Power and Ruination

Reflections on the Lectionary for Palm Sunday

Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. Russian icon by an anonymous artist. Date unknown. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia.

Out of all the gospel-writers, Luke keeps his eyes most fixed on power. Out of all the evangelists, Luke is the one who stays preoccupied with the way violence hangs like a sword over Jesus’ life, ready to fall. Of all the authors who set out to tell Jesus’ story, Luke is the one most intent on reminding the reader that Jesus was never going to die a natural death.

Why? We aren’t really sure, because Luke doesn’t tell us who he is or anything about himself, including his name (which comes from tradition and not the text itself), and much less does he tell us anything about his motivations. (The common claim that Luke was a physician turns out to not have much basis in either the text or in history). Biblical scholars tend to think that Luke was a historian, or at least that he had a historian’s sensibilities, and that he cared about things like sources and contemporary events. But when it comes to Luke’s special emphases—like his focus on the viciousness and vaguery of Roman power, and his insistence that the world was about to experience an overturning in which the mighty would fall and the lowly would rise—we are left to speculate about what might have motivated him to tell the story like he did.

Here's a question: Are you more preoccupied with national politics today than you were a year ago, or less? I know I am far more consumed with politics today than I was a year ago. During the Biden administration, I was able to give my brain a rest from the constant vigilance that I felt during the first Trump administration. I found myself tuning out from politics for days or weeks at a time; I found myself trusting that someone was out there doing more or less the right thing. That wasn’t always true, of course; the Biden administration did plenty of things that I disagreed with, and plenty of things that were wrong. But I didn’t live those four years with the feeling that the world rested on a knife’s edge, like I did from 2017 to 2021, and like I am doing these days. (Maybe you don’t share my politics; in that case, you might be resting easy now, and you might recall 2021-2025 as a time of anxiety and fear). These days I am living and breathing politics, because I am filled with fear and anxiety about the people in power and how the world’s most powerful government is choosing to wield its strength.

I think that should give us a clue to Luke’s perspective. Why does Luke focus so persistently on Roman power and Roman violence, and why does he insist that a change must be coming? I think there’s a good chance that it’s because Luke himself lived in the shadow of that imperial power and violence, and he knew very well the way inequality worked, and that he felt like he was on the wrong side of those things. Some scholars think Luke had a powerful and well-placed patron, Theophilus, who is mentioned in both Luke 1:3 and Acts 1:1. Theophilus, many of those scholars think, must have been a Roman official of some kind—which explains why Luke uses a special term, usually translated “most excellent,” that elsewhere he always reserves for Roman officials. Luke, then, might have been writing the document we call the Gospel of Luke for a Roman official, and using it to describe Roman power in a way that might convince that Roman official to act kindly or peacefully toward Luke and other followers of Jesus. Or Luke might have been writing for someone else or for no one at all in particular, and his descriptions of Roman power and empire-driven inequality might have been simply the way he felt about it. Either way, we can follow his preoccupation all the way through the gospel. Luke begins his gospel with time-stamps tied to Roman power (the reign of Herod, the empire of Augustus, the governorship of Quirinius), and like the other gospels his story reaches a crescendo in the story of Jesus’ crucifixion by Roman hands. Along the way Luke takes care to point out the ways Jesus was meant to subvert both norms and systems. He has Jesus read from Isaiah in the synagogue and release to captives and good news to the poor, he adds curses on the wealthy and powerful to the Beatitudes, he includes parables like the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, he has Mary exclaim the Magnificat with its bringing-down of the mighty—all specific to Luke, and all aimed at bringing the world’s injustice into relief. In his second volume, which we know as the Book of Acts, Luke frequently points out the fecklessness and corruption of Roman officials, and he spends much of the book detailing the way Jesus’ followers, like Jesus, meet resistance and violence from a powerful status quo wherever they go. And any time he gets a chance, Luke describes Jesus in ways that hint—but never quite come out and say—that Jesus is an ideal alternative to the power of Caesar.

That’s where this week’s lectionary readings come in. If you follow the church year very closely, you likely already know that Sunday April 13^th is Palm Sunday, the last Sunday of Lent and the final Sunday before Easter. Palm Sunday commemorates the beginning of the end of Jesus’ life, which in the way the Gospels tell the story is the end of the beginning of his importance. Palm Sunday recounts the moment when Jesus processed into Jerusalem like a king, only to be swept up by the power of Rome and fed into its violent machinery. Palm Sunday is a kind of kickoff to Holy Week—a week focused on the inevitability of suffering and death. But Palm Sunday itself is a strange celebration, like stopping by a birthday party on the way to a funeral; Palm Sunday offers one last triumph before everything falls to hell.

All four gospels tell a version of this story. As is the case in many other places, Luke follows Mark’s version closely. (Luke also follows Matthew’s version closely, if you prefer to see it that way). There are, to my eye, three major differences between Mark’s version and Luke’s version, and all three might tell us something about Luke’s preoccupations and anxieties as an author and storyteller. The first is that Luke, alone among the Gospels, says nothing about palm branches; the crowd only lays cloaks on the ground to line Jesus’ path. The second is that Luke alone omits the acclamation “Hosanna” from the crowd. The third is that instead of a straightforward quotation of Psalm 118:26, as the other gospels use, Luke changes the wording of the Psalm from “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD” to “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the LORD.” Other gospels include references to kingship too; Matthew calls him Son of David, Mark refers to the “kingdom of our father David,” and John evokes “even the king of Israel.” But Luke is the most forthright in having the crowd proclaim Jesus as a king. This might not be an accident.

Assuming that Luke was sitting down to write his gospel with some version of the Gospel of Mark in front of him, why would he make these three changes—removing the palm branches, removing the Hosannas, and having the crowd call Jesus the king? Some scholars think that Luke was trying to avoid the specifically nationalistic overtones of the palms (because palms sometimes functioned as a symbol of Judea) and the word Hosanna (which was closely tied to Jewish monarchy and not necessarily germane to a more universal idea of kingship). It’s also possible that Luke was trying to tidy up the text, and having the crowd lay one thing on the road rather than two made it simpler. Here, we are squarely in the realm of speculation. But I want to zoom out just a little bit, and notice that whatever his specific reasons, Luke is fiddling with the text wherever Judean kingship is in view. He’s pausing to meddle wherever something kingly appears, or wherever he thinks it ought to appear. Luke is intervening in Mark’s storytelling (and intervening in the Psalm) in ways that suggest that Luke was hyper-aware of the need to get this story of kingship and power right.

Why? My guess is that it’s for the same reason I have found myself thinking about national politics a lot more since election day: because it was such an inescapable and dominant part of the world. He was anxious about questions of power and violence for the same reason I am—because his world caused him to be consumed by those questions. Luke was writing his gospel in the years or decades after the conclusion of the Jewish War, and so he either witnessed or at the very least knew about the incredible destruction that the conflict had brought and the immense human suffering it had inflicted. When Luke described the Galilee and the Jerusalem of the 20s, he did so in full knowledge of its wreckage in the 60s and 70s, and when Luke told the story of Jesus in the prime of his life and career, he did so in full anticipation of Jesus’ death on a Roman cross. Luke’s preoccupation with power and his anxieties about status were a product of hindsight. When he was telling the story of Jesus, Luke was really telling the story of how another way had once felt possible, and how that possibility of change had been ground up in the machinery of empire. The story wasn’t over yet, for Luke—he had put his faith in the resurrection—but he knew that the story didn’t end with Jesus on the throne in Jerusalem, the way many people had thought it would.

So when it came time to tell the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem—the story we know as Palm Sunday, even in Luke’s palm-less version—Luke was telling two stories at once. He was telling the story of all the expectations that were bound up in that moment—the acclamations of a crowd, the kingly pretensions of a donkey borrowed from Zechariah 9, and the cloaks thrown down in memory of 2 Kings 9:13. Luke had Jesus parading like the king the crowd had thought he would be—like an emperor in procession, even, surveying his subjects. But Luke was also telling the story of failed hopes and unfulfilled dreams, and the way none of it had turned out the way they had thought it would. When he came to the moment where Mark had the crowd cry Hosanna, Luke thought it better to leave out that poignant word belonging to a nation that had been, by that time, destroyed. Where Mark had the crowd cut palm branches to hoist high in the air, Luke left them out, perhaps remembering the vast and famous date palm orchards that had burned in the war. And when it came to Psalm 118, Luke might have paused, remembering that Psalm 118:26 was one of the greetings pilgrims would shout at each other upon their approach to Jerusalem for Passover. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD, they would call out to each other, but by the time Luke was writing, no pilgrims approached Jerusalem for any festivals anymore, and Jerusalem was in ruins. Blessed is the king who comes, Luke wrote, both remembering the day it had been true and imagining a day when it might become true again.

The ruination of Judea must have loomed large in Luke’s imagination, and it haunts his telling of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. It’s a story about loss and trauma and violence, dressed up like a triumph and a victory. The memory of that procession was a source of anxiety for Luke, a sore spot, and that’s why Luke slowed down there and meddled with the story Mark had told, swapping out a word here and deleting other words there. Years later, Luke still wasn’t sure what to make of the moment when Jesus had ridden the donkey into Jerusalem like a king, and he still couldn’t be sure what it had meant. Like us, living in 2025, Luke was still too much in the middle of things to see what the big picture looked like. Like us, he could tell that something pivotal was happening, and potentially something cataclysmic, but he couldn’t be certain what it was.

Like Luke in the late first century, we are left to wonder what to make of the events of our world—what meaning to assign to the various triumphs and parades and exercises of state violence that cross our daily news feeds. Like Luke, we are left to wonder whether we are living through the end of something old or possibly the beginnings of something new, whether we are seeing the last days of one thing or the first days of another, or both. Like Luke, we are left to sift through ruination, discerning which direction the world is about to turn.