During the Palm Sunday liturgy, the Celebrant captures the tension of Holy Week and in our own hearts saying, “Today we greet [Jesus] as our King, though we know his crown was a crown of thorns, and his throne a Cross.” This tension, or dissonance, is because Jesus is not the type of King we (sinners) would choose for ourselves, but he is the King we deeply need. 

All through the Gospel of Mark (Chapter 8, 9, 10), Jesus teaches that to be King means to be rejected, die, and be raised. The disciples show that they desire worldly power and glory, and they struggle to understand Jesus’s way of sacrificial love. According to our flesh, we struggle too. We want a strong man, a warrior, one who exerts worldly power to accomplish our purposes for him. 

On our own we are trapped in this way of thinking, rejecting the rule of God for kings of our own making who ironically always fail us in the end. We find ourselves enslaved to sin (Rom 6:6-7) and condemned before God for our participation in this human rebellion (Rom 5:10). But thanks be to God, Jesus is not the king we would choose, but the King we deeply need. On the cross rather than saving himself, he delivers us from the power of sin (Mark 15:31-32), giving his life as a ransom for many (10:45). Moreover, he entered the darkness of God’s righteous judgment (Amos 8:9) and was forsaken so that we can be adopted into God’s family (Mark 15:34). 

While we feel the tension, the centurion saw in Jesus’s death the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God (Mark 15:39). Jesus calls us to join that confession, admit how we are still drawn to other “kings,” and take up the way of sacrificial love.