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Palm Sunday 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

Not one, but “two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in year 30 AD,…the beginning of the week of the Passover, the most sacred week of the Jewish year….One was a peasant procession (accompanying Jesus), (and) the other (was) an imperial procession (led by Pontius Pilate).”

This is part of the opening paragraph in a new book by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan entitled The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week in Jerusalem. In it, the authors describe the two processions into Jerusalem and invite us to see the crucifixion of Jesus as an almost inexorable outcome of the conflict between the two.

So let’s look at each as a way to understand and reflect on the conflict that leads us to the crucifixion story we just read aloud together and sets the tone for our entry into the mystery of Holy Week.

First: the imperial procession of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea and Samaria.

This is how Borg and Crossan describe it: “Cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. The (sound of marching) feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums, the swirling of dust.”

This procession was nothing new. Each year the Roman governor of the Judea and Samaria came to Jerusalem during the time of the Jewish Passover, not out of reverence for the sacred festivals of the Jewish people, but in order to maintain order by the use of force if necessary. For the feast of the Passover was the time when the city was packed with Jewish people. But it wasn’t just the numbers that caused the Romans worry, it was the nature of Passover itself as a feast commemorating Jewish liberation from their overlords in Egypt.

And so the procession of Pontius Pilate into Jerusalem was all about keeping Roman order in a situation that could easily get out of control.

But what was this order all about? What was the Roman system that Pontius Pilate and his men were guarding? As Borg and Crossan point out, what I’m going to describe here was not only true of Roman society but of most ancient societies. In a sense, then, it describes what tended to be a normal political, social and religious system.

So what was this Roman system about?

  • First, it was about political oppression, societies in which the few, the wealthy and the elite ruled the many, in which ordinary people had no status and no voice in shaping society.
  • Second, it was about economic exploitation. This was a system in which a high percentage of society’s wealth went to the coffers of the wealthy and the powerful. This happened through the systems themselves—the way land ownership, taxation, and indenture of labor through debt were structured.
  • And, finally, the Roman system was about religious legitimation. The twin systems of political oppression and economic exploitation were justified through religion, itself—through the language of the divine right of kings, through the claim that the emperor was the son of God, through the implication that the system itself was instituted and maintained by the gods.

The ready use of force to guard a system of political oppression and economic exploitation that was legitimized by religion: this was what Pilate’s procession was all about

And so what of the procession of Jesus, the one we reenacted at the beginning of our liturgy this morning?

According to the accounts in the gospels—it was not a spontaneous outpouring of affection for Jesus, it was a planned procession. Jesus, we hear, tells two of his disciples to go to the next village to get a colt they will find there, a young one, one that has never been ridden. Jesus rides this colt down the Mount of Olives to the city surrounded by a crowd of enthusiastic supporters who spread their cloaks and strew leafy branches on the ground, shouting “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming.”

All of this is intentionally to echo the words of the prophet Zechariah in the Jewish Bible who said that a new king would be come into Jerusalem “humble and riding on a colt.” This king, Zechariah said would “cut off the chariot…and the battle bow, bringing “peace to the nations.”

And so Jesus’ procession deliberately countered the procession on the other side of the city. That’s because it assumed and expressed an alternative vision to Pilate’s imperial system. Jesus’ came to proclaim the breaking in of the kingdom of God in the here and the now.

And what was this kingdom? This kingdom was a place where people were invited to live as if God, not the emperor, reigned. In the kingdom,

  • First, relationship with God superceded everything, including all the claims of any political and economic system.
  • Second, all people were of equal worth. Peasants were equal to the elite and all belonged at the table together. Jesus’s table fellowship with tax collectors and sinners was meant to express this.
  • And, finally, the kingdom of God was a kingdom of non-violence, a kingdom that did not resort to the use of force even in the face of force.

These three things: the authority of God over political and economic systems, the worth of all human beings and the ethic of non violence—these were what Jesus and his procession brought with them into Jerusalem on that day.

When asked how he created an exciting story, the spy novelist John LeCarre said, "You take one character, you take another character and you put them into collision, and the collision arrives because (of how different they are). (That’s how you) begin to get the essence of drama. The cat sat on the mat is not a story; the cat sat on the dog's mat is

the beginning of a story."

Palm Sunday is the beginning of a story and a drama that is all about the collision of opposites. a collision that leads to the execution of Jesus at the hands of those whose job it was to guard the political, economic and religious system of the time.

This collision is something we have known and experienced in our own lives.

This collision is something we have known and experienced within ourselves.

And so as we stand at the beginning of Holy Week, as we stand at the gates of Jerusalem already knowing what will happen, we must ask ourselves:

  • What procession are we in?
  • What procession do we want to be in?
  • What journey are we on?
  • What journey do we want to be on?

Almighty God, whose most dear son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Works Consulted or Cited

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The Last Week: A Day-by Day Account of Jesus’s Last Week in Jerusalem

Kenneth Leech’s We Preach Christ Crucified

John LeCarre as quoted by Garrison Keilor in The Writer’s Almanac, the week of October 15, 2001

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