The terms Christianity and Christendom have often been used interchangeably, which turns out to be a problem for at least two reasons.
The first is the notion that there was ever a singular Christianity. There were wildly different understandings of Jesus among his followers even when he was still alive, and though Christians spent centuries trying to figure out what had happened, to hammer out authorized belief, often with the help of swords, there has always been diversity within Western Christianity, as well as movements that never fell under the sway of the Western church.
The Coptic Christian communities of northeast Africa have existed since the beginning, and four of the five patriarchs, those in Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople, never consented to the primacy of Rome. The Western Church claimed the title “catholic” to assert that it was the only universal church, while the Eastern patriarchs described themselves as “orthodox,” meaning theirs was the only correct belief. Because humans…
Still, at our withering end of the Christian family tree, it is not uncommon for folks to say Christian and mean only this Roman branch and its off-shoots, especially those associated with the three branches of the Protestant Reformation as well as the Azusa Street movement that would become Pentecostalism.
The second reason we no longer tend to use the terms Christianity and Christendom as synonyms is that faithful Christians, gospel Christians like us, recognize that conflating the religion and the empire creates problems, not just the sort of thing that happens when the Pope tells Henry VIII “no more wives for you,” but also the sort of problem that occurs when a movement founded by an un-credentialed rabbi and focused on social and religious revolution becomes an institution that caters to the powerful, cons the poor, and does everything in its power to make sure that it has power and wealth.
Today, we tend to use the term “Christendom” to refer to this toxic religious movement that was co-opted by empire, and remains co-opted by empire today, the Jesus-claiming movement that embraced social Darwinism’s systemic violence while denying biological Darwinism, that believes in capitalism and colonialism, the Jesus-claiming movement that is obsessed with what LGBTQ+ folks are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms while happily electing rapists and racists to higher office. Christendom was well represented among the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021.
If the idea of a singular Christianity denies history and ignores diversity, the idea of Christendom is a perversion. If I accomplish nothing more in this life than helping a handful of people encounter Jesus and break-free from the toxicity of Christendom, it will have been a life well spent. Because Jesus is awesome, and Christendom sucks.
So let us start this morning with how Christendom would read the traditional Palm Sunday story. The entry into Jerusalem is, to them, Jesus acting out his role as king because kings are important, and you should obey yours. This gets reconfigured a bit with the Protestant Reformation, but not as much as you might think. It still operates under a rubric of wealth, power, violence, and patriarchy, which is sort-of a redundant string.
This is the theology of God as a violent egotist in the sky, God as the ultimate child abuser, a God who expects poor people to suffer in this life in exchange for a heavenly reward, which coincidentally happens to be the agenda of the rich and powerful people peddling this nonsense.
It has taken a lot of effort to whitewash Jesus, and by white I mean white, because Euro-Jesus with flowing blonde hair and blue eyes has zero resemblance to Jesus the Galilean.
But there is another way to read Palm Sunday, one that doesn’t turn God into a monster and life into a waiting room. And it starts with a little history.
We have allowed the repackaged gospel and countless maudlin movies to distort history. The simple fact is that the Roman prefect at the time of the execution of Jesus, Pontius Pilate, did not live in Jerusalem. Pilate was a notorious ethno-nationalist, and Jerusalem had little to offer besides crowds and Jews, stale air and rebellion.
As long as the Sanhedrin cooperated in extracting revenue from the poor, Pilate was happy to spend most of the year in his regional capital on the sea, Caesarea Maritima.
But the Hebrews were known as a particularly stiff-necked people. One foreign power after another had tried to get them to accept the religious syncretism of the mega-empires. Everyone else was willing to embrace new gods, hedge their bets by worshipping multiple gods. The Hebrews? No thank you. Keep your foreign gods out of here.
It didn’t even have to be gods. Just four years before the events of Holy Week, Pilate tried to install Roman standards, the famous eagles, on the Temple Mount, resulting in widespread protests that even reached Caesarea Maritima. No, Hebrews just would not embrace the benevolent rule of Rome.
And Passover, well Passover was an annual celebration of the Hebrew people’s triumph over an oppressor. If there was any time of year when rebellion was going to happen, it was Passover. So this is when Pilate came to stinking Jerusalem. This is when he had to tolerate the rabble, the noise, the stale air. This is when the city was on a hair-trigger, when anything untoward had to be crushed immediately.
So every year, just before Passover, the Roman prefect entered Jerusalem at the head of a legion, on horseback, trailed by lethal force, a reminder of the brutal power of Rome.
The entry of Jesus is, then, a protest march of sorts, a counter-narrative to the warlike entry of Rome into the holy city. In fact, in many Eastern traditions, the donkey is a symbol of peace. You rode a horse into combat, not a donkey. The gospel authors understood this not as a coronation, as the later church would see it, but as a triumph in the tradition of Rome, when triumphant generals entered the empire’s capital at the head of an army, with captives on display, and the crowds waving palm branches. But this was a parade not of captives, but of the liberated, those liberated from sin, liberated from disease, liberated from judgment. This was a triumph not of violence, but of love.
And those folks who waved the palms, who cheered?
They were good and crazy.
Why should they believe that this would-be messiah was any different than last year’s would-be messiah?
Why should this time be any different, when the Hebrew people had been crushed by powerful invaders again and again, been betrayed by the corruption and collusion of their own elite again and again?
But that’s the thing. Hope is not evidence-based. It is almost always counter to the evidence. If the evidence says something is going to happen, it isn’t hope, it is certainty.
Hope is a belief in the might be. Hope is the belief that despite all of the evidence to the contrary, humans are capable of incredible acts of love and creativity. It is choosing to see what is beautiful and amazing and crazily clinging to that sliver of light, the one that is shining under the locked door, as they cower and cry on Holy Saturday, their leader executed by the lust for wealth and power.
It is the light under the door of the Risen Lord who, and they don’t know this yet, is on the other side.
Good and crazy. Hope when things look dark, when all hope is almost lost… stubbornly deciding to believe that love wins, that humans can be more, that God is present in the world, calling us this day and every day. Belief in the things we believe, that every child is a child of God, regardless of gender, gender identity, gender expression, regardless of the color of their skin or the language that they speak, that every living creature is an entire gospel, good news in the ordering of this blue miracle circling an improbable star in an impossible universe.
Hosanna! Blessed are those who come in the name of the Lord. Hosanna!