For Sunday Palm Sunday A
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
Reflection
We open Holy Week with a bittersweet story of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. It is a curious moment; a bit of “guerrilla street theater” as the scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan describe it. What with the riding on a donkey and getting his disciples to fetch it and his seeming to play with the whole sense of expectation around him, that he is a prophet or even the highly anticipated messiah who has come to save them and restore them to independence and prominence once more. The story is electric (a double meaning) — it is both energizing and dangerous.
We are called to enter Jerusalem wearing a kind of dual-consciousness: as people devoted to experiencing what Jesus invites us into and as people who already know the story and where it goes. That the week ends in Jesus’s crucifixion and death. And also that the new week begins with Jesus’s resurrection. We do this and we enter into the season as disciples, too. Disciples who have been told of what Jesus is preparing to do and where this mission is supposed to go.
And it is because of this dual-consciousness, we can feel the fearful sadness at the end of the week and joy at the start of the next one. And perhaps, just as importantly, we can see how the disciples, crowds, and religious leaders misunderstand the experience. Our ability to listen and anticipate, gives us an advantage and an always-new opportunity to trust in Jesus.