Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’ triumphal entry into the Holy City of Jerusalem. I’ve italicized triumphal because it’s all a matter of perspective. Is it a triumph or the prelude to disaster? If it’s a triumph, then a triumph for whom – Jesus or the crowds?

At a luncheon given by the Lord Mayor of London in November 1942 in celebration of Field Marshall Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the star guest. For those of you who are not World War 2 history buffs, El Alamein is the small oasis town on the Egyptian-Libyan border where after a series of defeats and retreats British and Empire troops dealt the decisive blow in the North Africa Campaign – paving the way for an eventual Allied invasion of Italy.

Churchill – the consummate wordsmith captured the mood and significance of the moment when he told the assembled guests in the Mansion House:   This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

It’s interesting to hear in the archival recording of his speech the ripple of nervous laughter among those present. With hindsight, we hear Churchill’s words as prophetic. But to those present on this occasion they must have seemed tantalizingly enigmatic – hence the ripple of nervous laughter. For at the time – who could have with any certainty predicted the outcome of the war?

So, here’s another question. Is Palm Sunday the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning in Jesus’ campaign of non-violent resistance?

It’s important to explain the application of the term non-violent resistance to the Jesus movement – after all, it seems such a modern concept more associated for many of us with Gandhi and MLK Jn.

Some of us will be familiar with the book The Last Week by John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg – in which they chronicle events as recorded in Mark’s gospel of Jesus’ last week before the crucifixion. In God & Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now, Dom Crossan explores the development of the Jesus movement as a movement of non-violent resistance.  In contrast to John the Baptist’s movement of expectation – of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom, Jesus’ is a movement of action in recognition that the kingdom is already here.

Crossan hypothesizes that with the Baptist’s execution at the hands of Herod Antipas, nothing changed – the kingdom did not come sweeping in – leading Jesus to conclude that God’s kingdom was already here and what was required was not humanity waiting for God to act but collaboration between God and human agency giving shape to the kingdom within human history. This collaborative kingdom unfolding in real time was a movement of non-violent resistance to the forces of empire – an expression of God’s opposition to the forces that impose and maintain peace through violence.

Jesus was led to the realization that the nature of the kingdom must be different from the one John expected and that non-violent resistance was its hallmark.

Jesus grew up in a world of unspeakable violence. His was a world in which the cycle of violent resistance to occupation provoked an even more devastating response from the forces of empire – a cycle all too reminiscent of the situation in present-day Gaza and the West Bank. Growing up in Nazareth, Jesus would have learned the painful lesson of the ultimate futility of violent resistance. His childhood would have been shaped by hearing the stories of the calamity of 4BC when after the death of Herod the Great the Jews’ fear of a full Roman annexation sparked a series of violent revolts across the Jewish homeland.

In response, Varus, the Roman governor in Syria, led the Roman Legions south. Sweeping through Galilee they burned towns and villages and slaughtered men of fighting age along with the elderly while enslaving women and children. Galilee’s capital Sephhoris was pillaged and burned. Sephhoris was only an hour’s walk away – just over the ridge from Nazareth.

Jesus did not experience the calamity of 4BC as it was only after Herod’s death that the Holy Family returned from exile in Egypt. But he would have grown up in a community that had. For the people of Nazareth 4BC was not a distant memory but a painfully visceral recent experience.

Passover seems to have been the catalyst for Jesus taking his movement of non-violent resistance to Jerusalem – moving to the heart of where the action was happening. Now non-violent resistance does not – it seems for Jesus to have meant non-provocative resistance. Quite what Jesus expected to happen, he nevertheless chose to enter Jerusalem in the most provocative of ways – that is – by acting out the prophet Zechariah’s messianic prophecy: Shout aloud, O Daughter of Jerusalem! Behold your king is coming to you ….. riding on a donkey, the colt of a foal.

We can’t know with any certainty what was in his mind. Certainly, we know the mind of the crowds who greeted him. Remember, Jesus had been several days in Bethany – a stone’s throw from Jerusalem – and news of him must have spread like wildfire among the pilgrims pushing the city’s population to three times its normal size. Overcrowding and a growing frenzy of rumor and expectation raised the mood in the city to a fever pitch.

The echo of collective memory gives color and meaning to actions in the present. The waving of palms was a gesture from Jewish collective memory and tells us something about the popular expectations for Jesus. Some 160 years before, the triumphant Judas Maccabeus, the last leader of a successful Jewish rebellion against foreign occupation, led his victorious partisans into a defiled Temple. Bearing palm branches they cleansed and rededicated the sanctuary after its defilement by the Syrian tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanies – an event commemorated today by Jews in the festival of Hannukah.

The waving of palm branches tells us something of the crowd’s expectations of Jesus as another national liberator, who in the mold of Judas Maccabeus had come to free them from the hated Roman occupation. What seems perplexing is how Jesus seems to play into this expectation only to turn jubilation into raging disappointment days later.

At the same time as Jesus was entering from the East, a real triumphal entry procession wound its way into the city from the West. At the head of his Roman Legion, the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate had also come up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

Pilate feared Jerusalem’s ancient warrens seething with civil and religious discontent with some justification. His Administration preferred the sea breezes and modern conveniences of Herod the Great’s former capital at Caesarea Maritima just south of modern-day Haifa. Pilate feared the crowds most during the Passover which required him to come up to the city with a show of preemptive force to forestall the ever-present potential for insurrection. Passover was an extremely dangerous time. It commemorated the Jewish collective memory of liberation from an earlier period of slavery. Pilate’s arrival was indeed a wise move, for the crowds that hailed Jesus, were in insurrection mood.

Returning to the earlier question – is Palm Sunday the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning in Jesus’ campaign of non-violent resistance?

What we do know is that in Holy Week the storyline of worldly oppression and political violence intersects with a storyline of populist resistance – of nationalist longing for liberation no matter the cost. Both are storylines of violence being confronted by a third storyline – that of non-violent resistance -the recognition that God’s kingdom has already arrived and is unfolding through the collaboration between human agency and the divine purpose. The collaboration between human agency and divine purpose is the theme we will return to on Easter Day.

We already know that Holy Week is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning for Jesus. Nevertheless, we journey with Jesus transported by the liturgies of Holy Week. For some of us, this will be an intensely personal experience as our own experiences of loss and suffering – our passion surfaces in identification with Jesus. For others, the nature of our Holy Week experience is less personal and more communal. We journey with Jesus as part of a community that journeys to the cross carrying and bearing witness to the violence, pain, and sufferings of the world of the 21st century.

Liturgy is a form of dramatic reenactment that transports a community through sacred time – a dimension of experience beyond chronological time. In sacred time the past and future conflate into the present, where through liturgical action we become more than passive bystanders. We become participants in the timeless events that shaped Jesus’ last days.

Historical associations in sacred time trigger memory in real-time giving voice and expression to our contemporary experiences. You see, human beings don’t change much over time. The tensions we see acted out in the events of Holy Week are the very tensions we continue to struggle with today.

And so, like the crowds praising Jesus as he entered the Holy City, we enthusiastically hail our next political savior -until that is – he or she no longer is. Like those accompanying Jesus in his last week, we long to do the brave thing – until that is, – the moment when we don’t.