Many in the crowd that cheered Jesus’ entry on Palm Sunday mistook his mission as one to eradicate their political rulers, rather than to eradicate the sin in their own hearts. Two thousand years later, you can find the same mistake in the pages of The New York Times.

In a Sunday op-ed, the recently resigned Episcopal Rev. Andrew Thayer argues that “Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession.” Jesus, he says, was killed for threatening the power of the Roman Empire, an empire with which Thayer draws explicit parallels to the United States under President Donald Trump and “Christian nationalism,” whatever that means.

He says Jesus’ arrival into Jerusalem was an act of “political confrontation.” Jesus, in Thayer’s telling, “came to dismantle the very logic of Caesar: the belief that might makes right, peace comes through violence and politics is best wielded through fear, coercion and control.”

“Dismantling” political empires is, obviously, not why Jesus came to Earth and allowed Himself to be crucified. As any of the children I’ve taught in Sunday school could tell you, He came to take the punishment for our sins so we sinners could be reunited with God by His grace.

Jesus was not protesting Caesar, of whom he had said days before, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” When He was arrested, His reply was, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?” When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus what His crime had been, Jesus responded, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest.”