SERMON SPOTLIGHT: Palm Sunday. March 29, 2026.
The Rev. Aron Kramer
Palm Sunday, 2026
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 21:1-11
I was with some friends who are mostly unchurched, and they asked what I thought. My first response was that he was a day too early, tomorrow, today, is the day he needs to be riding down the street proclaiming Jesus is King.
But then my friends asked about Palm Sunday, and I told them: Jesus never wanted to be King, never wanted to function as a King, never behaved as a King. Even this day that we celebrate year after year was not an effort to make himself a King. It was a moment where Jesus was making fun of the empire, making fun of those who desire significant power and prestige. Jesus never wanted to be King. Jesus wanted something else.
Which leaves me asking the question Matthew asks at the end of this passage: Who is this person?
There is a moment, just before Jesus enters Jerusalem, that Matthew wants us to notice. He's come over the Mount of Olives. The city is spread out below. Everything that is about to happen, the shouts, the cloaks on the road, the anger, the arrest, the cross, all of it is still ahead. Jesus has not yet arrived. But he has made his choice. He has sent for the donkey. He knows exactly what he is doing.
On this day we call Palm Sunday, humor me for a moment, and imagine it was about this same time in Jerusalem, in the spring of the year 30, two processions entered Jerusalem.
The first came from the west. Pontius Pilate rode up from his seaside palace at Caesarea Maritima, as he did every year at Passover, at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. War horses, leather armor, helmets catching the sun, golden eagles on poles, the rhythmic crash of boots on stone. Rome is here. Rome is watching. Rome is in charge. He came because Passover made him nervous, a festival celebrating slaves walking free from a superpower, the Jews liberation from Egypt, has a way of doing that.
At the same time, from the east, our procession was coming down the Mount of Olives. No cavalry. No drums. Jesus, sitting on a borrowed donkey, surrounded by fishermen and tax collectors and people who had been healed of things that should have killed them, or kept them away from the community gathered here in Jerusalem. The crowd was not chanting songs of the empire, they were crying out a single word, Hosanna, which does not mean "hooray." It means save us. It means we have nowhere else to turn. It means please.
Two processions. Two completely different languages. Two utterly incompatible visions of how the world is ordered and who is in charge of it.
What slips past us if we don't look closely is that this second procession is not improvised. Jesus planned it. He arranged for the donkey, in Matthew's telling, not one but two: a donkey and her colt. He sends disciples ahead with a sort of password: "the Lord needs them." This is choreography. The writer of Matthew has Jesus staging a scene with deliberate precision.
Matthew reaches back into Israel's oldest promises and pulls them into this moment, Zechariah's vision of a humble king on a donkey, and beneath that, Genesis, Jacob's blessing of Judah, the founding promise of Israel's royal line. Two animals. Two ancient promises. Converging on a dirt road outside Jerusalem.
Everything Israel had ever hoped for, every prophet, every promise that survived exile and occupation, is walking into the city right now, on a borrowed donkey, surrounded by people who don't fully know what they are a part of.
This is often how God speaks. Not in spite of the ordinariness of the scene, but through it. Humility, dependence, vulnerability these are not side effects of Matthew's Jesus message. Humility, dependence, vulnerability, these are the message. This is what the Kingdom of God sounds like, and it sounds nothing like Pilate's drums.
Matthew tells us that when Jesus entered, the whole city was shaken, the Greek word eseisthe, from which we get our word, seismology. An earthquake word. I used to read that as colorful exaggeration. But Matthew uses this word only twice more in his entire gospel: when Jesus dies on the cross, and when the angel rolls away the stone on Easter morning.
Three profound tremors. The city shakes when Jesus arrives. The earth shakes when Jesus dies. The ground shakes when the tomb becomes empty. Matthew is not being dramatic. He is being theological. Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter are not three separate events. They are one event, experienced in three waves. Today is the first tremor of the earthquake that will change everything.
As Jesus enters the city, the people ask the natural question: "Who is this?"
The crowd gives the only answer they have: "This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee." They name him by his humanity, his geography, his vocation. And Matthew, remarkably, doesn't correct them. Because for Matthew, those human identifiers are not obstacles to understanding who Jesus is. They are where God has chosen to be found.
When God decided to speak most clearly, most fully, most finally, God did not send a voice from heaven or write in fire on the Temple wall. God sent a human being down a dusty road on a borrowed donkey, surrounded by confused and desperate people crying out in the only words they had. People just like us, right here, right now.
In a few days you will be asked again: Who is this? You will be asked on Thursday, in an upper room, when the one who we think should be served becomes the one who serves. You will be asked on Friday, when the one who shook the city hangs silent on a cross and the earth shakes again. You will be asked on Saturday, in silence and stories of our religious history, and then, one more time, the ground will shake.
Pay attention to your answer. Not the answer you give with your lips in a moment of enthusiasm, the crowd does that today, and we know how the week ends. The answer that matters is the one you give with your life. With what you do with your cloak. With whose procession you join. With whether you can still hear the voice of God in the places where it sounds least like power.
Jesus has arrived. The city is shaking. The question is on our hearts. Who is this?
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