By The Rev. J.C. Austin
Before coming to Bethlehem, I spent over eight years working on Christian leadership development at a seminary, which including teaching a workshop on the importance of storytelling for pastors and other leaders.
Not in the sense of just telling good stories, 
though I do think that’s important; no, in the sense that part of any leader’s job is to tell the story of their congregation or organization in a way that helps those involved to claim a shared understanding of who they are and what they are doing in the world. So, to show people the power of a story to shape how we perceive and interpret things, I would do an exercise in which I summarized the plot of famous movies from an accurate but very unexpected perspective. Something like, “a hard-working immigrant pursuing the American Dream struggles to maintain his family business in the face of unscrupulous competitors and changing times.”
Any guesses? The Godfather. That description is technically accurate, but you’d be expecting a very different movie if you decided to see it on that basis. Here’s a more difficult one: “A chronic underachiever abandons his family in a crisis and descends to into a hallucinogenic nightmare.” Anyone? It’s a Wonderful Life. We often forget how dark that film is because the ending is so, well, wonderful, but the setup is George Bailey spinning off into a spiral of despair to wish he had never been born, and that only gets interrupted by an angel showing him all the horrible things that would have happened without him being alive through a nightmarish alternate reality.
My personal favorite, though, was this one: “a religious zealot who radicalizes a naïve young farmboy into liberating a terrorist leader and destroying the symbol of governmental power.” That is the plot of the original Star Wars movie, but told from the Empire’s perspective. If you don’t know the film, its intended story is literally spelled out in a written introduction that crawls across the screen at the very beginning of the movie, explaining that heroic rebels have just won their first victory against the “evil Galactic Empire,” and have stolen the design plans for the Empire’s most terrible weapon, a space station called the Death Star that can destroy an entire planet. And the story then unfolds with a naïve young farmboy named Luke Skywalker being taught the mystical ways of something called the Force by Obi-Wan Kenobi, ultimately leading to him trying to rescue Princess Leia, a rebel leader, from the Death Star and ultimately to attack and destroy it.
Now, here’s the thing: if the symbol of your government’s power is something that blows up entire planets which you yourselves have named “the Death Star,” you are probably not the good guys. And yet no empire in the history of the world has ever seen itself as the bad guys, and many of their subjects would have agreed, even though every empire has done terrible things in the name of protecting or expanding its power.
Even with Star Wars, which has one of the clearest and most absolute divisions between good and evil in modern entertainment, there’s actually a debate between some of the characters and even from some outlying fans about whether the Empire was, in fact, the good guys. After all, similar to the Roman Empire, it imposed order in a chaotic and dangerous world and established peace through force within its bounds for many years, which in turn allowed commerce to flourish. How could that not be good? And how could those seeking to violently overthrow such order and progress not be evil?
That is how empires tell their own stories: that they are a force for order, prosperity, and even peace in the world, but often leaving out the sometimes-terrible things they do to accomplish that. The question then is what story the people under the thumb of an empire tell about it and themselves. And that was the debate in first century Judea, and we see all of that on display when Jesus comes to Jerusalem, starting on Palm Sunday and continuing through Holy Week to Easter. The Palm Sunday story that you just heard is all about this: the competing stories of what God is up to in the midst of the Roman occupation of Judea and how the people should respond.
Part of Jesus’ struggle throughout his ministry was the stories that people imposed on him versus the story he was trying to tell about who he was and what he was doing. There is this constant debate about who he is, and much of that centers around whether he is the Messiah, the one whom many believed was promised by God to come and liberate the Jewish people from the Romans and re-establish the kingdom of Israel as it was in the time of David and Solomon.
And as I said a few weeks ago, part of why he tells people who identify him as Messiah not to say anything about it is because he has not come to be the Messiah that most of them want: a heroic warrior-king that would lead the soldiers of Israel and even an army of angels to drive out the Roman Empire from their land forever. That is why the people greet Jesus’ arrival at Jerusalem, the city of Jewish kings, by laying their cloaks on the road: that was a practice from coronations of kings of the past. And that is why they also lay the more famous palm branches on the ground, which is also a more explicit story about who they believe, or at least want to believe, Jesus is.
About 160 years before Jesus was born, there was a very important event in Jewish history that’s generally called the Maccabean Revolt. You probably know at least a little something about that history because it’s where the story of Hanukkah comes from. At that time, Judea was occupied by a different foreign empire, the Selucid Greeks, until a man named Judah Maccabee organized and led a rebellion to overthrow Greek political and military control and drive out Greek cultural and religious influence.
The rebellion began in the countryside, similar to Jesus’ movement, and eventually entered and took over Jerusalem, cleansing the Temple of Greek practices and re-dedicating it for Jewish worship, which is where the Hanukkah story comes in about the oil for the menorah miraculously lasting eight days for the rededication ceremonies until they could get an ongoing supply for worship. And according to First Maccabees, which is not part of our Bible but is considered Scripture by Jewish people as well as Catholics and most Orthodox Christians, when the rebels entered Jerusalem to take it, they “entered it with praise and palm branches…because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel.”
Sound familiar? It should, because the crowd is deliberately making that connection. The story of the Maccabeans retaking Jerusalem for this crowd was like the story of Washington crossing the Delaware or the Battle of Yorktown is for us, and by laying those branches on the ground for Jesus entering Jerusalem the same way a similar crowd did for Judah Maccabee about 200 years earlier, they could not be making a clearer statement to each other, Jesus, or the Empire about who they think he is and what they think he is there to do: lead an armed revolution and win a war of independence.
The thing is, that’s not the story that Jesus is claiming or telling about himself. But he is telling a story; that’s the whole reason he sends the disciples to go boost a ride from the local village. To be fair, he tells the disciples to promise that he’ll send it back when he’s done with it if anybody asks any questions. And that means, by definition, he’s doing it for visual effect during his entry to Jerusalem, not for practical transportation; he’s using it to help tell a story.
Specifically, he’s referencing a very, very different Scriptural story than the one about the Maccabees. The prophet Zechariah, in a vision about the promised Messiah, exhorts the people to “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zech 9:9). Humble, on a colt, the foal of a donkey; a far cry from a majestic warhorse, yet triumphant and victorious all the same.
Matthew’s version of Palm Sunday explicitly references this verse, but interestingly he omits what comes next: “He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations” (Zech 9:10). winning wars, but stop them; who commands peace to the nations rather than battle. That is the story Jesus is telling about himself, a story that is accurate but from a very unexpected perspective: a Messiah who will triumph not through winning wars but from stopping them; not from commanding armies but commanding peace.
Yet nobody seems to get it. They are still throwing cloaks and laying palm branches and cheering what they think is the start of Jesus’ triumphant coronation as Israel’s messianic king. And, ironically, they are correct, but from a very unexpected perspective. Because Jesus’ coronation will be characterized not by pomp and circumstance, but by pain and death. Jesus’ throne will not be a golden chair but a wooden cross. And his crown? Well, a crown is an almost universal symbol of royal authority; kings from cultures across the earth wear some version of one. In Britain, it is so central that both the reigning monarch and the government and civil service are often simply called “The Crown.”
And yet Jesus neither claims nor seeks one; the only crown he receives is after his arrest, when thorns branches are twisted into one and placed on his head to cause suffering and inspire mockery, because the very idea of one such as he being called a king was totally ridiculous to his captors. Nothing about him suggests anything in line with the stories that kings tell about themselves through their regalia or actions.
Which, of course, is precisely the point. Jesus refuses to let his story unfold using the props and plotlines of standard royalty, even when the crowd tries to foist them. Jesus refuses the temptation to be a good version of a normal king, an enlightened ruler who still trades in the currency of domination, violence, competition, and control, even for good or justified reasons. Jesus’ kingship is completely different; he rules through the power of love, justice, mercy, and peace. And that is good news, though we sometimes forget it.
Sometimes we, too, want Jesus to be the enlightened ruler who will put on a crown and climb onto a war horse and impose order and prosperity and peace (of a sort); who will march triumphantly into our challenges and problems and take them over and drive them away for us. But that is not who he is; that is not who he is willing to be. No, Jesus comes as a king without a crown, casting aside the typical props and role with humility but clear purpose: to defeat shame and suffering and rejection and death, not with more suffering and rejection and death in kind, but rather with the unrelenting, irresistible power of God’s love and grace that transcends and transforms all that opposes it.
So as we begin the journey through Holy Week, let us claim our part in the story that claims us: that Jesus Christ is blessed as the one who comes in the name of the Lord, comes without crown or sword, but comes with love and invites us to receive and claim and share that love with others, until all the powers that resist them, even death itself, realize they are powerless to overcome it, and run away in fear and defeat.