Palm Sunday: Jesus Drag(s) Pilate
A feminine subversion of the military Messiah
Why did Jesus die like that?
No one sermon can encapsulate why, and certainly, no lifetime of sermons or bible studies or devotion to theological inquiry can solve the mystery of why the Living God decided to submit to a brutal human execution.
Certainly, we can behold the lynching of Jesus and see sinfulness at work.
Certainly, we can look at the ways we still put people on our own versions of the cross to bear the sins of a society wherein we are deliberately unequal and maliciously violent.
Certainly, we can see that a suffering God suffers with us.
But the point I think it not to “explain” in neat, clean lines why Jesus died. Today I want to unpack what Jesus did that got him killed. For Holy Week begins with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and clearly Jesus did something that made the empire angry – angry enough to kill him.
He did something to make his community very, very afraid that his actions would bring pain upon all of them.
To understand what, exactly, Jesus did to make the empire so angry, we have to understand what was happening Jerusalem historically at the same time as this Palm processional.
In the ancient world conquering armies seized cities and maintained their power by parades and shows of might through the conquered city. Think about that scene in Aladdin where Aladdin enters the city with all the dancers and gold and warriors … and imagine with me that scene not in Disney terms.
Conquering armies could roll up to a place they had subjugated with all their muscle and might, flex their power in a parade, rough up a few onlookers as a reminder that they were judge and jury, law and land.
And this is exactly what is happening on the Western side of the city as Jesus and his disciples make ready to enter Jerusalem from the East: on the Western side Pontius Pilate and his cronies have come to town because it is Passover, a time when the Jews remembered they had defeated an empire before - Egypt - and Pilate was no fool. He was there to make sure no one got any ideas about freedom.
But while Pilate enters from the West, Jesus enters from the East.
While Pilate parades into the city in a show of masculine military might, Jesus is riding "the most unthreatening, most un-military mount imaginable: a female nursing donkey with her little colt trotting along beside her."” (John Dominic Crossan).
While Pilate and his crew enter to pomp and circumstance and threat, Jesus enters the city as the promised Messiah, the one who will set people free from empire.
The people are so wild and desperate and hungry and delighted to see this Messiah they start ripping branches off of trees to shade his head and tearing clothes from their bodies to form a makeshift carpet on which he might tread. There is no military parade, no show of arms, nothing but skin and leaves and a mother donkey with her baby and this bizarre, gentle rabbi.
To quote theologian Debie Thomas, “As Pilate clanged and crashed his imperial way into Jerusalem from the west, Jesus approached from the east, looking (by contrast) ragtag and absurd. His was the procession of the ridiculous, the powerless, the explicitly vulnerable. As [historians Marcus] Borg and [John Dominic] Crossan remark, ‘What we often call the triumphal entry was actually an anti-imperial, anti-triumphal one, a deliberate lampoon of the conquering emperor entering a city on horseback through gates opened in abject submission.’”
Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was not unlike a drag queen. Drag queens who use bold makeup and exaggerated dance moves to illumine the ludicrous and beautiful and wild lives we lead, Jesus is using exaggerated moves and a bold lack of armor or military might to show just how ludicrous the “power” of empire is.
Jesus has dressed himself to exaggerate, to laugh at, and to be resilient to the powers of empire that he knows will kill him. He is laughing at the devil with a few improvised, earnest props and a crowd of hungry, desperate, freedom-seeking people.
And as Jesus marches by sitting, and conquers by submitting, and wears the simple robes of a poor peasant, the people begin to scream: Hosanna! which means “Save us!”
Did you know that? The word “Hosanna” means “Save us!”
We sing that every week in the Sanctus, the song we sing in the middle of the Great Thanksgiving, the Eucharistic prayer. We sing “Holy, Holy Holy Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are filled with your glory HOSANNA in the highest” – and we are saying: God you are holy, SAVE US.
Holy God, save us!
God save us.
Because we don’t have to do a lot of imagining to see how being a Drag Queen is a threat to empire still. We don’t have to do a lot of imagining to see how a ragtag group of people tired of oppression and ready for resilience can be seen as a threat to the good ol’ boys and their heavily armed battalion.
Because as much as it is for our sins that Jesus died on the cross, it is also because of our systemic sin – the forces of empire and power-mongering, the desire to protect our own interests against all others, the desire to squash anything or anyone who is different from our “norms” that puts this gentle, effeminate, fierce, sassy, bible-quoting nobody from Nazareth on the cross.
I bid you a welcome to Holy Week.
This is not an easy time in our walk of faith.
As much as Jesus is making a mockery of militarism and might and manmade power —
and as much as he is doing that with the means of peace and homespun resilience—
Holy Week itself is not a lighthearted romp through the last days of Jesus.
Holy Week is a time where we let our hearts be heavy, where the trauma and grief of the passion of Christ reflect and refract our own traumas,
reflect and refract our need to be saved,
and reflect and refract the love of a scandalous God
whose will it is, always, to have mercy.
Be brave beloveds, for into Jerusalem we descend.
Hosanna, Son of God, Hosanna.