Jesus preached the kingdom of God. In today’s gospel, we catch a window into the subversiveness of Jesus. He is most anti-king king. When Jesus preached the kingdom of God, his audience would have images and association kingship—such as Kings as David from Jewish history or immediately Herod Antipater or Tiberius Caesar. People would have imagined Jesus’ kingdom with notions of royalty, power, luxury, and privilege. The Emperor Constantine declared Jesus Christ the Pantocrator (Ruler of the entire Universe), hoping that Christians would understand his own title Emperor as mirroring the imperial rule of Christ. For centuries after, Christians worshipped Christ the King and eventually set aside the last Sunday before the start of Advent to honor the Christ the King.
Some of Jesus’ disciples and later Christians missed the intentions of what Jesus meant by God’s kingdom. David Boulton in his book, Who On Earth is Jesus?, writes,

The historical Jesus was a first-century Jew in a Hellenized Roman empire, immersed in a monotheistic Judaism…. The kingdom he preached and promised was a kingdom conceived in with the particular, distinctive religious and social culture, expressed (and subtly modified) in the language of the culture. His glimpse of an alternative reality, his envisioned paradise regained, was a kingdom; the king was God. There was no other language available to a Galilean peasant-artisan unacquainted with Philo and Plato….

.Some of Jesus’ disciples literalized his message about God’s kingdom, and even his Jewish opponents and the Romans literalized their understanding of God’s kingdom. All those followers of imperial Jesus literalized his kingdom message to support an imperial Christianity, often violent, prone to military aggression and spiritual conquest, and globalization.

But as I have said so often, Jesus was not a literalist, he spoke in metaphor and parable, fully of irony and paradox, often with a flair what we might call “camp” with a critical, prophetic or queer edge. He preached God’s dream for us, a world order that was inclusive, without hierarchy, without violence; sharing of goods, wealth, and food; filled with love. He understood that this alternative reality that he called kingdom was to understand that we lived as if God was really part of our world, living in our midst. His expectation was that we lived with love for neighbor and enemy alike, forgiveness extended beyond what we could imagine, practicing compassion as God’s compassion for us, and peace-making. It was a place where the first were last, and the last and least were the most important. The only human competition was that his disciples would compete to be the least in humility like a child and utmost generous of their service, time, and whatever they would share.

Many Christians for ages have interpreted “kingdom of God” with a patriarchal lens or male conception of kingdom and power fused together. Christians like Constantine and the succession of Christian leaders have elevated Jesus to King of the Universe, the imperial Christ. They used it to divinize their kingship, papacy, or leadership. Or most recently, kingdom is used to spiritualize the gospel. In other words, Jesus’ kingdom message is not about political reality but spiritual and heavenly reality, that is, the world to come in heaven. This has allowed Christians to support that status quo and ignore the poor.
Kingdom is certainly a political and social symbol used by Jesus. It has personal and spiritual dimensions. When Jesus, however, spoke the Aramaic malkuta dismayya or “kingdom of God,” it has the meaning of God’s ruling or predominant actions. Diarmuid O’Murchu translates it into the English idiom, “empowerment,” but qualifies it even further with “empowerment through mutuality.” The famous Jesus Dominic Crossan scholar, with whom I spent time at CSUN last Tuesday, translates it “companionship of empowerment.” Now these translations by “empowerment through mutuality” or “companionship of empowerment” open up new images of God not as patriarchal ruler and judge but co-creator in our midst—Emmanuel, God with us.

For Jesus, God was king unlike all kings and rulers. God’s rule was “queer,” meaning “not fitting in, strange, at odds with, out of place, disruptive, revolutionary, dangerous, outside the box, or my word “mischievous.” It is a topsy-turvy non-ruling but luring us through unconditional gift and love.
The Temple high priest and his colleagues brought Jesus before Pilate with the charges: “He perverted the nation.” Here “perverted” means inverting religious values, hierarchies, breaking all sorts of purity codes and religious laws for the sake of compassion. Jesus was always out of place, a peasant was meant to be quiet and subservient to the rulers of the Temple.

Let’s examine today’s gospel a little more carefully. Unfortunately the distribution of palms on Palm Sunday has become a spiritual blessing for us today. Many Christians tie up their palms into a bow and hang the palm crosses in their homes. And I am not opposed to anyone doing so. But Palm Sunday has a deeper meaning than just the palms. Jesus rides on donkey into Jerusalem accompanied by a ragtag group of male and female disciples.

Jesus enters Jerusalem or to use biblical scholar Warren Carter’s phrase “making an Ass of Rome:” The conflict between Jesus and Pilate begins the day that Jesus enters in Jerusalem on the back of a donkey and praised as the “Son of David.”

Roman entrances into city were always triumphant. No red carpets, but soldiers trumpeting, followed by cadence war drums sounding the entrance of the conquering hero. In this case, it was Pilate who represented the triumphant Roman Empire and Emperor Tiberius. Days before rode on a war horse from the sea resort of Caesarea followed by marching his Roman legionnaires with standards, Pilate entered Jerusalem as conqueror and made it clear to the populace that the Rome in charge of their city and their lives. They paraded and displayed extravagantly the power of Tiberius Caesar and Rome. It communicates Roman greatness and military power, reminding the crowds that they were conquered by the powerful Roman legions—the greatest power in the world blessed by the Gods. Augustine was the true Son of god, the god Apollo, and the savior of the world.

But Jesus intends to literally make an ass of Pilate and Rome. He choreographs his own dramatic and symbolic entrance into Jerusalem. He adopts some of the Roman trappings but queers them or rather mischievously reframes them as symbolic challenges. His entrance into Jerusalem reminds the Jews of their religious history in which God enters the holy city to serve, not dominate. He chooses an ass, not a war horse in which Pilate rode into the city. He uses dramatic parody of the Roman triumphant procession to point out to his disciples and the people. Matthew remembers the line from the prophet Zechariah: “Tell the daughter of Zion, your king is coming on an ass”(9:9). The rest of the verse states that your king comes triumphant and victorious, and humble riding an ass.
Jesus is recognized as a king, or more likely anti-king. He is teaching humility, non-violence, and peace-making, empowerment through mutuality and service, not conquest and domination. God’s community does not consist of military domination but is constituted by a new a kinship as children of God—not be wealth, prestige, gender, or ethnicity. It is constituted by God as Abba, parent in love with all and equally.

Jesus lives what he teaches—as meek and lowly in heart. He identifies with the suffering poor, the throw-away people, the powerless and humiliated—those whose spirit is crushed by Roman military. He parodies Rome’s imperial power and Pilate with God’s rule that promotes unconditional love, humility, and mutual service and respect for the least and the expendable..

Another example of this last week of Jesus’ life that reveals God’s actions among people as empowering mutual companionship is the Last Supper. Companionship is created when we share food together. Companionship was based on exclusion. As side note, how many Christian tables have exclusively functioned like the Temple or the Pharisaic tablefellowships.

There is no question that for Jesus the table had to be open and inclusive. I cannot accept the readings of the Last Supper as an exclusive meal. It goes against the very nature of who Jesus was. People from the highways and byways were to be invited into the meals. It was populated with diversity: outcasts, prostitutes, abominable people, tax collectors, those folks that terrify Pharisees and Christians alike. He did not moralize, berate them how to change their lives, or threaten them that could not share the table if they did not change their ways.

Jesus disrupted their normal behaviors in an oppressed world. He would assist them to realize the joyous presence of Abba God to undo their defensive selves, centered on themselves and their own survival. In Christianity’s Dangerous Memory, Diarmuid O’Murchu describes Jesus’ parables, healings, and ministry. It is equally applicable to his meals and his to Last Supper:

They defy the criteria of normalcy and stretch creative imagination toward subversive, revolutionary engagement. They threaten major disruption for a familiar manageable world, and lure the hearer (participant) into a risky enterprise, but one that has promise and hope inscribed in every fiber of the dangerous endeavor.

There were no hierarchies at table, no one in charge and in power. There were only those who voluntarily served others, gladly washed the feet of their companions, who assisted folks at table to heal from the years of religious abuse and oppression. Jesus encouraged them to dream a future with hope, with God with shared resources and the abundance of food created by the companions of the bread and the cup.

Jesus’ Last Supper, like all his meals, undid social ordinary patterns and hierarchical behaviors, introducing people into a new egalitarianism, an equality before one another and God. On the other hand, Roman and even Jewish religious meals had definite social hierarchies from seating at table, first served and so. No Roman official like Pilate would ever serve food to another person, especially with a male lesser of status or serve even his wife. No religious Jew would invite men and women together at table, suspected impurity and sinfulness. The seating in Jewish religious meals would observe hierarchical seating of men and women off to the side. Hierarchical leadership was the norm during Jesus’ time.

And then there is the radical service of Jesus at table that evening– washing the feet of his male and female disciples. This was the service of only household slaves or women. No free male would do such a washing service because it demeaned his masculinity and patriarchal authority. Jesus turns the social hierarchies inside out, breaking down the gender boundaries and social hierarchies. For Jesus, this exemplified that there are no social hierarchies and gender hierarchies in God’s reign. There is only table fellowship of mutual service and equals, revering those who were the socially least, and inviting the disciples to imitate Jesus in his act of foot-washing.

One of the ways I look at our communion lines is to remember how in the cities the poor line up for distribution of food lines created by dominant society. We, on Sunday, line up for Sunday communion in no special order and the celebrants receive community last. This is Jesus’ etiquette at table of God’s reign where we experience an unconditional handout of grace, forgiveness, and love. We should be so undone by God’s love for us as to break our self-centeredness for the revolutionary moments of self-giving and love to others. We live and experience God’s mutually empowerment and companionship at table. And this is Jesus’ message of God’s reign among us and its transformational impact upon people. Imagine if people lived that way, God’s revolution would take place overturning the tables in the Temple and overturning Roman oppressive rule. God’s activity changes the rule of empires with a logic of grace, love, forgiveness, mutual service, and forgiveness. No human empire can withstand the mischievous the presence of God’s reign; it was a dangerous message of Jesus that resulted in the complicit agreement of the Temple leadership and Pilate to remove such a dangerous person who might infect other people with the notion of God’s unconditional grace and love. Welcome to the upside down and topsy-turvy reign of God.