On Sunday, in cities around the world, Christians begin Holy Week by celebrating Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem for the final time before his death and resurrection. To mark the day, Christians recreate Jesus’ procession, often starting outside churches and winding down sidewalks and city streets waving palm branches.
Celebrations like this often miss an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’ procession: At the time, it was a deliberate act of theological and political confrontation. It wasn’t just pageantry; it was protest.
On that first Palm Sunday, there was another procession entering Jerusalem. From the west came Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, riding a warhorse and flanked by armed soldiers bedecked in the full pageantry of an oppressive empire. Every year during Passover, a Jewish festival celebrating liberation from Egyptian oppression and slavery, Pilate entered Jerusalem to suppress any unrest set off by that memory.
His arrival wasn’t ceremonial; it was tactical — a calculated show of force, what the Pentagon might now call “shock and awe.” It displayed not only Rome’s power but also Rome’s theology. Caesar was not just the emperor; he was deified and called “Son of a God” on coins and inscriptions. His rule was absolute, and the peace it promised came through coercion, domination and the threat of violence.
From the opposite direction, both literally and figuratively, came Jesus’ procession.
Jesus entered the city not on a warhorse but on a donkey, not with battalions but with beggars. His followers were peasants, fishermen, women and children — people without standing or status. They waved palm branches — symbols of Jewish resistance to occupation since the Maccabean revolt — and cried out “Hosanna!” which means “Save us.” Save us from a system of oppression disguised as order. Save us from those who tacitly endorse greed with pious language and prayers.
Jesus’ procession should be seen as a parody of imperial power: a deliberate mockery of Roman spectacle and a prophetic enactment of a kingdom not built on violence but on justice.
The next day, Jesus walked into the Temple, the heart of Jerusalem’s religious and economic life, and flipped the tables in the marketplace, which he described as “a den of robbers.” The Temple wasn’t just a house of prayer. It was a financial engine, operated by complicit leaders under the constraints and demands of the occupying empire. Jesus shuts it down. This is what gets him killed.
Jesus wasn’t killed for preaching love, or healing the sick, or discussing theology routinely debated in the Temple’s courtyards, or blasphemy (the punishment for which was stoning). Rome didn’t crucify philosophers or miracle workers. Rome crucified insurrectionists. The sign nailed above his head — “King of the Jews” — was a political indictment and public warning. Like with the killing of the prophets before him, the message sent with Jesus’s death was that those who demand justice will inevitably find themselves crushed.
Sound familiar?
We, too, live in the shadow of empire. Ours doesn’t speak Latin or wear togas, but its logic is familiar. Our economy prioritizes the 1 percent and puts corporate profits over worker dignity. Our laws enforce inequality in the criminal justice system, education and health care. Our military-industrial complex would be the envy of Rome. We extract, exploit, incarcerate, and we call it “law and order.”
And just like in Jesus’ day, political leaders defend this arrangement while religious leaders bless it. As the French writer Frédéric Bastiat warned, “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” That was true in first-century Jerusalem. It remains true today.
Since the 1980s, movements like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, and more recently, the New Apostolic Reformation, have not challenged the empire but rather sought to commandeer it. The Seven Mountain Mandate urges Christians to seize control of key sectors of society, including government, business, education and media. This is not a movement seeking to interrogate or challenge the injustice of empire. Quite the opposite. It is an ideology — a hunger for power and dominion — cloaked in pious language and baptized in the logic of empire. This is Christian nationalism in a nutshell.
Remember, Rome did not begin as an empire; it began as a republic. But over time, it ceded power to the few, tolerating cruelty, corruption and the consolidation of control, so long as it came wrapped in the promise of peace and prosperity. The emperor became both ruler and redeemer, venerated not for moral clarity but for the illusion of restored national greatness.
The false promise offered to both Romans and the people they conquered was that Caesar was divine — a chosen one, a lord. Today, Donald Trump is often cast in eerily similar terms by Christian nationalists: not as a moral leader, but as a figure who will deliver prosperity, protection, and cultural dominance, at least for a select few. To defy him, in this worldview, is not just to reject a man, but to reject a kind of sacred order. That impulse is not new. It is as old as Pilate’s procession.
But Jesus never sought to replace Caesar with a Christian Caesar. He came to dismantle the very logic of Caesar: the belief that might makes right, peace comes through violence and politics is best wielded through fear, coercion and control. Instead, he inaugurated a counter-kingdom that aspires to loving kindness, radical welcome, mercy and justice — a kingdom where the vulnerable and the poor are lifted up, and the idols of empire are exposed as frauds.
Waving palms on Palm Sunday connects us to justice, public life, discourse and action. We cannot remain silent on behalf of those who genuinely cry out “Hosanna … Save us.” At some point, we have to make a choice about the Jesus we claim to follow. Either he didn’t care about the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed — in which case we’ve built our religion on a hollow figure. Or he did care, deeply, and we’ve chosen to ignore that part because it challenges our comfort, our politics and our priorities.
Scripture’s power isn’t in magic or miracle, but in its witness, of people who loved boldly, acted justly, spoke truth to power, resisted empire and hoped defiantly in the face of despair. It is deeply relevant to modern life. The Resurrection, which Christians celebrate one week from Sunday, is not the reversal of Christ’s crucifixion. It is its vindication. It declares that even when the empire kills truth, truth still rises. That even when justice is crucified, it does not stay buried. The Caesars among us don’t get the final word.
Andrew Thayer is a D.Phil. candidate in theology at the University of Oxford and an Episcopal priest who has served parishes in the United States and England for over 20 years.
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