All Glory, Laud, and Hypocrisy

In less than a month, the final week of Lent will begin. Western Christians will commemorate the last days of Jesus’ ministry. Processions will reenact his triumphal entry into Jerusalem that set off the events leading to his crucifixion. Palm branches will wave recalling the donkey ride from the Mount of Olives to the Temple gate.

Many a church’s rafters will ring with “All Glory Laud and Honor to thee, Redeemer, King!”, one of the greatest of Christendom’s hymns.

Palm Sunday is not just procession and praise, however. It is the Sunday of the Passion. The central feature of the liturgy in most churches that day will be the reading of the Passion. By the time we settle down for the proclamation of the Word, we shall have left triumph behind and shall have plunged into its awful sequel: suffering.

In their amazing book The Last Week, renowned biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan give a day-by-day account of Jesus’ final week. Theirs is a radical counterpoint to the frequent pulpit lament that the fickle crowd was swift to change its tune from “hosanna” to “crucify him.” Not so, say Borg and Crossan. In a close reading of Mark’s gospel account—the oldest of the four Passion narratives­—they demonstrate that “the common people heard him gladly [Mark 12:37]” as he was teaching that week in the Temple. The hierarchy, on the other hand, were anything but gladdened by Jesus. It was the hegemony of religious leaders and Roman officials that ultimately put Jesus to death. Most of those who lined Jerusalem’s streets on Sunday were nowhere around the Praetorium for the trial of Jesus on Friday morning.

Precisely because of Jesus’ appeal to the masses, his public rebuke of those who oppressed the poor and his castigation of the powers that marginalized the vulnerable, the religious authorities were threatened, enraged, and certain that Jesus had to be eliminated.

That, of course, is not how the story came to be told. It isn’t that the evolution of the story was entirely wrong, but at the very least it was lopsided in favor of a personalized, pietistic appropriation of his death as a sacrifice for sin. I’m not arguing that it wasn’t that, but I join with Borg, Crossan, and others of their followers who recognize that when Jesus issued his summons “Follow me,” he meant a lot more than joining up for the club of the Saved. He meant seriously, “Follow me. Join the cause which is not my personal crusade but in fact the agenda of God.”

He called it the βασιλεια του θεου, the Kingdom (or reign) of God. For him the reign of God was about righteousness. And righteousness in his vocabulary (assuming a correspondence of the Aramaic he spoke and the Hebrew of his scriptures) was about right relationships. That boils down to justice: relationships—among people, and between people and God—are “righteous” when they are in balance, when they are working right, as intended.

So let’s take stock of where we are at this juncture. In 2026, how is the Passion playing out in local communities everywhere, especially in the USA?

There’s lots of glory, lots of laud, and lots of hypocrisy. And it’s not Jesus to whom it’s all ascribed. I’ve lived through the Civil Rights movement, the Viet Nam war that effectively ended a Presidency. I lived through Watergate that definitively ended a Presidency. And I’ve lived through the rise of the ayatollahs in Iran, the taking of American hostages, the two Gulf Wars, 9/11, the great recession in 2008-11, the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent outpouring of reaction and counterreaction, the pandemic, and now 1.25 terms of Donald Trump. Much of the glory that I’ve seen in all that time has been chintzy. For example, many Americans talk a good game of supporting the military and reflect that in what has become a nearly sacrosanct Pentagon budget. But what happens to the “brave men and women who have put their lives on the line” to protect our country when they come home? Well, then they’re veterans; and whether its PTSD, or Agent Orange’s effects, or addiction, or musculoskeletal problems, hearing loss, chronic pain, sleep disorders, joblessness, homelessness (the list goes on and on, like the wars that left many of them this way and that), they are holding the short end of the stick. And what do they get? Glory? Laud? Honor? You’d think.

But instead, they get a loaf of hypocrisy. How many people, even in liberal communities such as mine, rant about the scourge of homelessness? The answer is a lot. Rant? Some are genuinely concerned. But I’ll bet few people are aware that a disproportionate number of the homeless are male veterans. Best estimates put the number at 5-13%. That translates, according to one single night count, over 13,000 people.

It’s not unlike the energy spent around the issue of the unborn. For the record, I have never advocated abortion as a means of birth control, but I am staunchly in favor of the rights of women over their own bodies (same as men have autonomy over theirs). But more to the point, it is naked hypocrisy to care about the unborn and to give no damn about the born: children living but starving, whose health depends upon SNAP benefits and who, along with ailing grandparents and laid-off parents, sit around kitchen tables wondering how they’ll afford medication or a loaf of bread, while wealth gushes—not trickles but gushes—upwards into the bank accounts of billionaires.

Here we are, only a week after the once solemn custom of the State of the Union address in which in 108 minutes no mention was made of an obvious buildup to what is now a war, called such by those running it, in the Middle East, widening by the hour. No money for disaster emergencies. But money to make war and thus to make more veterans with the same problems as the ones now sleeping under bridges and screaming from nightmares in hospital wards. No money for USAID which was lifeblood among some of the poorest of the world, but billions of dollars for concentration camps called “detention centers” being built around the United States of America.

Are you beginning to see a thread here? Pull on that thread whose origin is just about 2000 years ago on a Sunday in Jerusalem when a prophet from Nazareth deliberately fulfilled a prophecy by riding on an ass into the Holy City with a message calling out the oppressors of the poor, the outcasts, the “sinners.” Read Matthew 23 and get a taste of his message. He’s not the gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild of Sunday School pictures. He is an eschatological prophet whose blood boils at the big rip-off done in the name of God Almighty. And those who sat in the seats of the scornful made sure he was shut up for good.

That thread runs all the way through the annals of the world to the present day. Some have swapped the legacy of democracy—that is to say government of, by, and for the people—for a regime that jerks around the common people (spiritual descendants of those who heard Jesus gladly), imprisons, pelts, deports, isolates, tortures, and kills the very people its elected leaders have sworn to serve.

Father, forgive them, for they know exactly what they do. [cf. Luke 23:34]