Speech by Rod Benson, Palm Sunday Rally and March, Belmore Park, Sydney, 2026
Friends, we gather at a moment in history when the language of power dominates our public life. Politicians speak platitudes. Governments speak of security. Nations attempt to dominate and eliminate enemies real and imagined. Genuine peace initiatives rarely even make it on to the political agenda.
There are people in our world who cannot defend their own freedom. There are families who cannot prevent missiles falling on their houses. There are children who cannot stop the machinery of war that turns their hopes into rubble and their futures into dust.
They do not command armies. They do not shape national policy. They do not sit at negotiating tables or appear on news shows. Yet their lives are most deeply affected by the self-serving decisions made in the corrupt corridors of power.
There are people in our community today who cannot prevent governments from excluding them or denying their basic rights. They are told that the logic behind these decisions is clear, unavoidable. On closer analysis, we find that these arguments rest on fear, convenience, expediency, and misinformation.
Entire communities are marginalised because they belong to the wrong religion, or they are treated as a threat because of racial profiling. Others are excluded because their political identity and aspirations do not align with the interests of those in power.
This is not justice. It is not security. And it is not peace.
The true measure of a good society is how it treats the most vulnerable: those who cannot influence elections, or shape public discourse, or shield their family from discrimination, violence and exclusion.
The moral test of our commitment to justice lies in whether we defend the dignity of those who stand outside our social and political tribes, beyond our national loyalties, far from the centre of power.
For many of us, this calling is political but also deeply spiritual. Those of us who follow the way of Jesus confess that Jesus was a person of deep and radical peace. Yet the peace he proclaimed was not the peace of domination.
It was not secured by violence, or sustained through fear, or reliant on the state. It was the peace that emerges when people recognise one another as friends and neighbours possessing dignity and grace.
Jesus rejected the logic of retaliation. He refused the temptation to answer violence with greater violence. But he also defied the state’s power to silence him, no matter what the consequences.
Half a century ago, New York lawyer William Stringfellow said:
The State has only one power it can use against human beings: death. The State can persecute you, prosecute you, imprison you, exile you, execute you. All of these mean the same thing. The State can consign you to death. The grace of Jesus Christ in this life is that death fails. There is nothing the State can do to you, or to me, which we need fear.[1]
Jesus invited his followers on a journey of life and hope as challenging today as it was two thousand years ago:
To welcome the stranger, care for the wounded, love our enemies, and stand alongside the marginalised: to practice justice as Jesus did.
Such an invitation demands courage.
We oppose the lie that some of us possess less dignity than others.
We reject narratives of greed, domination, and oppression of minorities.
We refuse to organise our communities based on fear.
We work together to build communities shaped by justice, hospitality, and solidarity.
Hospitality means recognising the humanity of those who differ from us, seeing beyond the labels and encountering people as neighbours.
Solidarity means standing with those who cannot defend themselves, those whose freedoms are denied, whose homes are destroyed, whose voices are ignored by the morally bankrupt powerbrokers of our world.
As agents of peace, we commit ourselves to the long, difficult work of building a world in which dignity does not depend upon power. The Prince of Peace calls us to this work, here and now.
Let us therefore choose courage over fear, compassion over indifference, hospitality instead of greed, and solidarity in place of exclusion.
Let it be said of us that, when confronted by violence, injustice, and suffering, we chose not silence, or fear, or distraction, or war, but the hard, hopeful, courageous path of nonviolent action, sowing seeds of lasting peace for our world.
Yes to peace. No to war. No to the Trump agenda.
Yes to climate action. No to AUKUS. Freedom for Palestine.
Thank you.
Rev Dr Rod Benson is General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council and a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving at North Rocks Community Church in Sydney.
Reference
[1] William Stringfellow, A Second Birthday (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 133.
Image source: Sydney Palm Sunday Committee (cropped).
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