Palm Sunday - The Rev. Brian Petersen
Palm Sunday has to be one of the weirdest days of the church year. What other day do you get to parade around the neighborhood waving palm branches? The only thing we’re missing here are the donkeys (but there’s always next year!) What’s even more bizarre is the juxtaposition of all of this fanfare – parades, joyful singing – with the shouts of “Let him be crucified!” just a few minutes later.
The liturgy on Palm Sunday gives us an insight into the fickle human heart. How we can cheer someone as savior one moment, and the next moment transform into a bloodthirsty mob calling for his execution. The drama of Palm Sunday would be totally surreal and over the top – if it wasn’t so true to life.
We live in a world where instant gratification and expectation rule over us, as we’ve been conditioned to expect that if someone or something doesn’t perform as described, we can easily toss it aside and move onto the next thing. As much as I love Costco and Trader Joe’s, they contribute to this – don’t like it, just bring it back and get a full refund (even if you’ve already used or eaten it!) At the root of all of this is a desire to see the complexity of life replaced by predictability, by stability. We want, at the core, someone to take the anxiety of life away from us.
This tendency may be fed by the pace of change in our society but it’s really nothing new. That same sort of feeling explains the animosity toward Jesus that we see and hear in the Passion Gospel, which comes from, well, just about everyone involved in the story. Jesus didn’t fit into the categories that worked for anyone, he represented an offense to everyone’s ideas of how things should be.
Jesus rode in to Jerusalem on a donkey, in an apparent mockery of the empire, and so the radicals and revolutionaries and even the common people who just wanted to be freed from oppression claimed him as one of them. But it didn’t take long for them to see that Jesus wasn’t trying to create a populist revolution. Jesus was a huge disappointment to both the conservatives and the liberals of his time – he didn’t stand up for the status quo, but he didn’t come to overthrow it either.
It’s been popular for a while now on social media to invoke Jesus’ passion as a way of deriding one’s opponents – to say “if Jesus were around today, you guys would be the one calling for him to be crucified.” Of course, we never identify ourselves with that crowd, we always assume we’d be the ones who really get Jesus and would be on his side. But the thing that makes Jesus’ message so difficult, so offensive, is that it challenges the heart of what all of us hold onto dearly – our need for control, for power, for certainty.
Again, I don’t want to blame people for seeking certainty. We live in a time where the continual bad news can drive us to the point of frustration, even despair. War, oppression of the vulnerable, assaults on our institutions all loom large in our minds. In the midst of that darkness, it can be very tempting to seek a certain path, to seek power so that we can take control and just fix something. But the model we find in Jesus is not power but the powerlessness of the cross. It’s not God punishing the wrongdoers but suffering alongside the victims. It’s no wonder that most of us can’t fathom it, and so let’s not be too quick to assume that we, too, wouldn’t be shouting down Jesus as “not the Messiah we were looking for.”
The very word “Hosanna” that we associate with Palm Sunday literally means “save now!” And it’s not that Jesus doesn’t provide us a path to salvation – it just doesn’t come in a form or by a means that most of us would choose. Jesus’ passion shows us that the path to salvation goes right to the cross - not away from pain and suffering but right through it. It’s power, revealed through weakness, through self-sacrifice. It’s not the kind of power that will win any elections, but it is the only power capable of truly transforming the world.
The Psalm that we chanted together today, Psalm 31, is one of my favorites, because it speaks to that power that comes only when we surrender that need for certainty and place our trust in God’s redemptive work, even when we can’t see it. It doesn’t shy away from the pain, from the despair, we cry out “my life is wasted because of grief” and “my bones are consumed.” But instead of demanding from God “save us now!”, or “do whatever it takes to make this go away”, we sing “my times are in your hand.” “I have trusted in you, you are my God.”
Trusting God doesn’t mean we isolate ourselves from the world’s problems. Trust gives us the power to confront them, as the Talmud says: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, But neither are you free to abandon it.” Or to quote Bishop Oscar Romero, whose feast day we celebrated this past week: We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
This sort of power is greater than any system, any charismatic leader, any so-called Messiah – because not even the power of death can defeat it. This is the salvation that Jesus came to bring on that day he entered into Jerusalem, not a new system but a whole new way of being, powered by a love so strong it would bear any amount of suffering to bring transformation.
As we enter now into Holy Week, our invitation is to walk with Jesus along that same road. To try to move ourselves from being in the crowd, to following along on the way of the cross, the way that leads to life and peace. To ask ourselves where we are still rejecting the idea of the cross, trying to hold onto ways that might seem easier or more effective, but will never bring lasting change. I invite you in this coming week to see where and how we might enter into that Passion story by walking through the pain we experience in our own lives, and in solidarity with the pain of others. May we walk this road together so that we can fully experience the joy of Easter that waits for us at the end of this journey.
