The Lesson of Palm
Sunday
April 17, 2025
Yesterday was Palm Sunday. On that Sunday, churches
everywhere acquire palm fronds. They wave them around. They may process with them.They
may shout “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” All of
this, of course, is based on the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. People
often call that entry “triumphal.” But it is also true that almost everyone
misunderstands the story of Jesus’ entry into that center of both religious and
political power in his world. They
misunderstand it because they misunderstand both the symbolism of Jesus
riding on a donkey and the meaning of the word the people in the story shout,
Hosanna. It’s high time Christians stop misunderstanding this important and
symbolic story.
I’ll start with the meaning of Hosanna. We usually take it to
be a synonym of Alleluia. We think it is a shout of praise or rejoicing. We
think the people shouting it are happy. Well, Hosanna is not a synonym of
Alleluia. Far from it. The word comes from Hebrew roots that mean “save us.” So
to understand this story, we must first understand that if the people shouting
Hosanna are happy, it’s only because they think Jesus has come to save them.
Which, of course raises this question: Save them from what?
Most American Christians would probably answer that question by saying that
they are calling on Jesus to save their souls after death. To get them to
heaven and allow them to avoid hell. Well, I can absolutely assure you that
that is not what the people in this story mean when they shout Hosanna to
Jesus.
We know that that is not what they’re calling on Jesus to do
for at least a couple of reasons. One is that the people doing the shouting are
all Jews, or at least most of them are. One of the distinct differences between
Judaism both then and now and Christianity after it became the state religion
of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE is that Judaism has never focused
on an afterlife. There is in the Old Testament something called Sheol or the
Pit, but it is neither heaven nor hell, and no one has a choice about ending up
there. It was just a sort of shadowy netherworld where souls were present but
were being neither rewarded nor punished.
Now, some Jews in Jesus time did believe in a sort of
afterlife, but it wasn’t at all like what most Christians mean when they say “life
after death.” The Pharisees, for example, about whom we hear so much negativity
in the New Testament, believed in a universal resurrection of the dead at the
end time. At the end of the world, when God comes to make things right, the
dead will rise and might well then be judged. But the consequence of the
judgment would not be getting to heaven or being damned to hell. A positive
judgment meant one got to live on with Yahweh, the Lord. A negative judgment
meant being cast out of Yahweh’s presence but not into hell, about which
Judaism has never had much of a concept. Yet not even that was what the people
shouting Hosanna meant.
We know that that is true because we know the circumstances
under which all of those people lived. They lived in a Jewish land that was
occupied and horribly oppressed by a Gentile conqueror, namely, the Roman
Empire. I once had a member of a church I was serving say that she thought that
it was a good thing for the Jews that they had been brought into the Roman
Empire. I don’t know how much thought she had given to that thought, though I
suspect it wasn’t much. In any event, she was wrong.
The Romans oppressed the Jewish people harshly. They did it
in at least a couple of ways. One was taxation. We hear about “tax collectors”
in the New Testament. The Apostle Matthew had been one. These tax collectors
were Jews who had signed on with the Romans to force the people to pay the
taxes the Romans had levied on them. The system worked this way. The tax
collector would pay to the Romans all of the taxes that were due from the area
to which he was assigned. Then the tax collector would set about forcing enough
money out of the people of that area to cover that expense and give the tax
collector a profit. The taxes thus collected were repressive at best. They kept
most Jews of Judea and Galilee dirt poor, living only at a subsistence level. The
Jews hate those taxes and the Romans who levied them. They hated the Jewish tax
collectors who coerced more money out of them than they could afford to give
(and more than they actually owed the Romans). The Roman system of taxation was
one reason why being occupied by Rome was definitely not a good thing for the
Jewish people.
Another was the fact that the Romans occupied their Jewish
lands with military force. Every Jew of Jesus’ time knew what a “legion” was.
It was a unit of the Roman army. The place was lousy with them. Or at least,
the governor in Judea and King Herod Agrippa of Galilee had lots of them available
if they needed them. And they needed them a lot. The Jews were restless under
the Romans. Time and again some charismatic leader would arise, claim to be the
long-expected Messiah, and set about trying to defeat the Romans by force. It
never worked, and Rome crucified any number of these would-be Messiahs.
There were popular uprisings against the Romans. Most
importantly for our purposes, the Romans always feared that there would be
other popular uprisings against them. They were especially on alert during
Passover. At Passover, the population of Jerusalem roughly tripled. Jews came
to Jerusalem from all over the place, both from the Jewish lands and from
abroad. They were there to celebrate the Passover. And the Passover celebrated,
and today still celebrates, the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in
Egypt. That story of the Exodus has functioned as an inspiration for enslaved
and otherwise oppressed people for at least 2,500 years. It was already ancient
in Jesus’ time. The occupying Romans surely thought that the crowd there to
celebrate the Passover might well try to liberate the Jews once again, this
time from Roman occupation.
So, at the Passover, Governor Pontius Pilate reacted. The
great Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan gives us an image of how he reacted.
He wasn’t usually present in Jerusalem. Rather, he hung out at the city of Caesarea
Maritima, a city the Romans had built over on the Mediterranean coast. But at Passover,
he came to Jerusalem; and he didn’t come alone. Crossan asks us to imagine
Jesus entering the city on one side riding on a humble donkey and Pilate
entering the city on the other side with great pomp and with the means of exerting
military force. With legions of the Roman army coming into the city with him. The
Jews never knew when Pilate might decide he needed to use them and order them
to attack even peaceful Jewish people. That is what the people wanted Jesus to
save them from. That’s why they shouted Hosanna at him.
They wanted Jesus to save them from the Romans. But the
thing is, they got Jesus all wrong. We see that they got him wrong in a couple
of places in the stories of Palm Sunday in the Gospels. In Matthew, the people
shout “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of
the Lord.” Matthew 20:9. Now, who was David? He was the second king of Israel.
Nine hundred or one thousand years before Jesus, he had used military might to
establish a Jewish kingdom that was as large as any Jewish kingdom would ever be
again. We see in Luke that the people thought of Jesus as coming as a such a
king. In this gospel the people shout: “Blessed is the king who comes in the
name of the Lord!” The people thought Jesus was a new King David. David created
his kingdom through military force. The people shouting Hosanna at Jesus quite
clearly thought that he was going to establish his kingdom by using force to
drive out the Romans.
Jesus, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing.
Yes, there is salvation in Jesus, but it isn’t salvation from earthly empires
through military force. Jesus was the world’s greatest prophet of nonviolence,
something the people calling him David and king apparently didn’t know, for
neither David nor most any other king has ever acted nonviolently. If Jesus was
any kind of king at all, and I don’t think that he was, we see the nature of
his kingship in how he enters Jerusalem.
Pilate may have been coming into the city mounted on a war
stallion or riding in a chariot pulled by a couple of them. He came with huge
military force clearly displayed. Jesus, on the other hand, rides in on a
donkey. A donkey is no war stallion. A donkey isn’t particularly powerful, at
least not in the same sense that a war horse is powerful. A donkey is humble. A
donkey is modest. Most importantly, a donkey is an animal used in peaceful
agricultural production. Used to help produce crops and deliver them to market.
To produce things that are beneficial for the people, not to wage war, which is
never beneficial for the people. And the people who saw him ride in on a donkey
didn’t get it.
Do we? The significance of Palm Sunday is that Jesus comes
offering the world, offering us, a different, a better way of living. A way
symbolized by a donkey not by some great Arabian steed. Yes, Arabian steeds are
magnificent, but we don’t have to use them to wage war. Here Pilate’s stallion,
whether he actually had one or not, is a symbol. A symbol of war. A symbol of
military force. And Jesus will have none of it. Instead, he chose to enact a
verse from the prophet Zechariah of a king coming to the people “humble and
riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” The text then says, “He
will cut off the chariot from Ephraim [Israel] and the war-horse from
Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to
the nations….” Zechariah 9:9-10. If Jesus comes as a king at all, which I don’t
think he does, he comes as a king of peace not a king of war.
We know that Jesus had no intention of being any kind of
worldly king. In the Gospel of Matthew, after he was baptized by John the Baptizer,
Jesus is tempted by Satan, called here “the tempter” and “the devil.” The third
temptation Satan places before Jesus is this: Satan shows Jesus “all the
kingdoms of the world and their splendor,” and he says he will give them all to
Jesus if Jesus will just worship Satan. Jesus rejects the offer. He quotes scripture
and says: “[I]t is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”
Matthew 4:8-9. If Jesus wanted to be a worldly king, here was his chance, and
he didn’t take it. Clearly, he had no intention of being any kind of worldly
king.[1]
So what is the lesson of Palm Sunday? It is that if Jesus is
any kind of savior, and he is, he isn’t the kind of savior neither the people
who shouted Hosanna at him nor most anyone ever since has wanted. He didn’t
come to use violence to accomplish anything. He rejected all violence. He
wouldn’t even let his followers use violence to try to save him from crucifixion.
Jesus is a Savior who says to us: Salvation does not come through violence.
Salvation comes through peace. Peace comes through the nonviolent use of
justice, love, mercy, forgiveness, and inclusiveness. So we can shout Hosanna
if we want. But if we do, let’s make sure we know what kind of salvation we’re
talking about.
[1]
There is perhaps another lesson in this story. To be a worldly king, you have
to worship Satan. All earthly kings worship Satan in one way or another. They
wage war. They execute opponents. The favor the rich over the poor. Earthly kings,
whether they have a royal or some other
title, almost invariably worship Satan. Jesus refused to be a king because to
be a king he, like nearly every king, had to worship the devil.
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