Palm Sunday, Sacred Power, and Institutional Critique

When we encounter a story in a sacred text, we are not meant to read that story as information.   Rather, we are meant to engage with the story and open ourselves to whatever insight may emerge.   That is why the story is considered sacred text: because it has led people to a deeper knowing and, by doing so, has brought them closer to a transformational truth.

The insight that emerges, of course, will vary from person to person and from epoch to epoch.  What arises from engaging with sacred text is always the product of the text itself, of what each person brings to the text, and of the cultural forces that surround both the text and that person.    And this is the way sacred story is supposed to function, it is what keeps it alive — that different people, in different times and places, can be led to a fresh perspective.

This Sunday, billions of Christians around the world will once again encounter the story of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, trial and execution as they observe Palm Sunday.   This is one of those years when Christians in both the Eastern and Western branches of the tradition will observe Holy Week (which Palm Sunday begins) at the same time.    The story is very familiar, and sometimes familiarity can keep us from truly engaging it in a way that opens us to something new.

This year, I contemplate that story from a very different perspective than I have before:  as a priest who has been sent away from the institutional church, and who no longer has a place in that world.    This new development in my personal life comes together with the upheaval currently unfolding in our country and in our world today.    And engaging the story of Palm Sunday through this prism leads me to find within it a profound critique of institutions, both religious and secular.

Whatever else may have been going on in the drama that led to Jesus’ death, it is the culmination of an on-going criticism of both religious and secular institutional power.   Most of what Jesus has to say in the gospels along these lines is directed at Jewish institutional religious leadership.  He does not hesitate to point out that the legalisms to which that leadership is so devoted are very much rooted in their desire to preserve their power and the power of the religious structures they serve.      At the same time, Jesus does not hesitate to show his disdain for Roman imperial power and its brutality, mainly by suggesting that Rome lacks legitimacy in what is most important and that, ultimately, Rome has no real power over him.

It is the power of his critique of these institutions that led Roman and Jewish authorities to come together in order to rid themselves of him.   The irony, of course, in doing so is that destroying Jesus of Nazareth created a fresh entry point for the power that Christians call the Christ into the world — and that power altered the course of human history.

It is tempting for Christians to argue that the enormous historical impact of the Christ Event was entirely a good thing.   But that would be naive.   Whenever sacred spiritual power enters the world in a decisive way, it always — and it must — settle itself in human beings.   And human beings, freshly animated by that power, will inevitably (and understandably) seek to preserve the moment and the movement to which it gave rise.    And that means that those human beings will settle into institutions designed to preserve, pass on, and re-create that sacred power in future generations.   And thus we arrive at religion, and religious institutions.

Those institutions, over time, become more invested in their own maintenance and survival than in the inspiration that gave rise to them.    And we see this so clearly in the history of Christianity, beginning with the alliance that was forged between church and empire in the 4th century to the alliance between mainline Protestantism and political elites in this county to the rise of evangelicalism and its logical conclusion, Christian Nationalism, which animates so much of our current political climate.  The churches ultimately align themselves with secular power in order to maintain themselves.   And secular political institutions draw on the churches to help support their legitimacy.

And thus we end up with churches and Christians who support racism, sexism, homophobia, war, violence, and mass deportations.

I am, of course, simplifying here something that is quite complex.   And it must be acknowledged that there are, in every age, those Christians and those churches that attempt to dissent from entanglement with secular power.   Even among the dissenters, however, one still tends to find a preoccupation with the maintenance and survival of the church institutions to which they belong.

It seems to me that one conclusion we must reach from any serious consideration of the remembered teaching of Jesus is that religious institutions tend over time to mute the sacred power which called them into being, to compromise the authentic and radical movement of that power and, in the worst cases, to corrupt it all together and twist it into something that is, in fact, not at all sacred.

In some churches, on Palm Sunday, as the story of Jesus’ trial and execution is told, the congregation is encouraged to play the part of the crowd surrounding Jesus, and to shout the words, “Crucify him!” at the appropriate point in the narration.   This has always struck me as a profound ritual act whose import we generally prevent ourselves from seeing.   To recite those words is to speak from the point of view of institutional corruption.  It is to choose institutional maintenance and survival over the life of this man.  And it should leave us profoundly unsettled, and to question whether our deepest loyalty is to what we call the Christ or the institution that was built on the foundation of the Christ Event.

The upheaval in our country and the world today is, in part, very much about secular institutions and their place in public life.    Jesus did not seek to destroy institutions but to transform them so that they would serve people rather than crush them.    That so many of our institutions today are being pressured or destroyed is certainly disturbing.   But this institutional chaos also raises questions about what kind of people we wish to be, what the function of politics is in our common life, and whether politically powerful institutions should be in the business of serving people or crushing them.    How many politicians there are right now who, along with those who voted for them, are so happy to yell out, “Crucify him!” to so many people they have inexplicably decided to hate.

Palm Sunday reminds us that the swirl of chaos can be a prelude to a new entry point into the world of sacred power that can settle in human beings initially in a transformative and reordering way.    This will not look like the way it has looked in the past — the memory of sacred text is quite different from the lived experience when these moments come upon us.   But Palm Sunday also leaves us this question:   when the moment arrives, will we place ourselves in the service of that transformation and reordering in favor of human liberation and evolution, or will we align ourselves with institutional power and its desire to crush those do not conform to its wishes?