being treasonous to the Roman Empire. They were making a claim for God’s rule over Caesar’s rule. “Long live the king (of David!).” 

Through which gates will you enter? 

The way we choose to enter the gates of the city makes a claim about what we believe and who we choose to follow. 

This week, as we prepare for the celebration of Easter, let us ask God to help us set down our worry and despair so we can join in God’s protest. Let us ask God to help us live in confidence of God’s steadfast love that endures forever. Let us ask God to help us protest the injustice we see around us and speak clearly and peacefully against violent and dehumanizing rhetoric when those who would lead us try to lead us toward the wrong gate. 

Let us spend time in the biblical text, preparing our hearts and minds for the good news of Easter that only arrives through the suffering of the cross. 

Let us pray for the courage to enter through the gates of righteousness accompanying our Lord through the final days of his earthly life. 

Amen.