Palm Sunday will lead us into Holy Week. In the exuberance of Palm Sunday to make Jesus King, he calls us into the depths of what that means to follow him.

Mark 1:1-11

Are we truly ready to follow him?

Over the next few chapters, in fact, Mark will show us what Jesus meant when, in chapter 10, he radically redefined kingship. This is not to be the sort of royalty that either Israel or the rest of the world were used to. But the passage already raises questions for us in our own following of Jesus and loyalty to him. Are we ready to put our property at his disposal, to obey his orders even when they puzzle us? Are we ready to go out of our way to honour him, finding in our own lives the equivalents of cloaks to spread on the road before him, and branches to wave to make his coming into a real festival? Or have we so domesticated and trivialized our Christian commitment, our devotion to Jesus himself, that we look on him simply as someone to help us through the various things we want to do anyway, someone to provide us with comforting religious experiences? In our world where most countries don’t have kings and queens, and where those monarchies that remain are mostly constitutional offices with the real power lying elsewhere, have we forgotten what, in biblical terms, a true king might be like?

 Wright, T. (2004). Mark for Everyone (pp. 148–149). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

We are in a day and time, again, when loyalties and allegiances will be tested. We are in a time when people are looking to political power and the fall of other political powers to bring “true change” to the world. We need to re-examine what Jesus means to be King.

Walk carefully through this Holy Week