Confronting the powers that be

He was called the “Tank Man” or the” Unknown Rebel.” Remember him? Way before our own No Kings Day, 37 years ago, in the spring if1989, students, intellectuals and ordinary laborers protested in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, joining others all over China demanding change in what was called "The Pro-Democracy Movement. They wanted greater democratic reforms, and most of all they wanted an end to the corruption that was a daily part of life in China in 1989. By June, the government had had enough. They sent in the army to break up the massive protest. The Unknown Rebel was a young man who was filmed singlehandedly stopping a column of tanks sent to the Square to break up the demonstration.

The Tank Man stood in front of the tanks, and when the lead tank tried to drive around him, he moved and stepped in front of it again, bringing them to a halt.  Eventually, students from the crowd dragged him away because they were afraid that he would either be shot dead by soldiers or run over by the tanks. We don’t know what became of the Unknown Rebel, but his act became known around the world via news reports and television. He became the symbol of liberty: a free man standing alone but firm against oppression. Time magazine included him as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20^th century.

One spring day in the year 30, in the city of Jerusalem, the local governor of the vast Roman Empire, named Pontius Pilate marched into the city, leading a column of imperial cavalry and foot soldiers. He came through the front door of the city, the West gate, backed up by the greatest exhibition of Roman military power he could muster.

That same day, a rabbi from Nazareth, a wandering preacher and teacher with a gift of both public speaking and, it was said, healing, gathered his followers and marched in the city through the east gate riding a young colt. Jesus came in the side door, effectively the service entrance of the city, and was greeted by the peasants and ordinary people of Jerusalem who carried leaves of palm and other trees, and spread their cloaks, garments, and household carpets (if they could afford them) in his path.

The Imperial procession was a demonstration of power. The Roman government came up to Jerusalem from their own city built by the sea, called Caesarea Maritima, and whenever there was a major festival in the religious heart of occupied Israel, he’d head up the mountain to Jerusalem to remind the locals of the might and power of Rome, with trumpets and drums announcing his arrival accompanied by a legion of soldiers to keep order. Just in case.

Jesus’ small procession, on the other hand, was at once a pitiful thing that in its shabbiness and impressive in its spontaneity, mocking the imperial procession across town. So, while there were no soldiers, no banners, no trumpets, and no drums, there was a crowd of people carrying tree branches and leaves, crying out “Hosanna.”

Have you ever wondered what “hosanna” means in English? I think most of us assume it’s a cry of praise, like “Hallelujah!” Actually, it’s a prayer. It’s a cry for deliverance. Hosanna means “free us!” The crowd is crying out to Jesus, Hosanna! Hosanna free us, we pray you! Deliver us! Save us from Pilate, from Herod, and Caesar and all of the misery of Rome! 

Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem was a prophetic act that underscored the conflict to come. The humility of his triumphal entry signaled that God’s power, God’s forgiveness, God’s reign did not rest with big golden idols, powerful armies, and impressive soldiers, and not even the established religion of the Jerusalem establishment could overshadow Jesus’ humble people’s procession. Jesus was showing that God was sovereign over everyone. God is bigger even than Rome, even of emperors who considered themselves sons of the gods, and that God arrives not in power, but in humility and in service.

Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem was a proclamation that God’s reign is here, present and available to all people, a tangible concrete answer to the grinding oppression of Roman occupiers, and the dulling drudgery of life lived without hope, purpose, or power. Jesus knew that when they saw him riding into the city, everyone would have thought of the prophecy in the Jewish Bible, where a king rides into the city in humility. Jesus arrives as a king of peace.

Pilate’s procession, on the other hand, signified human power and human glory that is established with violence and maintained by force. Jesus proclaims the reign of God, established by a Covenant with God’s people, and maintained by love.

No one really knew what to expect. Some people thought that Jesus would lead a revolt. Others through he’d take over the Temple and call down angelic armies. Of course, none of it will go as planned—or so some thought. Jesus did not rally the people to throw off the chains of oppression. There is no revolution. And while Roman soldiers did not scoop up the people who greeted Jesus... this time!... the authorities exerted their power, just the same. 

Before the week is out, Jesus will be arrested and the might of Rome and the power of the official Temple religion—which was at the heart of the religion and economy of Jerusalem— will fall on the head of Jesus. He dies a public, criminal, traitor’s death on a cross, outside the very gates of the city he rode through, not even a week later.

Normally, that would be the end of the story. We might have remembered Jesus’ entry into the city with the same sorrowful appreciation that we have for the Tank Man. Yes, it was stirring to see one man stand up against the tanks…but the tanks still won. And no one knows whatever became of the brave young man. It might have been stirring to see Jesus’ peasant parade in contrast to the Roman legions. But the legions, it appears, still won.

But the legions did not win, not in a final sense! And what was defeated was not an army or a government or a corrupt merging of power and religion. What was defeated was death. What was defeated is sin. What is defeated on the cross is every human attempt to make things serve in the place of God. What is put down is every complex structure, every kind of manipulation that both make us seem to be in control of our little universes, but which hide the fact that we are God’s creatures and responsible to God and each other.

You and I don’t have armies to show all the wily ways we put ourselves between us and God. We don’t need legions to find ways to hide ourselves from our deep-down fears that we are not who we wish we were. Human beings are adept at denying the ways we forget about our neighbors, ignore those in need and exercise our own self-doubt and try to control our own deep longings. We don’t need armies or governments or even big companies to hide ourselves from God’s purpose of love, compassion, care for one another and creation. It doesn’t take much for us to run away from the fundamental call to follow God’s way, to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and our neighbors as ourselves. We do it in big and small ways all the time.

Jesus marches in the side door of the city against all of this as well. He is still marching in, showing us all the ways in which power--personal and political-- is used not for good but for ourselves, not for good but for evil. He processes into our lives and addresses the many ways that we put ourselves—our fears and our pettiness and our selfishness--in between us and God. He processes in and reveals the pitiful but deadly ways that people use power not for service but for personal glory. Jesus parades into the service entrance and willingly goes to the cross.

And when he does, he shows us that God’s reign is present right here, right now, and that the cross marks the ultimate end of death’s reign over us, the end of our separation from God and each other and creation, the end of the power of sin.

We don’t know what happened to the Tank Man all those years ago. We don’t know if his quiet protest finally did any good. But during this holy week we will walk with Jesus along the way, we will accompany him to the garden where he pours out his soul and his doubts, we will accompany him to the upper room where he will break bread with his friends and wash the feet of his followers even the ones who will deny and betray him; we will walk with him to the cross and we will greet him as he rises from the darkness of death and walks in to the light of new resurrected life. 

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Here are the Scripture readings for Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, March 29, 2026

Here is a reflection connecting No Kings Day (March 28, 2026) and Palm Sunday.

Here is the website for St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida 

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here

Looking for Blame

 Palm Sunday: Sunday of the Passion, 2024

We are always looking for someone to blame. When things go wrong we need someone to blame. These days we have turned this into a kind of ritual. 

Today we need to blame someone…anyone! The investment bankers! The politicians! The business journalists! Celebrities, sports stars, or royalty from another country. Sooner or later, someone must take the blame! 

When that person is found, apologies must be made. Standing in front of microphones and klieg lights, broadcast over television or the internet, some contrite person will say "Mistakes were made." And, “If anyone has been injured or offended by words or actions, then I am truly sorry.” 

Sometimes the person being blamed with throw others under the bus with her or him, so as to perhaps feel less responsible.

Then the punishment begins. It might not be by jury trial or hearing; it may be through the media. Rehabilitation may or may not come. But you can be sure of one thing: when the next crisis comes along, blame must be placed.

As I said, it is a ritual. And it’s as old as the hills, only today it’s mediated through a variety of media, but we didn’t invent it. We might even take part thanks to social media, but it’s not new!

The odd thing about this ritual is that it never satisfies! We never feel better… not really. And we aren’t better people because of it. But is a ritual we follow nonetheless, even when we know deep in our hearts that it doesn’t work.

We are in another election season, and for the next eight months—as much as we might try to avoid it—attention will be paid to the horse race and reallybig conclusions will drawn from very small inferences. 

A few years ago, I remember seeing a YouTube a video of an excerpt from a German film that depicted Adolf Hitler’s last hours in the bunker underneath Berlin as the capital fell to the Russian army. The clip shows him raving and moving from rage to self-pity, over to self-loathing and then demanding the death of the people he blamed for the failure of his own choices. A frightening performance. Except that on this YouTube video, some satirist changed the English sub-titles to make it appear that his ranting was because he lost everything in his investments and in real estate in that year’s most recent economic downturn.

The satirist was making a point: we often blame everyone else for both the choices we make and for the things we cannot control. This is actually not very new. It goes all the way back to Jonah. When something goes wrong, someone must be at fault. Someone must atone.  

To be sure, there are times when people do things that deserve punishment. And there are times when we must hold people accountable for their actions. But sometimes the search for accountability stops being a search for truth and instead becomes a search for a Jonah or a scapegoat: someone on whom we can place all our troubles and who will take it far away from us.

When we scapegoat someone else, what we are doing is changing the subject. We are hoping that people will look more at the other person's failings than our own. We are hoping that our focus on the chosen victim will take our minds off other causes, other pain, other failings. Both institutional and personal. It tends to work because none of us can stand up to the fact that all of us are sinful, frail, limited, and self-serving. God made us one way, and we are another way and it far short of what God would have for us. But if we can make someone else take the rap, then maybe no one will notice.

Here is the ironic thing about Jesus’ condemnation and execution. The people made him into just that kind of scapegoat…and he willingly entered into it.

The thing is that what the people wanted to blame Jesus for and what Jesus was taking on were two entirely different things. People laid on Jesus the symptom. Jesus is addressing the source.

Jesus enters the city on the back of a small, not-quite-full-grown horse. Other Gospels say a donkey…whatever the case, it was not a mighty steed.  He was greeted by throngs of ordinary people as a king, a deliverer. They called him “messiah” but for them this “messiah” would be the one to throw off Roman rule and end religious and class corruption and so restore Israel to greatness. 

Jesus became for many a national figure on whom the national and economic hopes of an oppressed and struggling people rested. And when he failed to deliver…when his confrontation with the powers of both Jerusalem and Rome met with resistance, arrest, and failure…they dropped him like a hot potato! He became the one they blamed for all their troubles. 

The Gospel of Mark goes to great lengths to describe the unfairness of the trial before Pilate:   Mark says that the statements against Jesus did not agree with each other (14:56b); he says that some gave this false testimony against Jesus (14:57b) and but even the false testimony was inconsistent (14:59). Compared to the other Gospels, Mark emphasizes Jesus' silence by telling us "He gave no answer" (14:61), while only Mark has Jesus answer the question, "You, are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed?" with "I am" (14:61-62). 

He is spit upon, heckled and beaten all the way to Golgotha, where is executed by slow torture in full view public. The entire process is meant to reinforce Roman power over the people… and to draw the people they ruled into taking part. 

But Mark also describes something else: he tells us the most about Barabbas, which means ironically enough "son of God." It is Mark’s Gospel that tells us that was Barabbas both a murderer and part of the local rebellion against Roman rule. As part of the local intafada, Barabbas fit the bill much more closely than Jesus.  

So in a stunning twist of popular approval the crowd was willing to free and forgive Barabbas, but unwilling to let Jesus go because he apparently failed the people’s misplaced expectations.

So why would Jesus willingly enter into this game? If he knew that people expected him to be a liberator when he was in fact preaching peace, faithfulness and repentance, then why didn’t he go the other way? Why would Jesus choose to go into a place where the cards would be so stacked against him? 

Because what we blamed him for had nothing to do with what he was doing. The people killed Jesus because they wanted to blame Jesus and so avoid responsibility and continue to ignore the consequences of their sin.  People killed Jesus for expediency. People sent him down the road to the cross so that others would live another day politically.

But Jesus chose this route because while we still live in our sin and denial, God is busy reconciling the world to Godself. 

Try as we might, we cannot fully appreciate what Jesus did and who Jesus is without the cross. 

Jesus always refers to himself as a “human being,” as “the son of man.” There are only a few times in the whole Gospel of Mark that the phrase “Son of God” appears.  In the very beginning of the Gospel, once or twice when a demon blurts it out too soon, and then after he is crucified. When he has died on the cross, a centurion watching all this exclaims “"Truly this man was God's Son!" Mark’s Gospel shows us that the only way to really know Jesus is to know him crucified.

We’d love to avert our eyes, hold our breath as we drive around the cross. But to avoid or minimize the cross is to minimize the power of human sin. To minimize the cross is to take away the urgency with which God desires humanity and all creation to be healed and reconciled to God and to each other. To dodge the cross as something gruesome and distasteful (and it is!) is to dodge the weight and power of human sin.

Jesus goes the way of the cross because he is taking on the full weight of human sin. No scapegoats. No easy outs. No apologies in front of microphones or tearful admissions of failure. No phony mea culpas. Jesus, the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity in one person undiluted, will not skirt sin but walk straight into its full force and power. As he entered Jerusalem, he was about to was buried under a wave of the sum of human self-serving, responsibility dodging, scapegoating sin.

One summer when I was a young child, I learned to sail. I spent a whole summer learning the language and ritual of the sailboat. Eventually, it came time for me to pilot my own little catboat out in the open ocean.. well, a piece of Penobscot Bay, but it seemed pretty big to this 9 year old! 

So while I had been taught this, I almost forgot it: The first time I saw a big wave coming my way, I wanted to turn the boat and get away! But my teacher reminded me, to navigate a big wave, turn your boat into it! It will seem scary at first. You will ride high, and it may seem like the wave will win, but it won’t. To do anything else is let the sea swamp, if not capsize, your boat.

Jesus is doing something sort of like this but much more so. We try to avoid the consequences of our sin and bad choices and our complicity with evil all the time. But when we try to skirt the wave, we inevitably get swamped. Jesus will instead face it and head right into it. He will turn into the wave. 

The thing is, Jesus will die. Facing the full force of sin will result in his death.  But here is what no one expected: By turning into the wave of sin and evil, and experiencing its full force, not only will Jesus die, but sin and all the separates us from God and each other and creation will also die on that cross right along with him. So until Jesus faces and turns into the full force of sin, we will never know life. 

That is why we must also walk the way of the cross. Because instead of looking for someone to blame God in Christ walks with us to dark places we dare not go so that we can know life. He will show us the depth of love God has for us and fullness of our rescue from the power of sin, evil and death. But to know that, we also must go to the cross. We might want to dodge the bullet and go straight to Easter, or somehow avoid the hard truth of who and how we really are. But to know the truth, we have to go there: that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.

This week, come with us. Come and take part as we together walk the way of the cross. On Thursday, we will see Jesus serve his disciples one last time and then in agony face the depth, the darkness and power of human sin, he will break bread and share wine with him to tell us how his body will be broken and his blood poured out. He will also wash their feet to remind us that the fullness of God is here and serves… us! On Friday, we will go with him to the cross, where the power of sin will take him to his death.  And on Easter Eve, we will sit in silence and ponder the dark moments where it seems as if God is absent but is actually healing us in the very places where death dwells. We’ll wait in darkness and discover on Easter the dazzling new light that when Christ is raised from the dead, sin, darkness, and evil are defeated once and for all. 

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Bulletin for Worship for Palm Sunday: Sunday of the Passion March 24, 2024 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Palm Sunday: Sunday of the Passion March 24, 2024

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida for March 24, 2024

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on March 24, 2024

God’s encounters and defeats evil

The news is full of evil. If you have any doubt about the reality of evil in the world turn on the news.  Here you’ll hear about suffering among the poor, the drought-stricken and famine-stricken.  Agony among people on whom is inflicted excruciating death.  The airwaves, webpages and newspapers are filled with betrayals on personal, social and global scales. Gratuitous cruelty in families and neighborhoods.  Outrageous grabs by the powerful who disenfranchise, oppress and impoverish the less powerful.

We see all this around us – locally, regionally, globally.  The headlines need no recitation. There you have it – evil.

In this world-scape, human-scape, suffering-scape people often ask – in puzzlement, despair, or rage – ‘Where is God in all this?!  Where are you, God – that is, if you even exist?!’  And when they’re calmer and more analytical, many conclude, ‘Look at all this!  Obviously  God can’t exist, or if God exists God doesn’t care!’

On this Sunday of the Passion of Jesus, at the start of Holy Week, a very different conclusion emerges.  Where is God in the suffering?  The Gospel answers, right here!

The story of Holy Week is a disgraceful story of jealousy, rage, conspiracy, manipulation, violence, slander – and then condemnation, cruelty, mockery, torture, abandonment and, finally, excruciating death.  The story is dark and shameful.

At the center of that story is Jesus – Jesus to whom all that happens, Jesus on whom all that is heaped, Jesus who feels it all so keenly that he cries out in desperation from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!’  That cry resonates with the cry of so many who ask, ‘Where is God in the suffering?’  The Jesus who asks that question with us was a human being like all of us, yet at the same time the very being of God become flesh and living among us as one of us.  He lived among us, yet he set aside all of the of the prerogatives of God and so Jesus was genuinely alone, authentically vulnerable as he gaped into the darkness.

We often see ourselves on pilgrimage into God.  The Incarnation was God’s pilgrimage into humanity.  The primary mode of that pilgrimage was sharing – God sharing our life, God sharing our weakness, God sharing our anxiety, God sharing our unknowingness, God sharing our vulnerability to contingency and catastrophe.  Solidarity is a fancier name for it, properly popular in mission discussions, but ‘sharing’ says it more simply.  As Eucharistic Prayer A has it, Jesus was sent ‘to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.’

Jesus was sent first to share our life – that was his mission, his sent-ness.  Yes, there were the mighty words and the mighty acts, the preaching and the healing, yet Jesus could not preach to everyone, nor could he heal everyone.  The words and deeds were harbingers of a cosmic healing yet to come.  Underlying his ministry was sheer presence – Immanuel, God simply with us, the sharing.

And that turned out to be costly, as sharing always is.  Where is God in the suffering? – Well, right here in the midst of it.  A task in Holy Week is simply to contemplate God’s sharing the human journey.

I recall how Scott Simon, the host of National Public Radio’s ‘Weekend Edition,’ talk about a Canadian general who once encountered evil face to face.

“[I] interviewed Romeo Dallaire, the former Canadian general who commanded U.N. peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994. General Dallaire discovered Hutu soldiers were getting ready to massacre Tutsi civilians. But he was prevented by U.N. leadership from using his troops to try to stop the murders before they could take place. More than 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans were then slaughtered over three months.

“[General] Dallaire said that what happened made him believe in evil, and even a force he called the devil. “I’ve negotiated with him,” he told us, “shaken his hand. Yes. There is no doubt in my mind …. and the expression of evil to me is through the devil and the devil at work and possessing human beings and turning them into machines of destruction. … And one of the evenings in my office, I was looking out the window and my senses felt that something was there with me that shifted me. I think that evil and good are playing themselves out and God is monitoring and looking at how we respond to it.”

God monitoring and looking at how we respond.  Yes. 

And what we are about to walk into this Holy Week is nothing short that the ultimate batter between good and evil. But God does more than monitor, God gets involved. God comes to us as a fully human person, born in poverty, raised in a backwater town under military and economic occupation. And Jesus goes out among the people, living and eating, making a living and staying with them as he travels and teaches, and people will come to him to experiencing healing, transformed lives, and even new life out of death. But eventually those very people who proclaimed him king will turn around and crucify him. And when that happens, He will take every sin, every shame, every betrayal, every evasion, every abuse, every hypocrisy that humanity has to offer to that cross and he will die. 

Again, this week, We will walk this week to that cross and to that death. Even death cannot contain him.  We will discover that a week from now, but now we see only his betrayal, arrest, torture, and death.

This week we will discover again and experience anew how God has immersed Godself into all of human living, all of human suffering, and all of human dying. Christ will also immerse himself into the glory of our love and creativity, as well as the darkness of our fear and our capacity for evil. He will die and go among the dead so that we may live and share in his life.

But first comes God’s encounter with evil, and its’ defeat.

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Bulletin for Worship for Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Scripture Lessons for the Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 2, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 2, 2023.

Triumph and doom meet in the Passion

Jesus knew about oppression and he knew about mobs. And he would learn more, the hard way.

Jesus lived in a land that was occupied by a foreign power and ruled by a corrupt few. While nearly everyone in his hometown were no doubt of the same race and religion, they all knew that outside of their little sliver of land they called home, that they were considered strange, ignorant, and backward. Their way of worshipping just one God was considered quaint and naïve, their traditions were considered backward, and their customs about diet, dress, and marriage, and especially how they initiated males into their covenant through circumcision, was considered weird and even gross by the rest of Roman civilization.

The Roman government ruled all their territories with an iron hand, and everywhere they picked out locals who would carry out their rule. In Palestine, that meant that they hand-picked every official from the corrupt local Jewish king, Herod, to the local Jewish tax-collectors whose livelihood depended on efficiently collecting those taxes from their neighbors. Sad to say, but they found many willing collaborators.

Sure, the iron hand wore a velvet glove. The Roman Empire built paved roads…a big improvement over dirt paths worn down by feet and hooves…and these roads allowed chariots and wagons to move from place to place…and Roman legions protected the roads from bandits and brigands. They also made the sea lanes safe for ships to move about the Mediterranean Sea. Trade with people as far away as Rome, Gaul, Athens, and Alexandria and even Asia and India was all possible because of the peace of the Empire. But this peace came at a price and the Jews of first century Palestine were but one group that paid that price.

And Jesus also knew about mobs.

Jesus was very effective as gathering large groups of people and holding their attention. We know that he preached from the tops of hills, on plains, and sat at the bottom of small valleys or speaking from boats at the side of lakes using the natural amphitheaters they provided. He would talk to thousands of people at a time. We hear that he spoke the Sermon on the Mount to 5000 people and the sermon on the plain to 4000…and these were only the men. They didn’t count the women, children, and slaves that necessarily would come along. In an era when a really big walled city might amount to ten thousand people, this was really something!

Jesus attracted such crowds that he could barely find time for himself. If he sailed across the Sea of Galilee, the crowds would run along the shore to meet him on the other side. People lined the streets of their towns and villages, climbing trees just to catch a glimpse, reaching through crowds hoping to touch just a piece of his garment as he walked by. People would crowd around the houses where he ate and slept. Women would barge into his dinners and weep at his feet. And desperate people would even tear off the roof of one of those houses to lower a sick friend on a mat for him to touch.

And because Jesus knew about mobs and he knew about oppression, he knew about what the powerful would do to keep people in their place, especially when crowds got whipped up. So, Jesus must have known that he was playing with fire when he rode into Jerusalem on a colt while crowds of people lined the road with their coats and waved branches of palm proclaiming him as their King.

Jesus’ grand entrance on the ride of a peasant challenged the local puppet king, and he was stirring up the emotions of the masses. If someone lit the fuse, who knows what would happen when this brew exploded?

The problem with oppressors is that as soon as you stop being useful, you’re disposable. And as soon as you threaten or call out how paper-thin their power really is, they will strike back.

And the problem with mobs is that they love you… until they don’t.

When both the powers-that-be and the mob both turned on Jesus at the same time, he was done for! The powers-that-be came down hard, and the masses that greeted him as a hero quickly became the mob that cried out for his blood. In less than a week, Jesus would move from a conquering, victorious savior, to an executed and rejected loser.

In Jesus’ passion, the two ways that humans exercise Big Power—the military and economic power of the few, and the popular movements of the many—would come down on Jesus like a ton of bricks and kill him. It wasn’t the cross that executed Jesus, it was our humans passions and our thirst for power that betrayed, arrested, scourged, mocked, and killed Jesus.

It is easy to stir up fear, hatred, and violence. It is easy for people to hide inside the big group and let the emotions of the many take over our actions. The thing that makes rock concerts, street festivals, and even worship services wonderful, can also make for political rallies and riots where people get beat up and neighborhoods burn. We have become so good at this, so efficient that we can join a mob, bully a teenager, or even relentlessly shame someone from our laptop and even our phones!

I am reminded of what that wise sage Agent K said to Edwards in the film Men in Black. Remember that movie? After Edwards learned about the extra-terrestrials living secretly in New York, he asks K—who is recruiting him to join the secret organization—“Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.” K replies: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” 

It sounds cynical, but this is exactly what Jesus rode into when he entered Jerusalem. This is what Jesus knew as he went from the Gates of the City to the Temple and from there to the Upper Room and from there to the Garden all on his way to arrest, interrogation, and execution.

Here is God’s honest truth. People have power, and we can’t handle it! We have the power to love, and before you know it becomes a possession to protect. We have the power of imagination, and inevitably it becomes the habit of the familiar. We have the power to create, and yet we are easily bored. We have the power to build together, and we turn our unity into violence.

God knows both sides of us. And in order to release the love, Jesus will have to confront the hatred. In order to tap into the holy, he will have to face the sin. And to release life, he will have to defeat death. Jesus will face the worst of what we have to dish out so that he can lead us to the best God made us to be. There is no other way to get to the life, the love, the unity, the peace, we crave except through the cross where will we encounter face to face the power of oppression and the fickle violence of the mob.

In every age, people come along who become drunk with the power of the mob in their quest for the power at the top of the heap. In every age, there comes a person who thinks they can manage and control, even profit from, the passions of the mob. In every age, there comes a person with easy answers to complex questions, who taps into our fears, and who uses our need for unity and turns it into blind obedience. We have seen this before, time and time again. Pilgrimages become crusades, revivals become lynch mobs, and rallies become riots.  Inevitably, the people who think they can control these passions will be consumed by what they have unleashed.

When Jesus entered into this, he came knowing the powers of oppressor and mob are only defeated by the power of God. It will be the power of God to turn death into life, it will be the power of God that will take all the spiritual forces of darkness, rage, fear, oppression, and yes, even death, where it will go to that cross and there all that works against God will die. We will see and know in Jesus’ resurrection, that all that is in us that is attracted by fear and brute force, is overcome with love. It is in Jesus’ death and resurrection that we see the power of God to make all things new. It is through his passion, death, and resurrection, that Jesus turns our passions towards God’s healing of creation.

Once again, we hear the siren song at work. Once more, we hear the promise of protection from the other, of prosperity without sacrifice. We hear it from our pundits and politicos at home and from despots across the globe. We hear it from those who play on our fears and urge us to imagine the worst. Once more, we are drawn into the exhilaration of our helplessness being turned into rage. Once more, we feel the release of our darkest thoughts and feelings being said out loud. Once more, we are given permission to lash out at someone—anyone!—who we are told to think of as the source of our pain. Once more, we are tempted to look away from where we really hurt and to turn aside from the source of our real power—to go for the easy rationale instead of the noble, the lovely, the patient.

This is how evil works. Evil takes what is true, and lovely and good, and turns it into lies, ugliness, and horror. Evil tells us that good people can do bad things for good purposes—and while that, of course, is a lie, we fall for it every time.

But God is neither defeated nor distracted by this distortion. God is ready. And God always does the things that evil hates—God always turns the tables on evil. And because of Jesus’ journey to the cross and grave, evil is deader than a door nail, and evil knows it. It can scream, it call rally, it can lash out all it wants. But through the cross, and in the resurrection, death and evil are defeated. We have the power of God to love. We have the power of God to create! We have the power of God to serve! We have the power of God to heal! We have the power of God to overcome hatred with peace! We have the power of God to stand firm!

So when we go to the cross and face what Jesus faced, we know that in him, and in his love, and in his powerful humility, none of this has power over us!

Jesus knew power. Not the world’s power… God’s power! Jesus knew that the love, presence, and power of God that transforms hate into love, gives purpose and direction, and makes us not a mob but the gathered people of God. Jesus knew that divine love will always overcomes human power.

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Bulletin for Palm Sunday: Sunday of the Passion April 10, 2022 here

Video of Sermon for April 10, 2022 here.

Video of the Liturgy for April 10, 2022 here.