From time to time, The Christian Century has published a series of essays by "big league theologians" under the rubric, "How My Mind Has Changed." It's a great series that has been around now for decades.
No one has yet invited me to participate but if they did, I'd focus on how my mind has changed about the Liturgy of the Palms that leads Christians into Holy Week, and how this unlocks a theology of resistance to the powers-that-be.
I was raised to believe that the liturgy of the palms was festive, like a parade. This was actually reinforced by my theological education in the mid 1980s. The confusion that preachers and parishioners experienced on this day was about how the "fickle" crowd turns on Jesus after welcoming him to Jerusalem just a few days earlier. Who crucified him? We did - because we turned against him when he was not the kind of messiah we expected.
It's not that there is no truth at all in this assumption. But having walked this route in the Holy Land, and having read John Crossan and Marcus Borg's The Last Week nearly twenty years ago, I've fully embraced the notion that this day is not about a parade with a John Philip Sousa marching band. (That's happening on the other side of Jerusalem with a full-throated display of Roman Imperial Power!) Rather, this is a counter-testimony from the rabble rousers that Jesus has been collecting "on the way" to Jerusalem from Galilee. This is about people who refuse to bow down to the emperor, who claims to be almost divine. This is about people who insist: we have no king but Jesus.
Yesterday I participated in a No Kings march in Worcester, as millions of people did across this country. I did so because I believe that we are on the wrong track and we need to turn around. We need to repent as a nation, not pray (as the so-called Secretary of War recently did) for God to take our side in an armed conflict. That has nothing to do with following Jesus. We pray for peace on earth and good will to all. We pray even for our enemies. That is at the core of our purpose as followers of Jesus in every generation.
This is not simply a "spiritual" matter. Jesus may indeed be a king who is "not from this world" but his reign of justice and mercy has profound implications for this world and challenges all pretenders to his throne of glory. Jesus was political. The Church has always been political, as well. But for far too long, including at least the first forty years or so of my life, we stood with the status quo, especially in the Episcopal Church. We were proud chaplains to the empire.
So my mind has not changed because of revisionist history. It has been changed (over the past two decades or so) because I came to believe that where I was standing was keeping me and those among whom I served from seeing and hearing and proclaiming the powerful truth about this day. Walking in Jerusalem and reading Crossan and Borg allowed me to stand in a different place, in solidarity with all who know that the Church is called to resist imperial power in order to follow the One who kneels and washes the feet of even his betrayers, deniers, and those who have fallen asleep.
Jesus organizes a protest march against Herod and Caesar and the occupiers of first-century Roman Palestine. We don't wave the palms as if waving a flag on the Fourth of July. We wave the palms to say, "blessed is the only one who is worthy to be called king." We're with him.
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