Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday A: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

Philippians 2:5-11; Matthew 21:1-11

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

March 29, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1179747747

Yesterday I stood with a number of you and a wider swath of people from across our deanery and diocese on the steps of Grace Cathedral. The bright sun beamed down on us until, a few minutes before 11 AM, a brief liturgy began. Bishop Austin stood in front of us leading our worship, and as readings were shared from among the people, we turned to hear them. Finally we were sent forth by our deacon, and we began to make our way down the steps, singing “We are marching in the light of God.” It was true. We were. Turning to a side street, we made over way several blocks down the hill, past the Transamerica Pyramid to the plaza of the Ferry Building, where we joined a large crowd preparing to make its way up Market Street, and on to the Civic Center. It was No Kings Day, a day to remind ourselves as a country that by design we do not have a monarchy, but elected representation. It is a day to protest the misuse, indeed the abuse, of power. A day to stand and move with a different kind of power, one rooted collectively in a people committed to an ethic of justice, care, and compassion. It is not a Christian movement – indeed, it is a movement pressing back against Christian Nationalism. For those of us Christians who fiercely oppose oppressive, nationalist distortions of our living tradition, yesterday’s marches, coming right on the threshold of Holy Week launched today on Palm Sunday, remind us of the reign of God as Jesus proclaimed it, lived it, and died for it. We are presented with a vision not only of a kingdom but of a leader whose “kingship” openly upends hierarchical, prowess-based expressions of power, refusing their arrogance.

From the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus proclaimed what the gospels call the basilea, the kingdom or reign of God. It is a kingdom that counters the Roman Empire with its dehumanizing social hierarchies, its lust for dominance, its refusal of creaturely limitation. What does this kingdom look like? In Luke’s Gospel Jesus proclaims it at the very start of his ministry through the language of the prophet Isaiah. God had anointed him to “bring good news to the poor,” that God had “anointed [him] to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, [and] to proclaim the year of God’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19, quoting Isaiah 61:1-2). The reign of God is about liberation, healing, renewal. Jesus was anointed to enact it and to activate its unfolding, inviting its embrace in all who follow him. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus teaches this vision most movingly in the Beatitudes, in the Sermon on the Mount. In the midst of struggle, pain, overwhelm and loss, we hear words of consolation and blessing: blessed are the poor in spirit, are those who mourn, are the meek, are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, are the merciful, are the pure in heart, are peacemakers, are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. And blessed specifically “are you when people revile and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Matthew 5:3-11). He anticipates that horrors would be carried out in his name. That is what happens to the prophets, he declared. It was what would happen to him. But on no account would he, were they, and are we, to relinquish the vision, the lived reality, and the hope of God’s kingdom for which he lived and taught, suffered and died, rose and ascended to embody.

Palm Sunday draws us directly into this vision. As we stood outside our own red doors, our worship began with these words, “blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord.” Together, we responded not with shouts of dominance but peace. “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest.”^[1] And then immediately the poetic language of the prophet Isaiah painted a picture of the kind of leadership Jesus would live out: teaching to sustain the weary, listening as one who is always learning, grounding to withstand misunderstanding and persecution, fierceness to stand up and confront adversaries (Isaiah 50:4-9).

In a certain sense we see that fierceness in the entry into Jerusalem that Palm Sunday enacts in our opening procession, moving from the courtyard through the narthex into this worship space. Sometimes congregations process around the block or to church from other locations. Yet Jesus’ procession, evoking in a certain way the triumphal entry of an emperor or king returning from other domains or from war, specifically turns a prowess-based expression of power on its head. He rides not on a war horse but on a lowly donkey – sometimes fairly comically depicted (due to textual references such as our Matthew passage) as somehow a balancing on a larger and a smaller one.^[2] Impossible to sit regally in such a scene. The humility of this procession was understood not only in the ancient biblical texts we read but also in the centuries after Christianity began to be claimed by imperial Roman power. I was especially struck to read in a commentary on Matthew from the fifth century C.E.

Do you wish to know the gentleness of the one who is coming? Consider the image of his arrival. He does not sit on a golden chariot, shining with priceless purple. Nor is he mounted upon a foaming horse, the lover of discord and quarrelling, which has a chest filled with glory’s boasting, which sniffs out war from afar and rejoices at the sound of the war trumpet and, when it sees the bloody battle, says in its own heart, ‘it is well done.’ Rather, he sits upon a donkey of tranquility, a friend of peace.^[3]

Jesus rode into Jerusalem in spite of the danger, knowing he would face the very things over which he spoke blessing in the Beatitudes. Inherently, his ride confronted the power that sought to snuff him out. Yet such confrontation expressed not arrogance but an unfathomably deep humility. It is audible in Paul’s famous passage from the second chapter of Philippians: “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,” or grasped, clutched at. Instead, Jesus “emptied himself.” He took up a posture of service, humbling himself in vulnerable humanity. He suffered, even to the point of accepting death (Philippians 2:6-8). He embodied what we heard in our passage from Isaiah: “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting” (Isaiah 50:6). This outpouring would lead to death. As John Chrysostom, theologian of the ancient church preached on our passage, “The cross was at the door.”^[4] A lonely and stigmatized form of execution stretched before Jesus.

And now as we stand at the threshold of Holy Week, Jesus’ journey lies before us. This is the invitation of Holy Week: to follow Jesus, to stand with him, joining with him in sorrow and in gratitude for how he joined us. How his journey reflects the struggle of every oppressed communities all around the world in various times and places. In think moment I think of immigrant to this country being separated from loved ones, disappeared into prisons; trans, nonbinary, and two-spirit people targeted for erasure; people without healthcare and housing in an exploitive capitalist system; people war-torn parts of the world such as Iran, Palestine, and Ukraine. Jesus joins with all of these communities. He is with them.

The fourth century pilgrim Egeria, who traveled to Jerusalem and whose letters recorded some of her worship experiences there, describes what we would call stational liturgies. They enacted different pieces of the story of Jesus’ Passion. At one point she travels to a church, together with a community that had been practicing this pattern for some time. They go to the “Lazarium,” the cave of Lazarus that we heard about in last Sunday’s gospel passage.^[5] There are other churches and holy sites that she and others traveled to, intentionally journeying together with Jesus just as he journeyed together with us. It is from these sorts of spiritual practices, pilgrimages, that our worship tradition emerged. Not only particular services but our liturgical year itself, telling certain stories at certain times, to take into our hearts this unfathomably good news.^[6] This is the kind of pilgrimage that we take together today, on Palm Sunday. This is a hallowing of the process of becoming against the odds, of joining and being joined in vulnerability. This is a journey we take in trust that indominable life can and does come from out of death, that restoration is both possible and real, even as trends point to the contrary. This is the sovereignty that undoes all human kingship. This is the kind of kingship that we hallow today.

And so today, stepping into these holiest days of our year, we are called to take up a peculiar kind of power. A power that refuses domination; that stands in solidarity with the outcast; that seeks healing; that opens its eyes and ears with compassion; that participates in the liberation of all who are captive; that follows a divine sovereign whose will it is, as our collect conveyed, to bring together the peoples of the earth from out of our division and hatred, our oppression and greed, and finally “to restore all things,” in a creation becoming whole. As we journey into Holy Week, may we embrace that process, that becoming, together.

^[1] The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 270.

^[2] Anna Case-Winters, Matthew: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KT: John Knox Press, 2015), 250. On the imperial-critical dimensions of triumphal entry, Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 226.

^[3] Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum, quoted in ed. Manlio Simonetti, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. New Testament Ib: Matthew 14-28 (Downers Grove, Il: Intervarsity Press, 2002), 125.

^[4] John Chrysostom, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. New Testament Ib: Matthew 14-28, p. 123

^[5] Eds. Anne McGowan and Paul Bradshaw, The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation of the Itinerarium Egeriae (Collegeville, MN), 166.

^[6] The Pilgrimage of Egeria, 86-87