At LGBT+ events that have turned into commercialised parties, it is not uncommon to see critical placards declaring that “Stonewall was a riot”, or “Pride is a protest”. I was delighted to see that the Queer Theology podcast in the USA now sells T-shirts that declare “The first Palm Sunday was a riot”.

Palm Sunday – which is today – celebrates Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey at the head of what was clearly a controversial protest. The occupying Roman authorities and their collaborators were surely threatened by crowds cheering the “Son of David” – a title associated with people claiming to be kings of Israel. Passover was approaching, a time when the authorities grew nervous of rebellion and Roman troops stood armed by the Temple, ready to react.

This reality is too much for many churches today, who have turned the event into a fluffy story about donkeys, palm leaves and the importance of Jesus.

But that importance, I suggest, can be really understood only its social and historical context. In marching through a city in a parody of an imperial procession, Jesus’ followers were claiming that it was Jesus, not the Roman Emperor, who was their real king.

This is significant: if we seek to serve the Kingdom of God, we will not be serving the kingdoms and powers of this world. Sadly, it’s a message that many churches are keen to avoid.

Admittedly, it requires a broad use of the term “riot” to ascribe that word to Palm Sunday – because this was a nonviolent protest, but no less disruptive and illegal for that.

Once we see that Jesus’ march into Jerusalem was a planned protest, certain confusing details in the gospels make a lot more sense. For years I was rather baffled by a part of the story, before the march begins, in which Jesus asks some of his disciples to go and fetch a colt that they would find tied to a door. If anyone asked them why they were taking the colt, they were to say, “The Lord needs it”. According to the gospels, when they said this, the people let them take the colt (Mark 11,1-6; also Matthew 21,1-3 and Luke 19, 29-34).

Why would they do such a thing? Surely the phrase wouldn’t make sense to people unless they were following Jesus. If that were the case, why not just talk more straightforwardly?

It all made a lot more sense when I realised that the collection of the colt was a pre-arranged event. The pyhrase “the Lord needs it” seems to have served as a sort of password, letting the people with the colt know that the people collecting the animal had indeed come from Jesus. An illegal protest cannnot be organised too openly.

Ched Myers, in his excellent book Binding the Strong Man, points to a number of similar instances in the text that probably arise from this sort of underground planning.

Later in the story, when Jesus is preparing for the Passover that will be his last meal before his arrest, he tells two of his disciples that they should follow “a man carrying a jar of water”. They are to follow him to a house, and they are to say a particular sentence to the people in the house, who will then show them to the right room (Mark 14,12-16).

But water-carrying was generally done by women. Myers suggests that a man carrying water would stand out, so that the disciples would know who to follow. Indeed, the idea of a man carrying water was sufficiently odd that Matthew, in his editing of Mark’s account, changed the description to “a certain man” (Matthew 26,18).

Historians and biblical scholars spend a lot of time and energy debating which of the stories in the New Testament are more or less likely to be historically accurate. The events of Palm Sunday (if not every detail of every story) tend to score highly. Early Christians were unlikely to have invented a story that made clear that Jesus was a threat to the vicious rulers of the Roman Empire under which they still lived.

Jesus led a dangerous and unlawful protest against the authorities – a reality that many churches have spent centuries trying to ignore.