Letting These Stories Define Our Reality
May we see that Jesus is showing us a better way and that the ways of power commonly viewed as common sense are not only wrong, they are anti-Christ.
Palm Sunday, Year A
Sermon for March 29, 2026
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. It’s good to be with you this morning, here at the start of Holy Week. We have already done and read a lot today to start our service, so I’m going to get right into this brief sermon this morning, no introductions needed.
This morning’s liturgy gives us two of the most recognizable and memorable passages of scripture, all rolled into one service. We speedily walk through the triumphal entry into Jerusalem… as we talked about last year, this parade was likely happening on one side of the city, while Pilate entered on the other side. If not at the exact same time, Jesus at least enters Jerusalem in complete and total contrast to the authority and power of the Roman leader: he does so on a colt or donkey, without soldiers, with common people laying down cloaks and praising God for him and his ministry. The Messiah has come.
Of course, soon after that, we read the story of this Messiah’s death, his crucifixion. We do that because in the middle of the 20th century, the Pope realized that, for those who don’t come to services on Good Friday, the triumphal entry on one Sunday and the Resurrection on the next Sunday is a bit confusing. He and liturgists and our lectionary assemblers had to be sure our Sunday services covered the full story. So just now, we sat down and together read the Passion narrative too. We read the institution of the Eucharist, of the bread and the wine; we read the betrayal by Judas; we read of Jesus’s trials, of Peter and his three denials, of the release of Barabbas, of the brutal torture. We read of Simon carrying the cross, of the bandits crucified with Jesus, of Jesus giving up his spirit. His body is laid in the tomb of a rich man and a guard is posted. The Easter stage is set.
This combined service, these readings, they give us so much to think about, to consider. The roller coaster of emotions for the disciples in this short span of time comes to the forefront for me, as it might for you this morning. There is joy and celebration; there is grieving and death. In these stories, we have a very full life, and it only takes a few days.
I am struck this year, this Palm/Passion Sunday, by the willingness of Jesus, of God, to be incarnate and to fully enter into the extremes of this very full life. You might expect that the creator, omnipotent God would not come to earth and sit on the sidelines. But to be among us, one of us, like this? It is still a reality-shaking, reality-defining decision. This story, the stories of this week, of Christmas, of Pentecost, they define our reality. We short-change them and ourselves if we confine them to a few Sunday mornings each year.
See, the definition of reality itself has always been up for grabs, and we often, often let others define it for us. This last year, our country’s government, the one we all pay taxes to support, it has made some decisions based on a particular definition of reality. In January, our leaders removed the leader of Venezuela in a special forces raid. Members of the administration hit the TV show circuit for camera time to explain that decision, and though their rationales were conflicting and certainly debatable, one argument stood out as a throughline. On CNN, someone came on Jake Tapper’s show and said this:
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, Jake, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
Strength, force, power. To many, what this administration official said rings true, perhaps especially to those who have experienced the harsh reality of suffering under those who wield strength, force, and power, whose jobs have disappeared, whose retirements never materialized, whose families were killed or imprisoned or deported by those with strength, force, and power. This is a dog-eat-dog world, don’t you know? Kill or be killed? Bomb or be bombed? This is common sense, right? If we do not take hold of the reins of power ourselves, if we do not exert force, if we are not the strongest, then we will suffer, and, we say, the whole world will suffer, because “the other guy” is always wrong, always evil, always our opponent to defeat in the arena… or at the ballot box.
Viewing the world through this lens – that strength, force, and power are the iron laws of the world, that they are reality themselves, that the “other guy” is always evil and we are “in the right” and “just” when we wield strength, force, and power – this perspective always results in horrific ends. And, perhaps most importantly for us this morning, we must acknowledge and proclaim that it is anti-Christ.
In the dual narratives of Palm Sunday and the Passion, we are given an emphatically different understanding of the world, the Almighty God gives us a different understanding of the world. We as Christians can now see, we must see that the world was never intended to work, it does not work that way. Strength, force, and power wielded by us as individuals, wielded by the nations that are superpowers against those who cannot stop them, these are not the ways of the created order, of the world God made for us. These are the ways of sin, of disease, of separation from a God of abundant and overflowing and limitless love.
Our Messiah, Jesus Christ, he came into Jerusalem, the local center of power, humbly, with palm branches to welcome him, riding on a donkey. He stood and still stands in stark contrast to the power and parades of Pilate, the ruinous rule of an overconfident Rome. And, of course, they killed him for it; the Son of God was crucified, tortured, humiliated, executed by those with enough strength, force, and power to do so.
This morning, this Holy Week, may we allow these stories to define our very reality. May we see that Jesus is showing us a better way, that the ways some hold as common sense are simply wrong, that they are anti-Christ. And may we live in the light of that truth, that humility and self-sacrifice are the powerful images of our God, a God who could easily yield strength and force and bend us to God’s will. Instead, God chooses and shows us a different sort of power, the power of unending, unrelenting, undefeatable love.
May this love define our reality.
Amen.
