For the Eastern Orthodox Church, yesterday was Palm Sunday, the day we commemorate the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. I know, Easter was ages ago and we’re just getting to it. Don’t make me explain. Just know it has to do with old calendars, lunar cycles, and tradition.
Apropos of triumphalism and the expectations we have of our leaders, spiritual and otherwise, Jesus enters the city of Jerusalem under the widely-held belief that his arrival would mean the defeat of the Romans and the return of Israel to the Jewish people.
Under these circumstances, the whole scene is wrong. Jesus rides into town on a donkey, with no army. He isn’t armed and has no intention of confronting Rome. But the people have convinced themselves he’s THAT kind of messiah. He never promised anything like a coup or political revolution. But the people expected him to do just that. And when he didn’t do it, these same people either called for his execution for blasphemy or simply ran away.
It’s easy to see ourselves in these deluded citizens of Israel. Every politician is a disappointment. They never do all the things they say they want to do. And they know they won’t. But we support them and when they win an election, we cheer their triumphal entry into the crucible of government, full of unrealistic expectations of what they will accomplish. But they let us down. Every. Fucking. Time.
Our hope should never be placed in elected officials who are always corrupted by an unjust and frankly horrible ecosystem of government. Despite beginning with Jesus, I’m not going to make a case that our hope is in Jesus either. Sometimes that’s a hard pill for me to swallow, and I’m a committed Christian.
Perhaps a better place to begin is learning to rely upon our neighbors to help us make the world a better place. Our communities (physical neighborhoods, churches, community organizations, etc.) are engines of change. They drive us toward peace or conflict and the difference between those two trajectories is one of mutual concern.
The stories of Jesus are the narratives that help me sort out what is important and what is not, discerning between the wide road that leads to destruction (my favorite thoroughfare) and the narrow path that leads to righteousness (the road less travelled). This image of Jesus entering the city to the cheers of messianic hope is not all joy. Jesus had to know he was not going to meet the crowd’s expectations. He wasn’t there to topple the Roman Empire (“give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”). His mission was broader than that, the results of which would live on in perpetuity.
Our hopes for preserving peace and justice and uprightness (a Confucian term that probably deserves a whole essay of its own) are not realized in the hands of powerful people. They mostly just end up abusing that power and letting the rest of us down. A life of peace is not one devoid of struggle or pain. It is one that always sees a way through the struggle, pain, rage, and sorrow to a better future.
Peace and justice require sacrifice, not on some battlefield across the world, but on your street, in your neighborhood. Jesus didn’t accomplish anything as he passed into the city on a donkey. Sure, he fulfilled a prophetic oracle by Zechariah, but in the end, he only succeeded in giving the crowds the wrong impression. Where he accomplished his mission of peace and justice and love was in a room above a home in Jerusalem, eating a meal with his closest friends.
This is a lesson that is missed by many Christians who only see Jesus’ triumphal entry as his march on the gates of Hades. Every Sunday, across the world, Christians still celebrate what transpired in that room. They only relive the triumphal entry into Jerusalem once a year.
No matter the essential narratives you use to navigate life, be assured that peace and justice do not happen by accident, and they are not achieved by better legislation. Our communities are laboratories of peace and justice. Communities are never static and neither are the ways of achieving peace and justice. If we begin by making peace with our neighbors, we can be assured that our worlds, the spaces we inhabit, will be better.