Palm Sunday Sermon
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, March 29, 2026)
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us this day and always. Amen.
Palm Sunday is such an odd day in the life of the church. Begins in triumph and shouting and Hosannas outside, laughter and embarrassment as we walk in. And then it concludes in sadness and darkness that, coming of Jesus' passion. We've been on that journey this morning. We had the laughing and the embarrassment outside, and then the cello piece that Mr. Ma shared with us that was so beautiful and speaks so much to loss.
We begin, though, with these donkeys and these shouts and the palms. It looks, I mean, just odd, the donkeys. I always wondered, why is he on two donkeys? How do you ride two donkeys, first of all? But why is he on two donkeys? And then the palms, and the shouting that he is the king. The New Testament scholars, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, have an interpretation of this, and I've preached about this before. I want to talk more about this. They note that at major Jewish festivals in the city of Jerusalem, often Pontius Pilate, who tended to spend most of his time on the sea, would return to the city.
The Passover celebration is about freedom. It's about casting off oppression. It's about liberation. And so, this was a time of political unrest in the city. And so, the governor, Pontius Pilate, would reenter the city coming from the west, and he would usually reenter the city with soldiers around him, and on war horses, sometimes on elephants, as a show of power, through the western entrance to the city. And these scholars, Borg and Crossan, say that this is what's going on. Maybe at the exact same time, certainly in the consciousness of the people who gather around Jesus as he enters from the east.
The donkeys are making fun of the war horses, and the cries of Hosanna to the son of David, Hosanna to the king. They are poking fun at the authority, at the kingship, at the power of Rome. What they say is that this is a protest. These folks coming into the East are protesting, protesting imperial power. And as all good protests do, they're doing it with a sense of humor. These palms, these cries, son of David, the donkeys. It's a weekend of protest in this country. It's apt that we have this lesson.
It's also too easy. Because if it's only a protest, if what happens today is a protest, what about the rest of the week? This isn't the end of the story. Maybe more to the point, or more pointedly, we who pat ourselves on the back for protesting should pay attention to the fact that the protestors who rally with Jesus today, rally for his execution five days from now.
If we want to understand what happens between today and Friday, if we want to understand why these crowds who sing his praises, sing out for his death in five days, we need to know more about what's happening here.
So why do the crowds turn? Why do they turn on Jesus? If this is more than protest, if something more is going on, then what is this something more that these crowds discover they cannot abide or accept? And that itself is a euphemism, not that they can't abide or accept. What is it that they revile and they come to despise Jesus for?
We have a clue, not in this gospel passage, but in the one that shortly follows. If you come back on Good Friday, you will hear this chanted by some choristers. When Jesus dies on Friday, the crowd is given a chance. We, who are spiritually part of that crowd, we are given a chance. We are given a choice. Pontius Pilate, the governor, the man who rode in on his war horses will come before the crowd, and he will present to them two men. "You can free one," he will say, "Barabbas or Jesus."
Now we know this name Barabbas. If you're familiar with the passion story, you've heard this name Barabbas. He has a first name, too. His name is Jesus Barabbas. We tend to call him Barabas to distinguish him from Jesus. The word Barabbas is a patronym. It means “the son of the father.”
So, what the option that Pilate is giving to the crowds is, Pilate says, "We have Jesus, son of the Father." And Jesus, son of the Father. This one, we are told, Jesus Barabbas, son of the father, is guilty of violent insurrection. He murdered a Roman guard.
This one, Jesus of Nazareth, is guilty of not seeking violent insurrection, of preaching peace. "Who will you choose?" Pilate says to us. Who do we choose? Who we condemn? Which is the crime we cannot forgive?
At a moment of rising fascism in Europe, the early 20th century, mid 20th century theologian, maybe the most important Protestant theologian of the last hundred years, certainly the last hundred years, maybe the last 300 years, a man named Karl Barth, a man who throughout his career, especially just before World War II and during World War II, wrote unrelentingly against the evils of fascism. He also wrote, in the early 20s, in his commentary upon the Book of Romans, "When you stride ahead of others, you show yourself ignorant of God's secret. When you separate yourself from others, and you base that separation upon any idea or system, or identity, you set yourself as knowing the secret of God's righteousness yourself. You place faith in yourself rather than in God."
And then, about 20 years ago, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was thinking alongside Barth when he said that the church is not a pressure group on the right or the left. If we treat it like that, we treat it as if the secret of God were our own. And if we do that, we shall not manifest to the world anything other than a religious version of the world's own quarrels and tensions. William says that we have to show something else, show the triumphant work of Christ. Otherwise, we will say to the world that we have no real word to speak, no real world word to speak that the world doesn't already know. We will end up just echoing the anger or the compassion or the generosity of the human heart. There are worse things than that, William says. There are worse things than just echoing the anger or the generosity or the compassion of the human heart, but he says Christ did not die and rise for that.
I think we're in a real bind. There are real injustices that deserve to be decried, real injustices that must be decried. It is absolutely biblical. It is centuries old, thousands of years old. Mercy to the stranger, to the poor, to the immigrant, absolutely scriptural, and it is the responsibility of Christians to cry out for it. But Christ did not rise and die, die and rise, just for that denunciation, just for that cry. It was for something else as well. What is, then, the secret that Barth talks about? What is God's secret? What is the triumph, that is triumphal in this entry into Jerusalem? What is the triumph that Rowan Williams tells us that we must also proclaim?
In other words, if Christ did not die and rise for that, then what did Christ die and rise for? The troubling answer to that question, the one that causes these crowds to turn on him, is that he died for us. The problem is we don't like to define us, nearly as broadly, or nearly as capaciously, or nearly as widely, as the love of God does. We know he died for us, but he couldn't have died for them.
This is the problem with Barabbas, the one guilty of murder and insurrection. If he was not detained, he probably would have been at that protest with Jesus. We do. We must denounce injustice where and when we see it. We have, as I said, thousands of years of prophetic witness exhorting us to denounce it when we see it. The Christian denounces injustice, but the Christian doesn't just denounce injustice. The Christian also somehow impossibly tries to figure out how to love the one who is unjust, tries to love the one causing injustice. The Christian impossibly tries to love their enemy.
To follow Jesus into Jerusalem, to make our discipleship with him be more than just protest, means believing more than that he lived, rose, lived, died, and rose just for us. It means believing that he lived, died, and rose for them.
It means more than believing that he lived, died, and rose for the sinners who enter with him from the east and who will cry out for his death in five days. It means also believing that he lived, died, and rose for the terrible sinners who are entering the gates from the west at the same time. This is why the crowds abandon him. It's why they turn on him, because he insists on loving the people they, quite understandably, hate.
And this is the truly revolutionary aspect of Jesus' ministry, of Jesus' teaching, of the church that he has given to us. So much of what Jesus says is there right on the page, in all the scriptures that he was reading from. In the long tradition of his people, love your neighbor, love God, mercy to the immigrant and the stranger and the widow and the orphan and the outcast. That's all there already, but Jesus also says, "Love your enemy. Love the one who fails to do all those things."
And that's hard. It's hard. It was hard to write the words I'm about to say. It's hard to believe that Jesus died, not just for the folks who were being bombed on the other side of this world, but Jesus died for the ones who were doing the bombing.
Hard to believe that Jesus died, not just for the law-abiding migrant who's being ripped from his life, but to believe that Jesus also died for the one who was ripping him away. It is hard to believe that Jesus died not only for the person wasting away in our prison industrial complex, but that Jesus died also for the guard who watches over him, and the judge who put him there.
Jesus gives us this impossible, this impossible combination of commandments: love yourself, love your neighbor, love your enemy, all three at once. And it is impossible. How do we hold them together? And it sometimes feels intolerable.
No wonder they turn on him. No wonder we turn on him. The numbers are not out yet. Yesterday may have been the largest protest in American history. You who have heard me preach a few times, or have been part of this church for a few years, probably know how I feel about that. Because my heart bleeds for the immigrant, my mom was an immigrant. My heart bleeds for the immigrant, for the stranger, for the poor and the sick and the hungry and the outcast, for all those who are condemned, who don't fit in, for minorities in this country, for people of color, for trans kids and trans people, for queer people. All the folks who are condemned, my heart bleeds for them.
And I believe that is utterly, utterly faithful to our scriptures. It is utterly, utterly scriptural, as I said, 2,000 years of clear manifest, on the page witness, that these are the folks we need to protect, that those who cause them harm should be denounced and decried.
The call for justice is the scriptural call. It is the biblical call. It is part of our tradition. When we cry out, when we denounce, when we protest, it is faithful, absolutely faithful. It is absolutely scriptural, and it is also manifestly insufficient to the cross of Christ. Because on the cross of Christ, Jesus' heart bleeds, not just for some, but for all. This is what he goes to do this week. This, I pray, we will have the courage to do with him.