Palm Sunday begins Holy Week as Christians commemorate Jesus entering Jerusalem in a sacred paradox – celebrated as a prophet, only to be slain days later as a victim of state execution.
As the U.S. confronts imperial domination schemes, we would do well to recall that Christ did not merely ride the donkey as a harmless, apolitical sage of peace. In Luke’s gospel account, Jesus overturns the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple immediately following the triumphal entry – forcefully condemning those who would conflate profit with holiness.
Later in Luke, Jesus boldly declares, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 49:49).
Christ’s charge to set the world on fire with liberartory love applies equally today as we oppose contemporary systems of domination – colonization, white supremacy, queer erasure, genocide in Palestine, or mounting fascism in our own nation.
Our times demand courage, even amidst profound uncertainty. Only by drinking the cup Christ accepted, of joy mingled with pain, sorrow, and the prospect of death, can we hope to transform the world in his stead.
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Holy Week (2020)
• Palm Sunday: “A Planned Political Demonstration”
• Adan Eriksen on the “Subversive Politics of Palm Sunday”
• Palm Sunday at the Chancery
• The Most Dangerous Kind of Rebel
• The Passion of Christ: Jesus Enters the City
• The Passion of Christ: Jesus Drives Out the Money Changers
• The “Incident” in the Temple
• Pasolini’s “Wrathful Christ”
• Jesus and Social Revolution – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
• Jesus: The Upside-down Messiah
• Why Jesus is My Man
• Prayer of the Week – April 17, 2011
• Palm Sunday Around the World (2007)
Image: The Lumo Project.
1 comment:
And Jesus equally disappointed* the Zealots and their ilk who expected a Messiah who would overturn the Roman and local political establishments and establish a world-based regime to replace them. Jesus's mission was qualitatively and quantitatively apart from any worldly paradigm, including proto-Marxist paradigms avant le lettre.
* Disappointment from expectations, and expectations are premeditated resentments, and resentment is never of God. Expectations are a byproduct of worldly optimism, rather than Hope, which is orthogonal to Optimism. Optimistic people develop plans and work from paradigms - a lot of if-this-then-that worldview; Hope-ful people not so much, as they are more aware of the role of randomness in the worlds, and that God's mission is mercy, not fairness (God's mercy is decidedly not fair in worldly terms; Jesus tried to (metaphorically) beat that into the heads of his disciples, but they resisted until they understood they were the first beneficiaries of that mercy.)
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