Obama's Palm Sunday Mandate

by Tyler Wigg-Stevensen

Each year on Palm Sunday, a week before Easter, Christians celebrate the unlikeliest of invasions: one man, Jesus of Nazareth, riding unarmed into Roman-ruled Jerusalem on a donkey, surrounded by followers waving palm fronds. His arrival started a chain of events resulting in His arrest on Thursday, crucifixion on Friday, and resurrection on Sunday.

By any immediate standard, Jesus’ invasion was a spectacular failure. But His followers would grow from a small, persecuted sect into the most prevalent religion of the Roman Empire and, over the course of two millennia, the world. Palm Sunday is proof that human history does not always proceed according to realists’ predictions; proof, indeed, that our most momentous occasions defy all prediction.

In the early hours of the morning at the start of this week, while most American churchgoers still kept their beds, President Obama delivered an address in Prague that should be marked by history as “the Palm Sunday speech.” Standing before tens of thousands of Czech citizens, he called for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons from the earth, and outlined a set of practical steps to begin the process.

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The Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson is the director of the Two Futures Project and policy director of Faithful Security: the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger.