How many of you in the past few years have read one of the four Gospels from start to finish? It’s not something most of us do regularly—even those of us with a more Christian-centric prayer life. We get the gospel stories in snippets, without full context, from the pulpit here on Sundays or maybe in a daily devotional or from Bible verses we see family members or acquaintances posting on their social media profiles. A parable here, a psalm there, a bit of one of Paul’s letters cherry picked to justify some political position. It’s easy to start to view the Bible as simply a collection of pithy quotes and bits of wisdom. When we aren’t reading books in their entirety, it’s easy to forget they have structure to them, that they are complete works and fit into various literary genres. And the Gospels aren’t merely a collection of Jesus’s sayings, they are narratives with action, motion, tension, and conflict. The gospel writers were especially adept story tellers.

Holy Week is the time in the church year when we remember this most clearly, for it is during this time that the narrative tension reaches its climax. Holy Week isn’t just a series of liturgical observances we trudge through until Easter. It is a full narrative arc, with every movement important to the totality of the story and it begins today, with the end of a journey and two parades that foreshadow the conflict still to come, between the death dealing forces of empire and the life-giving, life-sustaining kingdom of God. I have to credit Biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan and their excellent book, “The Last Week,” for a lot of the scholarship informing this sermon.

The setting is Jerusalem and the occasion is the sacred Jewish holiday of Passover, commemorating the Jewish people’s liberation from another oppressive power. In our Gospel stories, Jesus has been gathering disciples, mostly from among the peasant class, and healing and teaching as he makes his way towards Jerusalem. He’s been proclaiming a radical message, one deeply grounded in Jewish scripture and teaching, a message of non-violence and forgiveness, care for the poor and the stranger, and freedom from oppression. A message that is at odds with the Roman imperial ethic of the time. And we’ve been with Jesus and the disciples on this journey, with our sights set on Jerusalem. As we get closer, Jesus begins to foretell of the conflict that awaits when they reach their destination. “Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes…” he tells the Disciples in Mark.

So by the time we reach Jerusalem, the narrative tension has built. So, we know the procession into the city isn’t just a simple welcome party. We’re waiting for this showdown between powers and we get it. See, while Jesus is entering the city from the East, there is another procession entering from the West. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea and Samaria is entering Jerusalem in a military parade, on a war horse. This is a deliberate show of power over an oppressed people, it is a reminder to the Jewish population, at the beginning of Passover, that even though they might be celebrating their freedom from slavery in Egypt, they shouldn’t get any ideas about their current circumstances. They are under Roman imperial control and here’s a war horse to prove it.

So now we see our parade, the one happening on the east side of the city, in contrast to this military parade. And ours starts to look like something of a counter protest. A mockery of the kind of violent control and idolatry expressed by the Roman governor’s entrance. Jesus enters on a humble donkey. The peasants who have gathered for this parade lay their palms, these symbols of military victory, on the ground, paving the way for this very different entrance. They shout “Hosanna!” Save us and “Blessed is the King Who Comes in the Name of the Lord,” which would have been an insult and direct challenge to the understanding of the Roman Emperor as divine. This humble demonstration would have made the imperial march happening on the other side of the city look kind of ridiculous. I can imagine Jesus and his followers seeing the war horses and Roman guards in formation, meant to intimidate their Jewish subjects and wondering, in the words of Tracy K. Smith, “what else are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade.”

Palm Sunday is a powerful story of protest. There is a good reason why so many folks have made the direct connection this year between yesterday’s No Kings rally and Palm Sunday. Reverend Ann Golladay writes:

“To say “No Kings” is not simply to reject a person or a political figure. It is to reject a system that concentrates power in ways that dehumanize and diminish. It is to say: we refuse to be governed by fear, by hierarchy that crushes, by narratives that tell us we are powerless. It is, in its own way, a modern echo of *“We have no king but God”—*a phrase that, in the time of Jesus, carried its own complicated and subversive weight. But here’s where the parallel deepens: Jesus doesn’t replace one king with another in the way the world expects. He reframes power altogether. His “kingship” is revealed not in domination, but in service. Not in coercion, but in community. Not in violence, but in self-giving love. So when people take to the streets this weekend—marching, chanting, refusing—they are participating in a long tradition of embodied dissent. A tradition that, for Christians, is not peripheral to faith, but central to it.”

It’s an inspiring and compelling sentiment. And yet I confess to having been one of those people who says, “but protesting doesn’t really do anything. We’re not actually changing anything.” Sure, it might make us feel better, but it’s not actually effective. When every day brings more news alerts about war, injustice, violence, and threats to our democracy, it can be difficult to hold onto hope that things will change. We wonder why we even try. Our feeble attempts at resistance feel like a waste of time. Or we worry our hearts can’t take it if we get invested and then lose. We’d rather be apathetic than ineffective.

Which is why I need Palm Sunday more this year than ever. See, Matthew does something interesting with this story. Matthew, of all of the Gospels, is most situated in Judaism, so Matthew quotes Hebrew scriptures regularly. The passage we read on the Front Steps paints Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem as a fulfillment of the prophecy from Zachariah, which reads

Shout aloud, O daughter Zion!

Lo, your king comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey

But Matthew leaves out one line, Did anyone catch it? He leaves out the line about being triumphant and victorious. There is a parade, but there is no victory. At least not immediately, and at least not in the traditional understanding of the term. Matthew is telling us something so paradoxical, so upside down, so contrary to the understanding of the Romans 2,000 years ago and to us today. We don’t need to triumph for this revolutionary message to change the world.

The protest is not, by our usual standards of success, effective. We have this narrative tension, this dramatic build up to this show down between these two powers and then…our guys lose. At least at first. Jesus is crucified. His disciples scatter in fear and doubt and even deny their association with him.

And Jesus knew this was going to happen. He knew what awaited him in Jerusalem, and as we discussed earlier, he warned his disciples. Before entering the city, he tells them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him.” Peter tries to stop him from going and Jesus doesn’t say, “yeah, it might not be worth the risk, let’s come up with another strategy.” No, he says to Peter, “get behind me Satan!” He knows he’s going to die and he mounts the donkey and mocks the empire and rides into Jerusalem anyway, as those around him proclaim that a new kind of reign is already here..

Palm Sunday was not a protest that came after a strategy meeting with focus groups and message testing and polling about which speaker would most appeal to the Romans across the aisle. Palm Sunday is a protest that is planned knowing full well it won’t change a single thing. That it will in fact, end in death. Efficacy doesn’t enter into the picture. Palm Sunday was a protest born not of utility, but of deep faith and a belief that this message is worth proclaiming no matter what comes next. That this message is so powerful, so true and certain and everlasting that if the messengers are silenced the stones will shout out. Palm Sunday reminds us that faith isn’t only about what might be possible in the future, but what we already know to be true today: Blessed are the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the peacemakers, and those who thirst for righteousness. If we wait until we think the empire can be convinced of these truths before we proclaim them, we’re giving them far too much power.

There is a saying from both Islamic and Jewish tradition that I love. There are different variations but basically it goes, “If the Hour of Resurrection comes up, and one of you is holding a sapling, finish planting it.” It is sometimes apocryphally attributed to Martin Luther as, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” The idea being that a thing worth doing is worth doing for its own sake. That even in the face of certain death and destruction there is something good and holy about saying yes to life.

And that’s what we remember on Palm Sunday. Before we get to the promise of resurrection, we are asked to remember the courage, and audacity, and stubborn hope of throwing a victory parade while marching towards death. Poet Kathy Coffey writes of palm Sunday, “We know the end, yet we walk this way with song.” In his poem of faith and resistance, Wendell Berry writes, “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

We know Good Friday is coming. We are aware of the risks—of failure, betrayal, death. But today, on Palm Sunday, let us make a path of peace and justice anyway. Not because we know it will work, but because we know it is good and right and true. Let us proclaim joyfully and definitely that love conquers death, that the kingdom of heaven is here and we are choosing to live by a different kind of politics, to be governed by a different kind of power, rooted in non-violence, humility, and service. And when we find ourselves face to face with the seemingly undefeatable power of empire, with their weapons and their war horses, let us wonder, “what else Are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade.”

May it be so. Amen.