Celebrating Palm Sunday forces us to recognize what responsibility we have. And what responsibility we pretend we don’t have.
Putting Responsibility in its place
Palm Sunday | Luke 19:28-40
This is the weirdest Sunday in the church calendar. Let’s not sugarcoat it. It is a weird Sunday.
We have palm fronds shipped here to the midwest from somewhere in which palms actually grow. Then we bless them, parade into church with them, and then awkwardly try to figure out what to do with them for the rest of the service.
Meanwhile, some of us are trying hard not to think about the environmental impact of this. And then some of us further know that this very practice is leading to a scarcity of usable trees, threatening to make Palm Sunday an unsustainable event in the life of the church. So…there’s that.
Then we read about Jesus coming into Jerusalem to great fanfare and rejoicing. And we are buzzing with the excitement and the prospect that the Jesus Event is finally coming to fruition! Freedom is coming! It is almost here!
Then we are to read about the Passion. We hear about Jesus being betrayed. Arrested. Abused. Tried. Tried again. Abused some more. Then he is lynched and killed: executed by the state on a cross.
Palm Sunday is a headtrip.
The church has long sought to pair these two moments: the entry and the Passion to help us tell the story. And to do so by inviting us into it, not only as 21st Century readers. Or as disciples. But as the people observing the moment. The masses trying to make sense of what is really going on.
Christians have long noted that the people shout for joy on Sunday and then “crucify him!” on Friday.
This juxtaposition forces us to see ourselves in this moment.
We love to imagine that if we were Germans in the 1930s, we wouldn’t let the Nazis rise to power. We would be different. Of course, they didn’t think they were, either.
It reminds me of something I heard a few years ago. Something like two-thirds of white Americans opposed the civil rights movement in the 1960s. But in the 2000s, something like 75% of whites old enough to experience it say they were always supportive of it.
It isn’t just that we don’t know when we’re on the wrong side of something. It’s that we won’t even allow ourselves to realize it.
Of course there’s more to it.
Historical critical and textual scholars will point out that the people who happily greet Jesus to Jerusalem and celebrate him at the Temple are clearly not the same people trying to get him killed. People didn’t change their minds over the course of five days.
And just as important is the fact that it is only the elites who conspire to murder Jesus. In the first part of the week, Jesus wins over the masses. And it is the elites’ fear of 1) Jesus’s popularity and 2) his practical theology that leads to the conspiracy to kill him.
These additional pieces are necessary correctives to help us truly get at what the Passion and Holy Week represent for us.
But it isn’t only these parts, but their sum that matters.
This is a story about joy and fear.
And people are responsible for both.
Just as most Germans didn’t pull triggers, put people in trains, or turn on the gas, they understand what they or their ancestors accepted on their behalf. And they recognize the guilt they share in it.
This weird Sunday, we are invited to recognize our place in an imperfect world. None of us was there. None of us is guilty of Jesus’s lynching. But we were there. Just as we were in Germany or Rwanda. Just like we have sponsored anti-semitism for nearly two thousand years. Our human family is responsible. Our neighbors did stuff and more of our neighbors let them.
Just like our ancestors one hundred years ago lynched a man not far from here.
Is the kin-dom here? Are we embodying it? If this doesn’t feel like heaven, then we still have work to do, right?
The real reason we talk about the Passion on Palm Sunday.
It isn’t the theological conviction to draw us into seeing ourselves as the crowds praising Jesus and the elites seeking to kill him.
It’s that we’re afraid people won’t get the whole story.
We train people to only show up on Sundays and then we say “Why won’t people come to Good Friday?” [grumble, grumble].
So then we also don’t trust people enough to actually do what we claim to want, so we’re supposed to do Good Friday twice. Once for the masses and another for the “real Christians”.
We have so little faith in one another that we’ll hedge our bets to make sure people understand that between the time Jesus entered Jerusalem and disappeared from the tomb that he somehow died! As if we’ll somehow forget the crucifixion. Andy, remind me how it happened again. Did he get in a car accident or…
Remembering how Jesus dies is not the problem.
Why he dies is the problem. And that is a whole other thing, isn’t it?
So now we need to address the other conflict for Palm Sunday.
The first was the problem of the people and their responsibility. Then the second is our responsibility and distrust of each other. Now the third problem is providence: what is the human responsibility and what is God’s?
The big question that covers Holy Week like a heavy blanket, like one of those big down comforters that doesn’t hold its shape so you’re grabbing it just does its own thing: is the Passion what God really wants?
And I think we’re always drawn to thinking of time as ordered and structured; using words like progress and inevitable. Like the MCU’s one sacred timeline and we all need to preserve it.
But the reality is way more profound. That the tragedy was most definitely preventable. But it serves us now as tragedy. We don’t read Romeo Juliet and go I guess fighting neighbors to keep a stupid feud going is inevitable! Or read King Lear and be like Kings can’t control their hubris.
God didn’t make anyone kill Jesus. In fact, God gave us every opportunity to avoid that very outcome.
And yet, even Jesus understood just how likely that outcome would be.
Because we are responsible.
Verse 39:
“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’”
Luke 19:39
We know what this means. Don’t be political. “You’ll get yourself killed.”
Passive voice. No actors and no responsibility. Like it will just happen. Like Jesus is responsible for his own murder.
And we know that this may actually be a genuine voice of concern here. Because the Pharisees are caught between Rome and the people. And if Jesus makes too big of a scene, Rome might bring the hammer down on them.
We know this is likely because it is precisely how Rome operated. They threaten to destroy the leaders if the leaders don’t control their people. Bring the hammer down on the Temple if the Temple doesn’t bring the hammer down on the dissidents.
So we act as if all of that is inevitable and out of human control. So that the only one who actually has a choice is Jesus. So he alone is responsible. Or else God.
Jesus flips it and says
“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”
Luke 19:40
God is doing something. And God will make that thing known. You can’t hide behind your power. You also can’t hide behind the way power pretends it bears no responsibility for what it does.
We have a choice.
We always have a choice.
Just like I don’t expect everyone to show up for noon on Friday. But we also can’t pretend like a lot of people choose to avoid confronting the Passion during Holy Week.
Or how we are once again using palms when we know it isn’t ecologically responsible. Primarily because we can’t imagine using oak branches or boxwood trimmings.
Just like we avoid the big political issues of the day pretending that avoidance is abstaining from reality and therefore leaves us with zero responsibility. Which is the lie we tell ourselves to feel better.
Jesus defied Temple leaders. He humiliated them in public from Palm Sunday through Holy Wednesday. And he preached a theology of responsibility, repentance, and the merciful love of God.
And faithful religious leaders formed a lynch mob and argued that he made them do it.
Thank God that we’re called to be different.
Thank God for allowing us to be responsible.
And that the Kin-dom lives in us and we get to share it.