Palm Sunday, or Pride in Protest

Preached at choral Eucharist at the chapel of King's College, London on 13th March 2019. Gospel reading Mark 11: 1-11.

In Erskineville, South-West Sydney, there is a mural of Saint George. Gilded in gold, he wears a rainbow cope and from one of his ears hangs a crucifix. This is not the Saint George who slays dragons, neither would he be particularly interested in winning the hand of the Princess of Egypt. Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou had a Greek Orthodox burial. In his life, he was a philanthropist and social justice activist, but you may know one half of popular music duo Wham!.

I mention Saint George Michael not only because ‘you gotta have faith’, but because last week was mardi gras. Mardi gras--literally 'fat tuesday' or Shrove Tuesday--is a pageant of excess and revelry before the penitential Lenten fast. From New Orleans to Rio, from Venice to Martinique, Shrovetide sees streets fill with carnival parades of dancers, samba musicians, and drag queens. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Sydney’s mardi gras also functions as Gay Pride. Ever since his untimely death, DJs Jonny Seymour and Paul Mac have been acolytes on their float, flanking a copy of this literal gay icon with two enormous candles. This copy is the only version still fully visible because Scott Marsh’s original was covered with black paint during Australia’s gay marriage referendum. By a Christian, naturally.

Parades and pageants are powerful expressions of human unity. Beyond the slogans on the banners, the sheer emotion of pride, all noise and movement and presence and excess, is that you are unabashedly there. So many bodies moving in the same direction: beautiful, exhilarating, mournful, and angry. Saint George is an icon of love, art, and beauty, but also one of grief. These things have been bedfellows of queer liberation movements, before the AIDS crisis and since. 

An enduring topic among LGBT activists today is the commodification of Pride. How it does sometimes feel like massive advert for Smirnoff. How a protest commemorating the Stonewall riots gets turned, by sponsorship from banks and Nandos, into a vapid party where we smile at cops. But, in the words of @seanbgoneill on Twitter dot com, 'Pride is a protest of course, and Ariana won’t save us, but these queens work so hard to distinguish "party" from "protest" that you’d be forgiven for thinking a queer didn’t smile for the whole of the eighties'.

Now I don’t want to do my cool youth pastor impersonation and say, ‘hey kids! the greatest pride of all is our pride in... Jesus Christ’. But I do want you to indulge me for a second while I entertain the idea that there are worse models of protest-party than Christ’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. 

In their book The Last Week, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossman remind us that not one but two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30AD. While Christ rode in from Galilee, entering from the East down the Mount of Olives, Pontius Pilate entered from the West. The week of Passover is the climax of the Jewish calendar, celebrating the Israelites’s liberation from Egyptian enslavement. Five centuries later, the Jewish people were living under another oppressive regime, and the governors of the Roman empire would flex their way into Jerusalem before every major Jewish festival to quell any uprisings. Flanked by cavalry, centurions, and banners, theirs was a demonstration of imperial strength. An assertion of a brutal status quo.

But as we hear in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’s parade into Jerusalem was also planned in advance, and it also made a point. Borg and Crossman describe it as a ‘pre-arranged counterprotest’. The symbolism at work in Christ’s counter-demonstration is lifted from the Hebrew scriptures: chapter 9 of the book of the prophet Zechariah reads, ‘tell the daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey’. The significance of the donkey extends deeper than humility, because while a warrior-king may crash in on a fine horse, the prince of peace has no need for horsepower. Zechariah emphasises this by telling us what kind of king the messiah would be: ‘He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations’.

Breviary of Isabella of Castile (c. 1497) British Library MS 18851: f96r.

The Jesus we know seems to fit such a bill. Yet in the gospel of Mark, the closest that Jesus comes to actually saying that he is the Messiah is in chapter 8, where he asks the disciples not to tell anyone that he is the Messiah. Mark’s Jesus is no charismatic leader, and his message was never, ever about himself. It is instead, Borg and Crossman suggest, a message about ‘the Kingdom of God and the way’. Jesus’s first public words in the gospel of Mark, ‘the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near’, are not said to the powerful, but to disenfranchised workers, and the physical way that he leads into the physical kingdom of God is to Jerusalem, and that is where Christ knew that he would suffer and die.

When I imagine these two processions in the year 30AD, I see the pageantries of two different kingdoms: Pilate’s assertion of the already dominant kingdom of empire, and Christ’s radical imagination of the Kingdom of God, where swords become ploughshares, the wolf lies down with the lamb, where ‘every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain’. 

Christ asserts radical equality through radical love, and protests with joy. Amid people crying ‘Hosanna’, it is a party, but it is much more importantly a protest. When we protest, we dare to imagine a future that is not yet here. When we party we love the moment, and that’s important too, but it is with joy that we transcend the moment and say ‘it gets even better than this’. I think George Michael communicated something like that when he sang, ‘I need someone to hold me,/ But I wait for something more’.

So when we march in Pride this June and pass the inevitable Christian fundamentalists with banners that say, ‘repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand’, perhaps we can say ‘I know’, and say it with pride. Because by treading the path of love in the face of adversity, we tread the path of Christ.