Palm Sunday is one of the most misunderstood moments in the Bible.
Most of us have a Sunday-school picture of it in our heads. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. Crowds wave palm branches. Everyone shouts “Hosanna!” Cute. Triumphant. Pretty.
That’s not what’s happening.
What’s happening is a political confrontation. The people lining the streets are not gathered to celebrate a kind teacher. They are gathered because they think the Messiah has finally come to throw out the Romans. They are expecting a king. They are expecting a war. They are expecting Jesus to mount a horse, raise an army, and take Jerusalem back by force.
That’s what Messiahs do, in their understanding. That’s the script.
And Jesus shows up on a donkey.
A donkey is not a war animal. A donkey is a peasant’s animal. A donkey is what you ride when you don’t have a horse, or when you’re deliberately mocking the very idea of military conquest. The crowd is screaming for power, and Jesus shows up on a punchline.
By Friday, the same crowd will scream “Crucify him.” Because he refused to give them the kingdom they wanted. He refused the political project. He refused power.
He kept refusing it his whole ministry.
Every time someone offered Jesus power, he turned it down. Every time. Including from the devil himself.
The wilderness was a power test
Read Matthew 4. Jesus is in the wilderness. The devil shows up with three offers.
Offer one: Turn these stones into bread. Translation: use your power to feed yourself, prove yourself, take the shortcut. Jesus says no.
Offer two: Throw yourself off the temple. Prove you’re the Son of God by making God catch you. Translation: spectacle. Influence. The kind of viral moment that builds a following overnight. Jesus says no.
Offer three: I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world, all their splendor and authority, if you’ll just bow down to me. Translation: skip the cross. Skip the suffering. Skip the slow work of redemption. Just take political power and use it to fix everything.
Jesus says no.
Read that third temptation again. The devil offers Jesus political power over every nation on earth — which Jesus could have used to do unimaginable good. He could have ended slavery overnight. He could have outlawed every injustice. He could have written the Sermon on the Mount into law in every kingdom.
He says no.
Why? Because the means are inseparable from the ends. You cannot bring the Kingdom of God by bowing to the methods of Satan. The minute Jesus picks up the sword to enforce his vision, his vision has already been corrupted into something else.
This is not a small theological point. This is the fault line that runs through everything.
The Right’s power idol
I’m going to say something that’s going to make some of you angry, and I’m saying it with love.
The American church on the right has spent the last decade convincing itself that political power is the way to bring about the Kingdom of God. “If we just elect the right people, we’ll save the country. If we just appoint the right judges, we’ll restore Christian values. If we just take back the culture, we’ll bring about revival.”
This is the third temptation, dressed in a flag.
Whenever Christians become willing to compromise the character of Christ in order to secure the power of Caesar, we have already lost. We have stopped being a Kingdom that belongs to no nation and become a tribe trying to hold onto territory. We have stopped being followers of the donkey-riding Messiah and become customers of the war-horse fantasy.
The cross is the ultimate critique of every political project — including Christian ones. The Kingdom of God doesn’t advance by the methods of empire. It never has. It never will.
The Left’s power idol
If the right’s power idol is cultural and political dominance, the left’s power idol is something subtler but just as real: coercive moral consensus.
It looks like this: “If we can just shame people loudly enough, fast enough, hard enough, we can force them to comply with what we believe is right. If we can use the levers of institutional power — corporate, academic, governmental — to require everyone to affirm our moral framework, we’ll bring about the just society.”
That’s not love. That’s a different flavor of the same idol. It’s still using force to bring about a vision of the good. It’s still skipping the cross to grab the kingdom.
The left will use cancellation, social shame, and institutional pressure to enforce moral conformity. The right will use legislation, judicial appointments, and cultural dominance to enforce moral conformity. Different methods. Same fundamental move. Both are convinced that if we just have enough power, we can fix this.
Jesus already told us how that ends.
The ridiculous strategy of the cross
Here’s what’s almost impossible for modern Americans to wrap our heads around. The early church had no political power. None. They were a tiny, persecuted, weird minority in the Roman Empire. They had no army. No senators. No judges. No cultural cachet. No platforms. No leverage of any kind.
And they changed the world.
Within three centuries, the empire that crucified their leader had bowed to him. Not because they organized a voting bloc. Not because they took over institutions. Not because they cancelled the right people or elected the right Caesar. Because they loved each other in ways that made no sense. They cared for the poor. They took in the abandoned. They forgave their persecutors. They died singing.
The early church did not advance the Kingdom by power. They advanced it by faithful weakness.
Paul put it like this: “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)
That’s not poetry. That’s strategy.
The Kingdom of God moves through people who are willing to lose. To not retaliate. To absorb suffering rather than inflict it. To let go of the lever rather than pull it.
Faithful weakness is the way.
A question to sit with
This week, name your power fantasy. Be honest. What does the daydream look like? “If only my side won the election… if only my candidate became president… if only the laws got rewritten… if only the culture finally agreed with me…”
Then ask yourself:
Would Jesus have signed up for that? Or would he have walked away from it the way he walked away from the third temptation?
Most of us are operating on a power-fantasy version of the gospel. Jesus offered us something else. Something harder. Something that goes through a cross before it gets to a resurrection.
Next week, the final article: Hope as a Posture, Not a Party. What it looks like to live with resurrection in your bones when both sides keep insisting the world is ending.
Comments are wide open. Where does this hit you? Have you noticed a power fantasy in yourself — left or right? What’s the hardest part about letting go of it? I’ll go first if you’ll go second.
Forward this to someone you’ve been arguing politics with. The donkey beats the war horse every single time.
