For the latest No Kings March to occur on the eve of Palm Sunday seemed to me a resonant conjunction. Both yesterday’s march and the “triumphal entry” of Jesus into Jerusalem stirred the deepest hopes of people suffering under oppressive regimes. Of course not all hopes are equal, and sometimes they turn out to be, as T. S. Eliot noted, “hope for the wrong thing.” Even if the folks shouting Hosanna in Jerusalem were mistaken about what God was up to that week, I imagine Jesus still being touched by their longing, that crazy feeling that the world might just get better. The capacity for hope is one of humanity’s finest qualities.

There is some irony, of course, in linking No Kings to a biblical event suffused in royal imagery. I’ve been singing the Palm Sunday processional, “All glory, laud, and honor to thee, Redeemer, King!” ever since I was a child. But God is no stranger to irony—manifesting divinity as a helpless child, “ruling” as a servant, and dying to give life. And a line by the late great songwriter Bob Franke neatly resolves, for me at least, any tension between democracy and religious language inherited from monarchists.

Well you kneel to the Lord and you will bless yourself;
Ain’t no need to kneel to no one else.

In a week when people of my tradition walk the Way of the Cross in ritual, song and story, we know that hope is no stranger to struggle and suffering. It’s a long and winding road to Easter, passing through Gethsemane and Golgotha. Yet it remains, as the Book of Common Prayer assures us, “none other than the way of life and peace.”

On yesterday’s march in Seattle, I shot video of what I saw, and in putting it together I was struck all over again by the recurrent note of joy. Not everyone would put it this way, of course, but for one gloriously sunny day, we were, as the South Africans sing, “marching in the light of God,” and the divine future of human flourishing made a significant incursion into the present moment. As the crowd chants in the opening of my video:

We are unstoppable!
Another world is possible.