Today is Palm Sunday. Every year we tell the story of Jesus entry into Jerusalem.

It was our hope that our confirmands could help us tell the story this year, but alas, it was not meant to be. But then again, anything is impossible and we can find love in the time of cholera.

[At this point the hymn “From the East the Poor are Marching” is sung]

The song Mae sang was Daniel Charles Damon’s reflection on a recent book by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Our confirmands are familiar with Borg. The entire curriculum for their journey has come straight from Marcus Borg. Anyway, twelve years ago the historians Borg and Crossan tell us that there were riots associated with Passover circa the thirtieth year of the Common era: “And so, at each Passover, the Roman governor — Pilate in the time of Jesus — rode up to Jerusalem from the imperial capital Caesarea on the coast at the head of a cohort of imperial cavalry and troops to reinforce the Roman garrison in Jerusalem as a deterrent against and preparation for any possible trouble. Pilate’s procession, arriving from the west, symbolized and actualized Roman imperial power.”

Jesus enters from the East on a donkey, and sure, Matthew connects the event with Zechariah, but in the historical moment, as Borg and Crossan point out “the contrast is clear: Jesus versus Pilate, the nonviolence of the kingdom of God versus the violence of empire. Two arrivals, two entrances, two processions.”

What Crossan and Borg point out is that in many ways Jesus mocks the imperial power. Jesus on a donkey satirizes Pilate on his war horse.

Emperors and empires do not enjoy being mocked. The powers that be want to be feared. They do not want to be objects of scorn or derision.

About a year ago I was getting ready to visit Central America. I had the opportunity to visit El Salvador, and there in is one of my regrets. I was never able to visit San Salvador.

For many years I have told a story about San Salvador.

From approximately 1979 until 1992 El Salvador was in the midst of a Civil War. The war, as all wars are, was complex. On November 16, 1989, thee years before the end of the war, elements of the El Savadoran Army raided the University of Central America in San Salvador killing six priests. There were reasons the Army argued, for the killing. These priests were teaching liberation theology after all.

One may wonder why in a war where countless innocents were killed we tell the story of this one raid. Did the deaths of these priests matter any more than the deaths of the countless others? Certainly there are parallels between the mass murder perpetrated by the Roman Empire through countless crucifixions and the countless deaths by the imperial forces seen in moments such these. And yes, sometimes there are moments that stand out. It is not that some lives matter more than others, but within the historical events, some events become moments of crystallization. Yes, there are countless other holy places born of tragedy and death, but on this Palm Sunday I want us to return to this one holy place.

Among the priests, Jon Sobrino was not there. Although he lived and taught with the priests, he was traveling. He talks about returning to the destruction, the horror and the grief. As he tried to clean up and put things back in place he found that one book had fallen off the bookshelf and was stained with blood. It was Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God. Today that blood stained book is on display there in San Salvador, and perhaps someday I will have the opportunity to make that pilgrimage.

Moltmann’s book is holy for a hundred other reasons. I loved it long before I knew this story. In fact, the way Moltmann reads the event is to see the book, covered in blood marking these deaths. Either way, as we tell the story of empires and political executions it is to this book, and therefore this story, that I return every year around this time.

As Lillian Daniel has said Palm Sunday is a gateway into holy week. It opens up for us this space in which we walk towards Golgotha with Christ. We stand at the cross. And so every Palm Sunday points toward the Passion.

As we open up holy week, I return to Moltmann. It is a big book. We have not the time to interrogate it, and yet, Moltmann helps us think through the events of holy week in a way that follows and builds and returns us to Crossan and Borg.

There were two processions that day.

Jesus mocks, rebels against, challenges the empire. And so, we can say that “Jesus was crucified by the Romans . . . for tactical and political reasons of peace and good order . . .” “Crucifixion at that time was a political punishment for rebellion agains the social and political order of the Imperium Romanum.” Jesus was crucified “in the name of the state gods of Rome who assured the Pax Romana.”

And yet Jesus was crucified “not only because of the understanding of the law by his contemporaries or because of Roman power politics but ultimately because of his God and Father.” Here Moltmann brings us back to Jesus cry of absence and abandonment on the cross.

My God, why have you forsaken me.

“As a ‘blasphemer’, Jesus was rejected by the guardians of the his people’s law. As a ‘rebel’ he was crucified by the Romans. But finally and most profoundly, he died as one rejected by his God and Father.”

Every year we tell this story in these most holy of days. This story that shapes the reality of all of our days. Particularly in these days of grief, fear and isolation let us remember that the in the cross of Christ God reveals Godself “as unconditional love, because he takes on himself grief as the contradiction in humanity and does not angrily suppress this contradiction. God allows himself to be forced out. God suffers, God allows himself to be crucified and is crucified and in this consummates his unconditional love . . .”

So as we see the two processions and Palm Sunday opens up for this week of Passion, we remember that we sang our glad Hosannas.

[At this point the hymn “We Sang Our Glad Hosannas” is sung]