What we think of success and power is not how God thinks of them. God who has everything, all success and all power, gives it all up to save us and to transform who we are, and to remake the Creation that had gone sideways.

Jesus, stages the “anti” Triumph when he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He comes as saving victim, who forgives us while he is dying, a death that happens because of our rejection and turning from God.

This is the “anti-success”. God is remakes Creation in these days, reveals a New Adam – and does it while keeping the promise, made to Noah after the flood, that God would never again destroy the world in wrath and reject that which God had made. God transforms it all but acting out a triumph that to the World seems to be an absolutely upside down version of the Roman one, of the sort that Empires proclaim.

This is not a Lord who requires us to sacrifice ourselves to serve the purpose of the Empire, of the economic engines, but a King who dies at our hands to lead us out of the nightmare in which we have become trapped.

You can find the direct link to the sermon video here.