Ride the Donkey: Three Ways to Respond to Empire
Full disclosure: I wrote this sermon in a couple of hours the day before I preached it. Palm Sunday, I told myself, we're not breaking tons of new ground here. And then I sat down to actually think about it, and realized — no, actually, this might be the most relevant Sunday of the year. Because the question at the center of Palm Sunday isn't just a first-century Jewish question about Roman occupation. It's the question we are living inside of right now.
What do you do when you are up against something bigger than you? What do you do when the empire — whatever that looks like in your moment, in your life, in your country — is organized, armed, and not going anywhere? What do you do with your fear, your grief, your anger, and your desperate, stubborn hope?
There are exactly three options on the table. I've been sitting with all three of them this week, and I think you have been too.
Option One: Run Let me take you to the very end of Jeremiah's life, because that's where our Jeremiah series landed this Palm Sunday, and the timing felt almost too perfect.
Jerusalem has fallen. The Babylonian empire has done what everyone feared it would do — swept in, destroyed the city, taken most of the population into exile. What's left is a frightened remnant of people who weren't taken, trying to figure out what to do next. And to their credit, they go to Jeremiah. They say the right thing: Pray for us. Whatever God says, we will do it.
God's answer takes ten days. Even for Jeremiah — the prophet — it takes ten days to get a word from God. I find that both frustrating and deeply comforting. The answer, when it finally comes, is: Stay. Don't run. I will build you up and not pull you down, plant you and not pluck you up (Jeremiah 42:10). Whatever you do, God says, don't retreat to Egypt.
And what do they do? They go to Egypt. They call Jeremiah a liar, pack their bags, and head for the border — and they drag the old prophet with them.
Here's what I want you to notice: they didn't disobey because God was unclear. They disobeyed because it was scary to do what God said. The answer required trust, and trust in an uncertain future felt impossible when Egypt — a known quantity, a familiar place — was right there. Even if Egypt meant chains. Even if it meant returning to a very old kind of captivity.
Sometimes the chains that are familiar feel safer than the freedom that's unfamiliar.
We know this feeling. We run back to the jobs that were killing us, the relationships that were shrinking us, the ideologies that were suffocating us — because at least we know how those cages work. The unknown freedom is scarier than the known cage. That's the first option: retreat to what you know, even when what you know is a prison.
Option Two: Fight About 165 years before Jesus walked into Jerusalem on a donkey, a Jewish family did something genuinely extraordinary. Their name was the Maccabees — a nickname meaning the hammer — and when a Greek empire moved into their land, desecrated their temple, and told them to assimilate or suffer, they picked up actual weapons and fought back.
Judas Maccabeus and his family led a military revolt against the Greeks. And they won. They marched back into Jerusalem as conquerors, cleaned out the temple by force, and became national heroes. This is what Hanukkah celebrates — the miracle of the oil and the rededication of the temple after the Maccabean victory. And when Judas Maccabeus marched into that city, the crowd lined the streets waving palm branches. Victory banners. Military triumph.
This is the context that matters enormously when Jesus rides into Jerusalem 165 years later and the crowd starts waving palm branches. They knew exactly what that image meant. They were quoting a story back at him. Do what the Maccabees did. Drive out the Romans the way they drove out the Greeks. We have been waiting for you.
The Maccabees were heroes. They were brave. Their way worked — for a while. But fighting fire with fire has a ceiling. Violence wins battles and loses the very thing you were fighting for. The Maccabees held their land for a generation, and then the next empire showed up. And the next. The hammer has never been the final answer.
Option Three: Ride the Donkey So here is what Jesus actually does, and I want you to feel how strange and specific and deliberate it is.
On the western side of Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate — Rome's governor over Judea — is leading a military parade into the city. This was standard procedure for Passover. When a major Jewish festival brought hundreds of thousands of pilgrims into Jerusalem, Rome showed up in force to remind everyone who was actually in charge. War horses. Centurions. Gleaming armor. The full display of imperial power rolling through the western gate.
Simultaneously, from the east, Jesus is entering the city. Same city. Same festival. Same destination — the temple. But everything else is different. He is riding a donkey. He has no weapons, no army, no display of force. Generals rode war horses. Peaceful kings rode donkeys. The contrast was not accidental. It was the entire point.
Two processions, the same city, the same festival, and opposite claims about how power works.
It would be like responding to a military parade by riding through the streets on a bicycle. And the crowd saw it and understood it and — here's the remarkable thing — they joined him anyway. They started shouting Hosanna, which is Hebrew for God, save us. Please. Save us. They were quoting Psalm 118 directly, the ancient parade liturgy: Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord (Psalm 118:26).
This was not a pep rally. It was a prayer. A desperate, public, politically illegal prayer, shouted within earshot of Roman soldiers who did not tolerate rival kings. Shouting Hosanna to the Son of David — to the heir of the royal line — was not a safe thing to do. When the religious authorities told Jesus to silence the crowd, he refused: "If I keep them quiet, even the rocks will cry out" (Luke 19:40). The parade was going to happen. The only question was whether people would join it.
What Leipzig Taught Me About Palm Sunday
In 1982, a Lutheran pastor named Christian Führer began hosting Monday evening prayer services at St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, East Germany. This was behind the Iron Curtain, under surveillance by the Stasi — the secret police. A handful of people showed up: some dissidents, some ordinary folks who had nowhere else to speak freely. The communist state couldn't fully control the church, so the church became the one space where people could breathe.
They met for seven years. Mostly unnoticed.
Then, in the fall of 1989, something shifted. Dozens became hundreds. Hundreds became thousands. By October 9th — two days after the regime's 40th anniversary celebration — the government had seen enough. 8,000 armed security forces were deployed. Hospitals stockpiled blood reserves and cleared beds in preparation for casualties. There were credible rumors of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown.
That evening, over 2,000 people packed into St. Nicholas Church for the prayer service. When it ended, they walked outside. Waiting for them in the streets were 70,000 more people. Holding candles. Pastor Führer described the discipline of the candles: it takes two hands to carry one, one to hold it and one to shield the flame. Which means you cannot throw a stone. You cannot swing a fist. The candle was the nonviolence, built right into the act. 70,000 people processed through the streets of Leipzig carrying fire, chanting Wir sind das Volk — We are the people. The soldiers refused to fire. A month later, the Berlin Wall fell.
A procession out of a house of worship, into the streets of an empire city, carrying not weapons but lights. I don't know a better image of Palm Sunday than that.
Living in the Saturday
The crowd that lined the streets on Palm Sunday had no idea what the week would bring. They didn't know about the arrest in the garden, the kangaroo trial, the cross on Friday, the silence on Saturday. They joined the parade before they knew the ending. And I think that is exactly what trust looks like — not certainty, but movement.
We are living in the in-between. In the long middle of stories that haven't resolved. Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Between the world as it is and the world God is promising. And Holy Saturday — the day of silence and locked doors and grief that doesn't yet know it has a reason to hope — Holy Saturday is the hardest day to sit in.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to: even when the crowd on Palm Sunday watched Jesus die on Friday, even when they locked the doors on Saturday out of fear, Sunday was still coming. They didn't know it. But it was coming.
The invitation is not to run away to Egypt and not to pick up a sword. It is to keep marching in the parade.
To choose joy as an act of defiance. To trust that the donkey beats the war horse even when the evidence is thin. To refuse to let the empire — any empire — tell you who you are or what is possible. The psalmist put it plainly, writing from inside his own moment of being pushed to the edge: "I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone" (Psalm 118:17, 22).
The rejected thing became the foundation. That is the whole Easter arc in two verses.
So here is where I land, and where I hope you'll land with me. You can retreat to what's familiar. You can fight fire with fire. Or you can ride the donkey — showing up unarmed, in public, carrying something the empire doesn't have and can't manufacture: love, humility, stubborn and inconvenient hope. ** The parade is still moving. Join it.**
