Downward Mobility (Palm Sunday)

Sermon — March 29, 2026 (Palm Sunday)
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

A few years before St. John’s was founded back in 1840, a young boy named Horatio Alger was born just across the river in Chelsea. The son of a Unitarian minister, he grew up in a family that was educated but not aristocratic. He was the kind of guy in 1840s Boston who excelled at Harvard but was excluded from joining its more exclusive social clubs. But he became known later in life as one of the pioneers of the “rags-to-riches” genre. In his books, Alger wrote stories of poor young men rising in the world through honesty and hard work, climbing into the middle class against the odds in fulfillment of the American Dream.

Alger’s novels aren’t very widely read, these days—I know them from US History, not American Lit. But the dream of upward mobility is still at the heart of the American experience. In time, “rags to riches” has turned into “Stanford to Silicon Valley,” but we still see less dramatic stories of upward mobility everywhere. My grandfather, for example, started his working life as a machinist, and went to night school to get his degree as an engineer; my mother was the first person in the family to get a four-year college degree; and here I am, at the absolute pinnacle of American society, Rector of St. John’s Charlestown. And this dream of upward mobility is only natural: What parents don’t want their children to live safer, happier, more comfortable lives than their own?

In a Lenten devotional published this year, Brother Luke of the Society of St. John the Evangelist reflects on one of the verses in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5) He notes the humility and meekness of Jesus in the stories we hear this week: “Jesus showed love and leadership by riding a donkey, not a stallion,” he notes, “and by washing feet” on Maundy Thursday. And then he connects this to a wider point: “Gentle and strong patience,” Brother Luke writes, “does not mean giving in or giving up. The meek are not weak.” And then he uses a phrase I’d never associated with Jesus before. The meek, he writes, “use power, surprisingly for good, often choosing restraint and downward mobility.”

It’s the perfect phrase for today. After all, what is the story of Palm Sunday but a story of “downward mobility?” How else could we characterize the trajectory of this day, which begins with us parading around the church, waving palm branches and singing, “All glory laud and honor…” and then suddenly turns toward sorrow and suffering, culminating in the events of the Passion of Christ. The “downward mobility” of the Palm Sunday service begins the long downward slide of Holy Week: it takes us from a royal procession to betrayal and death; from “Hosanna in the highest heaven!” to “Let him be crucified!”; from “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” to “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” At the very moment when the people welcome Jesus to the Holy City, at the very moment when they think that the long-awaited heir of the king David is finally coming to ascend to the throne—that’s when the descent toward his death begins.

Although in fact, it began much earlier. Because the story of the downward mobility of Christ doesn’t begin in Holy Week. The whole story of the Incarnation, of the way in which God became flesh in Jesus Christ, is a story of descent. The eternal Word of God becomes human; one who has reigned with God in heaven comes down to live on earth.

This larger story of downward mobility is what Paul’s talking about when he writes to the church at Philippi about Christ’s “self-emptying.” It’s likely that in these verses, Paul is actually quoting from a hymn, drawing on something the Philippians would’ve heard or even sung before to illustrate his point. And this ancient hymn, which may be the earliest part of the New Testament to be composed, is all about the downward mobility of Christ. He was in the form of God, but did not cling to equality with God; he emptied himself of divine privilege and was born in human form. (Phil. 2:6-7) Not only did he empty himself of divine power, he humbled himself to the point of death—“even death on a cross.” (2:8) Jesus descends from glory to normalcy to shame, from heaven to earth to the underworld, and he does it all because of a humble, self-emptying love for humankind: a willingness and a desire to serve us and to try to save us from ourselves, even at the cost of his own life.

Of course, we know—and Paul reminds us—that the story doesn’t end there. Jesus descended from heaven and down to earth, and from earth to the grave; but then he rose again, from death into life, and ascended from earth back to heaven. Jesus’ story of downward mobility, ends with an upward return trip.

But we’re not there yet. There’s always a temptation, during Holy Week to jump too quickly to the Resurrection: to minimize the pain of Jesus’ death by reminding ourselves that it all turns out okay in the end. And this is a good point. The Resurrection doesn’t cancel out their horror of the Passion, or its pain. It doesn’t erase the experience of Jesus’ suffering or death. But it does begin to transform what they mean. Jesus’ defeat becomes a victory, his victimization becomes self-sacrifice, his weakness becomes a particular kind of strength: the kind, as Brother Luke says, that uses power for good, that chooses restraint and downward mobility, caring for and loving others, sometimes at its own expense.

Now, none of us is Jesus Christ, thank God. None of us can claim to be equal to God. None of us have access to the kind of royal power Jesus could’ve seized in his hands. Some of us may feel like we have no power at all. We certainly don’t have the kind of power the Son of God has, and we’re not called to make the same extreme kind of self-sacrifice. But every one of us does have some kind of power in this world. And we can choose how to use that power for good.

We can choose to follow the path of upward mobility alone: to use the power and the privilege that we have solely for our own benefit, to pursue our own good without concern for anyone else. Or we can choose the more-uncertain path: the path of meekness and humility, of self-emptying love.

Jesus invites us to do some pretty radical things: to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us; to forgive one another as we have been forgiven; to love one another as Christ has loved us, in fact—to love our neighbors not only as if they’re members of our family, or good friends, but to love our neighbors as ourselves. These things aren’t impossible. They don’t require miracles. But they’re profoundly counter-cultural, and they ask us to make a choice.

We can choose to “let the same mind be in [us] that was in Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 2:5) We can choose to follow our donkey-riding king wherever his path of humble service leads. We can choose the counter-intuitive, counter-cultural path of downward mobility, even if it’s only sometimes, even if it’s only in the smallest of ways. And if we choose to follow that path of self-giving love, our stories will never be as extreme as the story of Christ’s journey from the glory of heaven to the shame of the Cross and back; but we may still find that the path of humble service, of downward mobility, leads us not only down into the depths of life, but out the other side, into a way of life more abundant than even Horatio Alger could ever have imagine