Today is Palm Sunday. Easter is generally characterised by our celebration in springtime of renewal and new life. I want to consider the heart-felt radicalism implied in Jesus arrival and entry into Jerusalem. The energising sense of joy and optimism that it brings to mind may also remind us of the optimism of all those who seek to improve the lot of humanity by initiating change. And it might also perhaps remind us of our own inner journey to the Jerusalem of our own spiritual Journey The Dominican theologian James Allison writes about the great excitement that Jesus approach to Jerusalem created, amongst his disciples and others who saw his arrival as the climax of a long wait for a revolutionary challenge to the oppressive authority of Roman Rule. But at this point Allison uses a phrase that caught my attention and imagination; he says that at exactly the high point of everyones anticipation Jesus; “collapses the narrative”, confounds everyone’s expectations by doing something spontaneous and unsettling. Instead of capitalising on his popularity and sweeping into the city as a military leader might do, Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark, sent for a young colt, more or less a foal and rode in on that. A symbol of simplicity, intense fragility, innocence. An image that, instead of powerful, is so vulnerable that it is almost comic. Finally knowing very well that he was to be arrested instead of escaping to lead the resistance from the mountains as so many revolutionaries and guerrillas have since, instead of initiating complex negotiations or organising a siege, he again, “collapses the narrative”, he arranges to have dinner in conversation with his friends, with one friend apparently sleeping most of the evening on his chest, which is informal even by Palestinian standards. In an age such as ours where we are coming to rely more and more on the “image” we are in a position to re-examine Jesus use of imagery and consider what these intensely powerful symbolic actions that he uses might mean to us today. James Allison’s phrase “collapsing the narrative” brought another incredibly powerful image to my minds eye, an image that I can more or less guarantee you’ll be familiar with because whether or not you ve seen the film where it first occurs, the sequence is shown often on television and the still is used in every book about film making that you care to lay a hand to. In case you dont know it I reprinted a still image from the frames of the film on the front of the order of service. A man stands in front of a house looking straight at camera with a beautifully open expression. And the front of the house suddenly falls forward, crashing literally round his ears while the man continues almost unblinking to look at the camera. The actor is Buster Keaton and the stunt works because the first floor window in the house front is so positioned that as the house front falls to the floor the window-frame falls around him. Keaton knew very well about the power of the image and he knew that in this case its not the slapstick comedy of a house falling down that remains with us but the man still standing. In his innocence and purity – steadfastly enduring. April Fools day falls this week on Wednesday – St Paul tells us that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” and we often overlook how close to God folly can be. Historically, court-fools were allowed exceptional leave to say things that anyone else would be punished for saying. Today I read from the work of another icon of the age of silent comedy Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin  discovered that the powers in authority in modern America were less lenient than those in Elizabethan England though and for statements like the one we heard in our reading, from his anti-Hitler film the Great Dictator, he was persecuted and hounded out of Hollywood and the U.S. I read statistics that said that world-wide Chaplin’s is still one of the most universally recognised faces. It could be that his enduring popularity is down to his instinctive identification with the poor and displaced, identification that finds its greatest expression in the film “The Kid” where the combination of tramp and orphan pulls on so many heartstring at once. I ve always been interested in how his act evolved; I only really saw an answer when my daughter was born and I realised that the gestures and faces he uses exactly mimic those of a newborn, with their infinite purity, vulnerabilty, infinite gentleness and innocence. And this is where we can perhaps glimpse the meaning of the symbolism of Jesus’ actions in his final week, the week running up to Easter. James Allison points to the Sermon on the Mount to reveal that Jesus identifies constantly with those whose positions in society are “precarious”, marginal, dependant people; poor, meek, rejected and despised. People who are not involved with either the power or the violence of the world are immensely vulnerable to being victimised by the world. Allison says that the “intelligence of the victim” is to see beyond the self deception of a world which is blind to it’s victims; an intelligence which instead reaches out to help them. This intelligence is also at the heart of Jesus teaching on his last evening; how we relate to those who hunger, thirst, are naked, sick or imprisoned is how, ultimately, we may be judged. For Unitarians I think it is significant that James Allison makes clear that this intelligence is not the preserve of Jesus or even those who follow Jesus – it is universal. It is the intelligence not of any group or sect but of all and any who identify with the victims and not the powerful, the weak not the strong, the precarious not the secure, the fool and not the king.