Why were the people so excited to celebrate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem?

After three years of ministry of healing, forgiveness, inclusion, and community building, I imagine people had fallen in love with Jesus. He fed thousands from next to nothing. Told those who felt ruined by life that they were indeed the blessed ones, that they were closest to God. The ones who felt excluded from community due to shame were told that they were welcomed in by the prodigally loving father. They were the lost lambs who God left everyone else to find. God’s celebration of these lost ones wasn’t despite their inadequacies and their lost-ness, but because of them.

In a world where might makes right, this is Good News. While we aren’t that different from the ancient world, they had a stronger belief than even us that we get what we deserve in the world. So, if we were arrested by the police or crucified by the Romans, we must have done something to earn it. If our child was born with a disability, we must have done something to deserve that “shame.” If we lost everything for some reason and became destitute, we got what we had coming.

As Jesus was doing his teaching of grace and forgiveness, he himself seemed to be immune from bad things. He challenged the power structures, flipped tables in the temple, and taught that he himself had discretion about how to live faithfully on the Sabbath. He declared multiple heretical “I am” statements. I am the true vine. I am the way and the life. I am the true bread of heaven. These were bold things he had been doing, yet nothing happened to him.

So, it’s understandable that people were not only grateful for his teaching, healing, and feeding of thousands, they were really coming to believe that he was truly the one they’ve been waiting for. He really was the Messiah, the one who was going to come and overthrow Rome and take the boot of political domination and crushing taxation of their necks.

This was exciting stuff. Not only that, but it was about to be the festival of Passover, which is the celebration of the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. It was the perfect time for political uprising in Jerusalem.

And, Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem was a political statement against the domination of Rome. The Romans also knew that Passover was the optimal time for a possible revolt of the Jewish people. They knew the people well enough to know this about Passover, so the Romans had parades showing off their military and political power. So, for Jesus to enter into Jerusalem in this was itself political commentary. He was declaring a contrast. Instead of warriors on their war horses being cheered by the complicit, Jesus was on a colt of a donkey, cheered by the poor and disenfranchised. It must have looked and felt like the beginning of a revolution for the poor. God was coming to their rescue!  

It must have felt so wonderful, to feel the hope of freedom and dignity for the least of these to be on the brink of breaking into the world for real. Jesus was the one who could walk through a crowd of people who wanted to throw him off a cliff and still walk away unscathed. A man like this, a man who couldn’t be touched would be the one to lead the people into a new life and new world.

That’s obviously not what happened, but it is most likely what people were so fired up about on this day we celebrate as Palm Sunday. This man of love, compassion, wisdom, and humility was showing people the way towards a world without domination. And that indeed is something to celebrate, but then we have to consider what came next.

There is a theory about how we understand history and our current world that’s called the “Great Man Theory,” which basically says that all of history is the story of great (mostly) men who change the course of history. And without these men and women, history would have taken a different path. It would have taken the path defined by a different powerful human or two who would have bent the world in their direction instead.

The alternate way of understanding history and our current moments in time is called the “People’s History” or “History From Below” theories. This way of understanding the world prioritizes the impact of mass movements and shared realities more than powerful individuals. This theory argues that powerful people are lifted up in leadership, but in many ways, they ride the wave of the larger social movements.

Obviously, there are unique individuals that rise to the top of leadership. I don’t think anyone would say otherwise. But there are lots of examples that support the History From Below Theory, such as Martin Luther King Jr. He didn’t start the Civil Rights Movement. It was bubbling up out of deep suffering and out of authentic hope nurtured in Black churches across the United States. He was asked to step forward as the leader, which he ultimately did even though it wasn’t his ambition to do so. He’s just one of many examples we can point to that demonstrate how mass movements create the momentum that are represented by leaders who arise from the movement. Or leaders who find themselves aligned with a movement.

The people in Jerusalem were ready for their Messiah. They were ready for this Teflon-man of miracles to step forward and lead them to a military overthrow of the Romans. They were ready for their Great Man of history to change everything for the better; a world of love, inclusion, and peace and he was going to do it for them, with their support of course. If this was indeed the expectation, what a massive disappointment Jesus came to be.

When he was arrested, the people clearly saw he was not the one they were waiting for. They saw he was not the Teflon-man. Something finally stuck and he didn’t even defend himself. In a world that deeply believed you only suffered fates like this if you were abandoned by God, then it would have been obvious, no? Jesus was not the Son of God. He was not the Messiah. He was a con man or a mad man and he had them fooled.

I wonder if Jesus himself would not subscribe to the Great Man theory of the world’s social and political realities. If Jesus believed that this is truly how the world changes for the better, that great individuals do the heavy lifting, then maybe he would have just stayed and fixed it all back in the day. Just get ‘er done, right?

It begs the question, what if God indeed wants us to together create the movement towards the Kingdom of God ourselves? What if we are the people we are waiting for? What if we are the people God is waiting for? Instead of this Great Man theory, waiting for someone else to come along and lead us to the promised land, what if Jesus already showed us how to lead, how to follow, how to be transformed in faith, and also what this New Creation in Christ might just be like?

It’s fairly obvious from the state of the world that we still struggle, all these years later, to see the value and importance of putting love, dignity, peace, and integrity in the center of everything we do. But the world is changing. We are changing. It wasn’t that long ago that intrinsic human rights were legally recognized in our international community. That year was 1948. Just to get to that point was multiple centuries of societal change. It’s not like we are doing a wonderful job respecting human rights now, but at least we have come to the point we say we intend to do so. We aspire to be that kind of world and that is something! We are changing. We are being reborn in ourselves now and across generations to become people who would only accept leadership that is dedicated to love, dignity, peace, and integrity.

The joy of Palm Sunday was about the people’s expectation of liberation from systems of domination. This joy was in expectation of health, sufficient provision, and a chance to just live normal, healthy lives. Simple stuff, yet clearly hard for us humans to pull off.

The people in Jesus’ day may have been dismayed and felt abandoned by his death. But the early church knew that Jesus did not abandon us. Never has. Christ lives in and among us, helping us every step to become the people we are waiting for to bring about the Kingdom of God. Christ is alive in us now to help us to put love, dignity, peace, and integrity at the center of our lives. Christ is alive in us now to transform us, bit by bit, step by step into the people who create the Kingdom together.

The hope of Christ is as alive and potent today as it was on the first Palm Sunday. For this, let us give thanks and rejoice.

AMEN