Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025

This psalm is packed with familiar verses. If you’re not in the pattern of reflecting on the psalms
as part of your homiletic work, this could be a good beginning psalm for your own personal work
in preparation of the sermon and the worship service. It could also be a sound decision for
approaching the poetic with your congregation if they’re regularly hearing the psalms in the
worship service. I don’t know if Palm Sunday is the day to start something new with the
congregation, but you sure could try if you want!
The process preacher ought to be keen to aesthetic value and the efficacy of beauty in faith.
Many people might come to Christian process theology as they wrestle with issues of theodicy,
liberation with meaningful metaphysics, or the possible relationships between religion and
science in the modern western senses of both of those words. One of those routes might describe
your story. If so, that’s good. Glad you’re here. For others, process theology holds attentive
space to beauty and poiesis that resists the instrumentalization that seems to reign in our
capitalist societies.
The poetry of the psalms is a chance to embrace the sacramental gift of beauty. Contra the
stillness of anaesthesia, beauty evokes the lively motility of peace, enlarging our attention to
worlds beyond the discourses of doctrines, theoremata, and texts. How threatening might beauty
and aesthetic depth actually be in Christian traditions where the homiletic proclamation takes
center stage?
How might even the most familiar of the psalms invite us into the humbling wonder and
peaceability of beauty, preachers? How could poetic craft enliven our homiletic work? our
liturgical lives? On a Sunday that is full of lively motility, how might your sermon harmonize
with the whole liturgical experience so that the congregation might experience an intimate
transcendence as members in the festal procession?

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If you scroll down, you’ll notice that, for this commentary, I’m only focusing on the Palm
Sunday reading from St. Luke’s gospel. Bruce Epperly is writing the commentary for the rest of
Holy Week, and I trust that his treatment of Christ’s Passion will be helpful in your homiletic

preparation should your congregation observe Passion Sunday as well as Palm Sunday. For now,
let’s have a parade.
One of the questions in the “Theology & Doctrine” portion of my ordination paperwork in The
United Methodist Church was, “How do you interpret the statement, ‘Jesus Christ Is Lord’?”
Every Palm Sunday, I ask myself the question again. This year, I invite you to join me in this
discipline. The Lord needs the colt, after all.
“Jesus Christ Is Lord” posits a clear power distinction between Christ and Not-Christ. When we
proclaim that Jesus Chris is Lord, I think we need to get a little grammatical. What’s the
modifier, and what is being modified in the sentence? Does Lord modify what it means to be
Jesus Christ, or does Jesus Christ modify what it means to be Lord?
Palm Sunday might be one of the clearest examples of the political weight of the statement
“Jesus Christ is Lord” and the question at hand. Jesus is riding on a colt, disciples are praising
God with joyfully loud voices, and the crowd is chanting a verse from the very Psalm that we
read just earlier: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD. We bless you from
the house of the LORD” (118:26). The procession-in-process evokes the Roman Imperial
Triumph and the Passover festal sacrifice procession at the same time. Whether the one on the
colt intends to look like a combination of a conquering Caesar, a High Priest, and the Paschal
Sacrifice or not, the author of Luke-Acts effectively sets that exact scene. The author provokes
Christian reflection at the intersections of creaturely humility, Imperial power, religious practice,
and Christic revelation.
You may bristle at the “Lordship of Jesus,” for the phrase and concept has been co-opted by
centuries of kyriarchical powers and principalities that have often enacted might-makes-right
ethics with Christian language and symbols. These efforts answer my question above by saying
that “Lord” modifies what it means to be “Jesus Christ.” Christian nationalism, The Divine Right
of Kings, and countless other authoritarian, republican, oligarchic, theocratic, totalitarian, and/or
plutocratic regimes have repeated this evil equation. Though certainly not alone, feminist and
womanist theologians call our attention to the oppressive and exploitative use of power in the
vast diversity of our relationships, and process preachers would do well to heed their critiques.
People who are called to solidarity with the oppressed, broken, despised, disappeared, and killed
victims of our world are right to hesitate to ascribe Lordship to anyone when every “lord” around
is so violently far from loving.
Yet there is that one on the colt. We’re caught up in a parade, you and I, and the crowd keeps
using this “Lord” word about a man who has yet to live like the “lords” around.

The whole fabric of Luke’s gospel suggests that this one on the colt is, in fact, living a different
lordship. On Palm Sunday, I think the preacher needs to clearly engage this colt-riding Lord. For
the Christian, “Jesus Christ” must unequivocally modify what it means to be “Lord.” As “Lord”
is modified, so must understandings of lordship and the reign of the Lord be modified in light of
Jesus Christ.
The process preacher and congregation might quickly recognize that proclaiming Jesus Christ as
Lord, then, is not ascribing cosmic omnipotence to Jesus! Rather, Jesus redefines what it means
to be a ruler through the lens of the incarnation, life, death on the cross, and resurrection!
On this Palm Sunday, with this parade heading toward the cross, the scandal of Jesus Christ’s
crucifixion is not, then, that an omnipotent ruler of the cosmos was killed. The scandal of the
cross is that our definition of a lord who is worthy of adoration and discipleship was wrong.
For Christ to be rightly called “Lord,” we, as the Body of Christ, must recognize that our ruler is
the one in whom both the crucified and crucifier are reconciled to one another and made right in
the loving-justice of God. Reconciliation and loving-justice are the benchmarks for what it
means to be properly understood as a ruler of any sort.
This parade, then, is neither Caesar’s Triumph of conquest nor the passive victim’s ritual march
to the sharpened blade. With this gospel lesson, the process preacher has the opportunity to
critique the real sociopolitical hierachies and kyriarchies that have benefitted from imagining
God as some omnipotent ruler over all. These hierarchies and kyriarchies use omnipotence
theology to legitimze the King as a Divine Right Monarch to whom all earthly authority is given,
the Master as God’s appointed governor over the unruly and savage other, or the manager to be
the wholly other over and apart from the workers. The reign of a ruler who is marked by
reconciliation and loving-justice, however, cannot be the triumphal Kingdom, for we are
becoming co-laborers in the gospel with the Lord as we follow our head.
In this parade, on the way with the one on the colt, we are called into solidarity through the
incarnation and life of Jesus of Nazareth. We are called to respond to God’s lures in the gospel
work of feeding, quenching, clothing, caring for, healing, freeing, giving sight, and proclaiming
God’s Reign as marked by the Jubilation of debt forgiveness, reallocation of land, and care of
creation to the people oppressed by sinning structures and persons of this world!

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Tom is an ordained United Methodist Elder and process theologian. He earned his PhD from Boston University School of Theology, where he developed a process theology of Holy Communion in a sacramental ecotheology. Currently, he serves as the Acquiring Editor at Orbis Books, an affiliate faculty member in Wesleyan and Methodist theology at Memphis Theological Seminary, the Lecturer in United Methodist History and Doctrine at Yale Divinity School, and on the steering committee of the Open and Relational Theologies Unit of the AAR.