The strangeness of the Palm and the Passion is that they enter into a mystery we long for and refuse equally.
For Sunday
Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
Collect
Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
From Luke 19:28-40 + Luke 22:14-23:56
“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.””
Reflection
We enter this Holy Week with a familiar sense of anticipation and longing. Not for the liturgical days ahead or “to get them over with” or even with fondness for Easter, but full of memory and hope and impatience and frustration for all that has consumed our hearts and minds these last few years. It is natural to want to put all of that behind us.
And I sometimes wonder if that worldly anticipation and longing doesn’t color this week in which “all the things” happen. And it compounds with just how much happens that we lose track of the story and its impact for us.
The story that begins with celebration and ends with tears and in between Jesus is tried, mocked, and executed by Rome as a terrorist; hanged from a cross. A form of capital punishment no less barbaric than our own. Just less sanitized and hidden.
When we read the story, the whole story, which I invite us to do every year, we get most of the answers we seek. About the excitement at the arrival on Sunday, the clearing of the Temple, and the frequent teachings there afterward. How Jesus humiliated all of the leaders and all of the religious sects. And how it is they who sought his death.
We read about the last supper and the passion. How it is Rome who executes Jesus after mocking and humiliating him; treating him with nothing but contempt. The opposite of the dignity that Jesus preached. And on that cross, he dies.
Then we read about his burial in a tomb and the sorrow that befalls his followers.
And then we wait.
Because he promised he’d return. And waiting, anticipating, preparing, sharing, serving others is what we do while we wait for his return.
The story at the heart of Holy Week, that takes the better part of six chapters in Luke to tell, that we somehow have to summarize into just two Sundays is a story of hope and generosity.
Hope and generosity told in a story whose primary image is death and resurrection.
As followers of the one who suffers through this story, who invites us to follow him into suffering, and who have a tendency to do the opposite, we keep receiving this reminder as if there were hope for us. As if Jesus is being generous with us. As if, even after all of this, we cant get a second chance. That the old us can die and we may yet be reborn. The old things are falling away and behold! They are made new. Even old dogs refusing to learn new tricks.