Palm Sunday: The Wrong Kind of King
RESIST: A HOLY WEEK SERIES
PALM SUNDAY
They were expecting a war horse. They got a donkey.
That's the story nobody tells at the Palm Sunday parade. The crowds lining the road into Jerusalem weren't celebrating a spiritual event. They were rallying around what they believed was the beginning of a revolution — a military overthrow, a restoration of Davidic power, a kingdom won by force. They waved palms because palms were nationalist symbols. They shouted Hosanna because they meant save us now — as in, pick up a sword and do something about Rome.
Jesus rode in on a borrowed donkey.
That's not humility as a personality trait. That's a statement. A provocation. A direct refusal of the script the crowd was handing him.
Here's what I keep coming back to: the people who were most wrong about Jesus that day weren't his enemies. They were his fans. The ones waving branches, singing his praises, clearing the road — they had him completely figured out, and they were completely wrong. They wanted a king who would crush the right people, restore the right power, make their nation great again.
He was already doing something else entirely.
This is where Resist begins — not with a villain but with a seduction. The seduction of using Jesus to bless what we already wanted. The temptation to recruit him into our political project, our national story, our vision of restoration. It happened in first-century Jerusalem. It's happening right now.
Christian Nationalism isn't new. It's just the latest version of the crowd on Palm Sunday — sincere, loud, and pointed in the wrong direction. It takes the real longing for justice, for security, for belonging, and it runs that longing through the machinery of power and domination. It wants a war horse. It will not accept a donkey.
But the donkey is the whole point.
Jesus didn't come to make one nation great. He came to make a new kind of community possible — one that doesn't need an enemy to hold it together, one that doesn't confuse flag and cross, one that isn't sustained by the fear of the other. The kingdom he was announcing looked nothing like what the crowd was cheering for.
Which raises the uncomfortable question for those of us who follow him: what are we actually cheering for?
When we align Jesus with power, with nationalism, with the restoration of a particular cultural dominance — we are the crowd on Palm Sunday. Well-meaning. Enthusiastic. Completely missing it.
Resisting that misuse of Jesus isn't a political act. It's a theological one. It's saying: I will not hand him a sword. I will not dress him in a flag. I will follow him on the road he actually chose — which, by the way, leads not to a throne room but to a cross.
Holy Week begins here. With a parade that misunderstood everything, and a savior who rode in anyway.
»> Reflection: Where are you tempted to recruit Jesus into a story he didn't sign up for?
