The Day of the Lords: A Palm Sunday Reflection on Two Parades and One Question

By Nick Mumejian

There is a moment in Mark’s Palm Sunday account that rarely gets preached.

After the crowds have gone wild, after the cloaks have been thrown and the branches cut and the hosannas shouted — Jesus walks into the temple, looks around, and goes home for the night.

That’s it. He looked around. And left.

I find that both funny and oddly instructive. After the most dramatic entrance in the ancient world, Jesus essentially does a slow 360, nods, and heads back to Bethany. He came back the next day ready to flip tables. But on this day? He looked. He saw. And he rested before he acted.

There’s something in that for us. But first, we need to talk about the parade.

Two lords. One day.

New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have noted that on the very same day Jesus rode into Jerusalem from the east, Pontius Pilate was riding in from the west.

Every Passover — that festival celebrating liberation from empire — Rome sent a show of military force into the city. Cavalry. Imperial standards. Gleaming armor. The message was unmistakable: don’t get any ideas.

That was the parade of empire. The parade of: we have all the power, and you have none.

And then, from the other side of town, a rabbi from Galilee on a borrowed donkey.

This was not coincidence. Jesus was staging a counter-demonstration drawn straight from the prophet Zechariah: “Lo, your king comes to you, humble and riding on a donkey.” Where Caesar’s representative came on a warhorse, the kingdom of God arrived on a farm animal. Where empire announced itself with swords and soldiers, a different kind of power announced itself with people pulling off their cloaks and laying them in the mud.

The ancient prophets called moments like this “The Day of the Lord” — that hinge point when God’s justice breaks into human history. But on this particular morning, there were two lords in Jerusalem. And everything depended on which parade you were watching and which one you decided to join.

Pilate’s parade hasn’t stopped.

We would be unfaithful readers of this text if we didn’t name what is obvious: empire is still riding in from the west.

We see its parade in the deportation of neighbors who have built lives and raised children among us. We see it in federal budget proposals that strip food assistance and healthcare from the most vulnerable while expanding military spending. We see it in the slow, deliberate dismantling of institutions designed to protect the people least able to protect themselves. We see it in the message — delivered through policy and rhetoric alike — that some lives are expendable, some people don’t belong, and this is just how the world works.

Empire always wants you to believe it is inevitable. That is perhaps its most powerful weapon.

And into all of that, the Jesus story rides again. On a donkey. With borrowed everything.

The cloaks are still coming off.

What moves me most in Mark’s account isn’t the shouting. It’s the cloaks.

In the ancient world, your cloak was not a fashion statement. It was your most essential possession — warmth, collateral, shelter. Mosaic law required that if someone pledged their cloak, you had to return it before nightfall because they needed it to sleep. The cloak was irreplaceable.

And people threw them in the road.

Not because they had extras. Because the good news of a different kind of kingdom — one built on healing rather than domination, abundance rather than extraction, the nearness of God rather than the threat of Caesar — was so real to them that they could not contain themselves. Good news is kinetic. It puts bodies in motion.

German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote that “God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be comforted, it is our embrace, not God’s, that will comfort them.”

The cloak-layers understood this instinctively. The good news wasn’t something they received and filed away. It was something they joined.

Which parade are we in?

That is the question Palm Sunday keeps asking us.

Every generation gets its own Day of the Lords — that moment when empire’s procession and God’s procession are moving through the same city at the same time, and communities of faith have to decide not just what they believe, but where their bodies and their resources and their voices are going to be found.

This is ours.

As people shaped by the Baptist tradition of soul freedom and prophetic witness, we know that the church has never been called to watch the parade from the sidewalk. We have been called to be the parade — the humble, stubborn, borrowed-everything procession of people who believe that the arc of history bends toward justice and who are willing to bend with it.

Jesus looked around the temple that first Palm Sunday evening. He saw clearly what was there. He rested.

And then he went back and got to work.

So can we.