Palm Sunday 2026
Matthew 21.1-11
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking “Why is this?”.
There is brave, and then there is stupid. The itinerant preacher leaps onto a donkey, and parades into town to—let’s be honest—moderate fanfare. Hosanna!, they yell, their clothes on the ground, with branches they pruned from their gardens.
We know where this all leads of course, and probably so did he—every Palm Sunday, we hear both readings, one telling of his triumphal entry and another of his summary execution. Colonial powers do not take kindly to rebel kings. The intervention is brutally efficient. Within the week, he will be betrayed and arrested and tried and sentenced. The soldiers will beat him, as if to check if his blood would run blue. When it doesn’t, they put it on the billboard anyway: the King of the Jews. And then they kill him. The king is dead, said nobody; long live the king.
If Jesus intended to be a rebel king, he wasn't very good at it. Sure, he had the colt from Zechariah's prophecy and Solomon's own entry into Jerusalem; and he had the foliage from the 118th Psalm, which also provided the script for his entourage. But these hints of royal pageantry threatened just about nobody. According the Acts of the Apostles, the rabbi Gamaliel likened Jesus to Judas of Galilee and Theudas, leaders of revolts decisively crushed by Rome’s iron gauntlet; but Jesus is precisely not like them in that he neither led nor incited any such revolt. The so-called triumphal entrance into Jerusalem might have the appearance of the beginning of a failed coup, but lacks its substance: it is a sign of something else altogether.
+++
There is brave, and then there is stupid. And they were brave: Judas and Theudas. Whether we like to admit it or not, our dominant cultural representations of courage are still militant. Whether in the news or in summer blockbusters, the language of courage and bravery is deployed most frequently in contexts of battle. We valorise those who fight for us; perhaps we are flattered by the thought that we are worth fighting for.
This being the case, we run the risk of focusing on the wrong things, confusing courage for machismo or, worse still, the glorification of aggression. And so Christians must turn elsewhere to learn about courage. We must journey with Christ to Jerusalem, and face him on the cross, to whom we are worth suffering for, worth dying for, you and even me. Courage is love bearing all things readily for the sake of the object beloved, St Augustine ends up saying, and it’s obvious what and who he has in mind. For Christians, the paradigm of courage is not might but martrydom.
So, then, was Jesus brave or stupid? Courage is love bearing all things readily for the sake of the object beloved, and we are the object of his love. And we might wonder whether we are worth all that trouble, considering the mess we keep making of things. And if not, then he was a fool, not for any political miscalculation, but for overestimating our value: for loving us too much. It is not an unreasonable view. But God respectfully disagrees with this self-assessment, without denying the facts of our failures. We are worth the trouble precisely because God dares to love us.
+++
Perhaps it is an obvious thing to say, that Christ is our model of courage. But then again, maybe it isn’t, if we can now better notice courage around us, in those who patiently endure hardship for the sake of those who depend on them; in those who in their vulnerability seek help and in their shame, forgiveness, because in their own healing is also the healing of relationships; in those whose only available answer to the world for this moment is the silence that keeps them from giving up altogether. Courage, in other words, not in the mighty but in the meek.
Maybe it isn’t too obvious a thing to say, if in seeing courage in Christ’s own silence before Pilate, we can now better see our own capacity for bravery, which is nothing other than the love that drives us and helps us to face our own fears. Maybe it is worth saying, if we can begin to realise that Christ, who loves us and is our courage, has brought us here together to be each others’ courage, to face together whatever comes.