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Earlier this week, I went to a lecture at the Oxford Literary Festival given by the political documentary maker Michael Cockerell, who was talking about the many political leaders he has filmed and met over the years. There were clips of very familiar faces, from Harold Macmillan to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. But even if I hadn鈥檛 known them, I would have quickly realised how important they were: the entourages, the smart suits, scenes in Number 10, the crush of journalists around them. Power is in part about having the trappings of power, showing people that you鈥檙e important and have authority. You can see it, not just in politics but elsewhere too, whether through the clothes that managers wear in the workplace or how football coaches behave in the dugout.

But when Jesus entered Jerusalem 鈥� the event that Christians mark tomorrow, Palm Sunday 鈥� people didn鈥檛 acknowledge him as a leader. Instead, according to the account in Matthew鈥檚 Gospel, they said: 鈥淲ho is this?鈥�

While Jesus鈥� followers welcomed him, others, as he passed through the gates into Jerusalem, were bemused. Here was someone that was being applauded by his own people, who were strewing his path with palm leaves 鈥� hence the name Palm Sunday 鈥� but there was none of the manner of a triumphant leader. More than 350 years earlier, Alexander the Great had ridden into Jerusalem on a magnificent stallion and people in Jesus鈥� time were used to their Roman occupiers with their warhorses and their chariots. But this man was riding on a donkey, hardly the image of power or authority.

Of course, our own leaders need more than their outward signs of authority to truly have it. The figures that history recalls may have had their flaws but leaders like Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy, Pope John Paul II and Gandhi had charisma too.
But there is something different again about Jesus鈥� power and authority, his leadership. Several prophets before Jesus鈥� time had written of a king riding humbly into Jerusalem on a donkey.
It is that humility that is at the heart of Jesus鈥� idea of leadership, challenging what it means to have authority. As he once said to his disciples, rulers like to lord it over people. But he offered an alternative. Whoever wishes to be great must be a servant, Jesus said.

Palm Sunday is just the start of Jesus鈥� journey, commemorated as Holy Week by Christians in the coming days, that leads eventually to his death on a cross.

But even just that first moment, that entry into Jerusalem, on an ass, was a moment of huge significance: offering, against the backdrop of a despotic, imperious Roman occupying force, a countercultural gesture of humility.

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