There is a resounding line from the Palm Sunday account of Jesus’ entry into all the commotion and conflict in Jerusalem that never gets silenced. As Luke presents it in chapter nineteen, the crowds, filled with factions, are going crazy. One of my favorite Palm Sunday hymns is called The Palms, composed by Jean-Baptista Faure, the famous French operatic baritone. My favorite lyrics are in the refrain:
Chorus:
Join all and sing His name declare,
Let ev'ry voice resound with acclamation,
Hosanna! Praised be the Lord!
Bless Him, who cometh to bring us salvation!
Indeed, in the beginning, the crowd’s oversized involvement was one of super-charged acclamation. People were high on generational expectations. Hosanna means “Save Us!” and it was their deliverance from their oppressed and poverty-stricken lives that they wanted and needed.
There were others watching the spectacle, however, who were not just suspicious but oppositional. No acclamations coming from them! They wanted the noise silenced and the political implications snuffed out. The line I like most from the nineteenth chapter of Luke is spoken by some in this group, and it is filled with poignancy:
39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” 40 He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”
41 As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it …
Jesus is saying: ‘There is no stopping this!
The Episcopal priest, Andrew Thayer, wrote a column last week for the New York Times. (April 13, 2025) It was titled Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession. Here is an excerpt from what he wrote:
On that first Palm Sunday, there was another procession entering Jerusalem. From the west came Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, riding a warhorse and flanked by armed soldiers bedecked in the full pageantry of an oppressive empire. Every year during Passover, a Jewish festival celebrating liberation from Egyptian oppression and slavery, Pilate entered Jerusalem to suppress any unrest set off by that memory.
His arrival wasn’t ceremonial; it was tactical — a calculated show of force, what the Pentagon might now call “shock and awe.” It displayed not only Rome’s power but also Rome’s theology. Caesar was not just the emperor; he was deified and called “Son of a God” on coins and inscriptions. His rule was absolute, and the peace it promised came through coercion, domination, and the threat of violence.
From the opposite direction, both literally and figuratively, came Jesus’ procession.
Jesus entered the city not on a warhorse but on a donkey, not with battalions but with beggars. His followers were peasants, fishermen, women, and children — people without standing or status. They waved palm branches — symbols of Jewish resistance to occupation since the Maccabean revolt — and cried out “Hosanna!” which means “Save us.” Save us from a system of oppression disguised as order. Save us from those who tacitly endorse greed with pious language and prayers.
Jesus’ procession should be seen as a parody of imperial power: a deliberate mockery of Roman spectacle and a prophetic enactment of a kingdom built not on violence but on justice.
The next day, Jesus walked into the Temple, the heart of Jerusalem’s religious and economic life, and flipped the tables in the marketplace, which he described as “a den of robbers.” The Temple wasn’t just a house of prayer. It was a financial engine, operated by complicit leaders under the constraints and demands of the occupying empire. Jesus shuts it down. This is what gets him killed.
Jesus wasn’t killed for preaching love, or healing the sick, or discussing theology routinely debated in the Temple’s courtyards, or blasphemy (the punishment for which was stoning). Rome didn’t crucify philosophers or miracle workers. Rome crucified insurrectionists. The sign nailed above his head — “King of the Jews” — was a political indictment and public warning. Like with the killing of the prophets before him, the message sent with Jesus’s death was that those who demand justice will inevitably find themselves crushed.
Sound familiar?
We, too, live in the shadow of the empire. Ours doesn’t speak Latin or wear togas, but its logic is familiar. Our economy prioritizes the 1 percent and puts corporate profits over worker dignity. Our laws enforce inequality in the criminal justice system, education, and health care. Our military-industrial complex would be the envy of Rome. We extract, exploit, incarcerate, and we call it “law and order.”
We are living in such a time as that. I cannot think of a time in all my years of ordained ministry when Holy Week forced upon us the abusive threat of power and wealth being used to enrich the few and abuse the many. Fortunately, our Holy Week observances, including our reenactments of entries into cities and our vocal demands for compassion and justice are not processions or parades but protest marches. The tables grifting the king’s bibles and the sale of angels and Waterford Chrystal crosses for a mere $1000 donation to some megachurch have been turned over. Unlike the week of long ago, Christians, of the white Christian nationalist brand, are in the White House trying to eliminate the constitutional principle of separation of church and state. They are being ‘called out,’ as we say these days. Across the country, protests are being called “a dollop of Hope amid Trump’s vandalism of the American project.” (Kristof, 4/16/2025) the Actual quote reads as follows:
America has periodically faced great national tests," he wrote. "The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street’
We needed a dollop of hope,
That dollop came in the expansive and prophetic protest marches during this season of Lent and Holy Week. “Hands Off,” “50501- 50 states, 50 cities-1 movement” are two of the most visible and successful. K. Granberg-Michaelson of Sojourners’ Magazine writes in this week’s SojoMail that Pontius Pilate used fear and blame to mask unjust actions — and there’s a lesson for us in that part of the resurrection story as Trump defies court orders:
For all the powerful moments in the story of the Passion, this year I can’t help thinking about the decisive role that the public — the crowd — plays in the story. On Palm Sunday, crowds meet Jesus’ entrance to Jerusalem with cries of Hosanna, meaning “Save us!” as they cried out for deliverance from the occupying regime of the Roman Empire.
Finally, David Brooks wrote a piece for the New York Times that puts forward a challenge. Under the title of What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal, he writes:
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
I would like to think that because of His resurrection, Jesus’ Easter people possess the necessary power.
On April 2, 2021, Esau McCaulley, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, penned and post a piece titled The Unsettling Power of Easter. He writes:
The four Gospels describe Jesus’ female followers going to his tomb on Easter morning, only to find it empty. They receive the news that Christ has risen from the dead. Each Gospel, at different points, comments on the fear that these women felt.
The Gospel of Mark’s account is especially striking to me. The earliest and most reliable manuscripts of Mark conclude with a description of the women as “trembling and bewildered.” Mark tells us that they “fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). That the story is known at all makes it clear that Mark believes the women eventually told Jesus’ disciples what they had seen. But what do we make of the fact that Mark ends his Gospel on the women’s fear and silence?
Mark’s ending points to a truth that often gets lost in the celebration: Easter is a frightening prospect. For the women, the only thing more terrifying than a world with Jesus dead was one in which he was alive. (On Good Friday, the women were forced to confront their profound grief and despair, a life without Jesus, but Easter? Easter called these women to return to the same world that crucified Jesus with a very dangerous gift: hope in the power of God, the unending reservoir of forgiveness and an abundance of love, the love thy neighbor kind of love, and the never ending, even consuming, responsibility of following Him again. I wonder when they first said not just, He Is Risen! but also, We Are Back On!
As I said previously, our ‘White House Christians’ are held up in the ‘palace,’ wearing their MAGA hats, cozying up to and colluding with power and wealth and plotting their next illegal assault against the protesters in the streets and worshippers in our churches. Trump was quoted the other day, after receiving permission to enter houses of worship, that he hoped for “one of the greatest Easters ever.” Huh? What does that even mean? Brooks is correct in saying, These are not normal times. They are filled with fear and anger and hostility. Yesterday, a prominent GOP senator confessed for herself and her colleagues; “We are all afraid! I am anxious about using my voice. Retaliation is real and that’s not right. Overcoming that fear and being a people of renewed faith courageously using their voices is how Easter shows its power. Although it may be true that the only thing more terrifying than a world with Jesus dead is one in which he is alive, it is also true that nothing is more triumphant than a world ‘saved’ by the Risen Christ and made better by those who follow him. We are called, as ‘followers of Jesus, the Risen Christ,’ to live unafraid of the threatened consequences of speaking truth to power, who advocate for the immigrant and the migrant, the refugee and the prisoner, and who will not capitulate to those who act with cruelty rather than compassion or who do what is wrong, illegal and unjust rather than what is lawful, right and just. We must be members of that coalition, of which Brooks speaks, and bring forth a rival power that not only confronts from the streets those in the palace but who openly and with limitless courage shows the world that they are a resurrection people, using their voices to say: “We’re back on!
David French wrote an inspiring column this morning, Easter morning, titled: To Embrace a Resurrection Faith, Choose a Love-Your-Neighbor Church. What a great idea! To embrace our resurrection faith, let us choose to be a love- your–neighbor people, whose aim, in the words of French, is to follow Christ’s consistent pattern of moving to the suffering, the alienated and the sick, all to bring life from death… This faith loves its enemies. It mends the broken heart. And it declares, by word and deed, that no one is too lost to experience the love of God.
Our Easter message is that our resurrection life and faith is back on!