Homily March 29, 2026, Rev. Holly Cardone

Palm Sunday

March 27, 2026

My mentor, Father Jaime Edwards-Acton at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Hollywood, would call it guerrilla street performance. The first time he said that in a sermon on Palm Sunday 2014, I smiled. That’s a great way to describe what is happening. The entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem is deliberate, staged, and a public act of political theater.

The people knew all about royal processions in the first century. They were a thing. At the main gate of the city, the conqueror, or Pilate in this case, rode in on a great white war horse or in a chariot with the military troops marching with him. It would have been an impressive image of domination to inspire awe and fear.

The street theater part is Jesus, entering the east gate, on a donkey. The writer of Matthew is drawing directly from the prophet Zechariah, chapter 9:

"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. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem… and he shall command peace to the nations."

This moment doesn’t have to be literal history to be a powerful statement. The writer is making both a strong theological claim as well as a political one. This man, riding on this donkey, is your king. And he and Caesar look nothing alike. It’s what we would call today a protest. Jesus, riding in on a donkey, was a challenge to the religious establishment, the temple system and to the Roman occupation.

Jerusalem’s population would swell during Passover which is when this event in Matthew’s gospel takes place. This was a religious obligation for the Jewish peasants in the first century. They were obligated to travel from all over the region to make their sacrifice at the temple at Passover. Not only were they exhausted from travel, but they were exhausted from the bone-crushing occupation of the Romans, and they were ground down by Roman taxation. In the ancient world there wasn’t a clean separation between politics and region. Their religion was political.

Every year at Passover, the people retell the story of Moses leading the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt, out of 300 years of bondage, into freedom. It is the central story of Jewish identity. And for a first-century Jewish peasant living under Rome, that story wasn't ancient history. It was a mirror. We were slaves. We are still, in some ways, slaves. And God is a God who liberates.

The air is electric, and emotions are running high. There is a volatility that is rising just below the surface. Jesus rides a donkey into this volatile, hope-filled and grief laced environment.

We don't read it today, but what happens next only turns up the heat.

Jesus walks into the temple courtyard and loses it. He overturns the tables of the money changers. He drives out the merchants selling overpriced doves and pigeons for Passover sacrifices. He exposes the whole operation for what it is: people who have traveled great distances, at great cost, to worship God — being exploited at the door.

Jesus is fuming. He has every right to be angry. He isn’t throwing a tantrum. He’s reminding everyone in the temple, that while he is alive, he will not allow God’s name to be desecrated. Then he turns his attention to the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, the Scribes, the powerful religious leaders of the day, calling out their religious postering, their love of public attention, and the way they've confused the performance of faithfulness with faithfulness itself.

The week unravels from there. It’s overwhelming and devastating, and all too human, what follows in the Passion narrative. A last meal shared among friends. Betrayal. Deception. Boasting. Failure. A kiss weaponized. Violence. Abandonment. Arrest. Denial. Bitter self-contempt. The political cowardice of a leader who knows an innocent man is being railroaded and washes his hands of it anyway. Torture. Mockery. Death. An absolute mess. And in the middle of it all, Jesus tells his friends, that there is a new commandment. To love one another. He tells them to remember him. When they drink this wine and eat this bread, remember me, he says.

At the center of betrayal and act of violence is the possibility of reconciliation. A table. An invitation. The Presence that refuses to abandon us even when we abandon it.

Here is the question that Palm Sunday leaves us sitting with:

How is it that the one who does not save himself becomes the source of our salvation? How is it that obedience unto death becomes the gift of life? How does this execution, this story of an unmanageable prophet eliminated by a collaboration of religious and political power — become something other than just another tragedy?

How does it become resurrection?

In the face of blatant injustice, in the face of lies and torture and state-sanctioned murder, Jesus does not become just another casualty of empire. The story refuses to end there. It becomes, instead, the story of redemption. Of reconciliation. Of something entirely new breaking open from inside what looked like defeat.

How did that happen?

Well. You'll have to come back on Easter Sunday to find out.