+What in the world just happened? Can you imagine being completely unfamiliar with Christian tradition yet finding yourself in a church on Palm Sunday----seeing glory laud and honor, festive marching, waving palm branches, and triumphal joy suddenly transformed into a horrific scene of mob violence? Watching and hearing the very people who cheered their redeemer turn on him, urging the oppressive power of Rome to kill the one they’d just hailed?
Any reasonable human being would call us crazy. How we can go from cheering a hero with songs of love, to tossing epitaphs at him, all in the course of one short morning?
Of course what happens on Palm Sunday—the Sunday of the Passion is a Reader’s Digest version of Holy Week.
Many people just don’t or can’t take the time to walk the whole of Holy Week in segments---the triumphal entry of today leading to the betrayal, last meal, anguished lonely wait in the garden of Thursday, the arrest, trial and death sentence of Friday morning, the crucifixion, suffering, denial and despondency of Friday afternoon and the silence of the dead on Saturday so it gets crammed in to today so that when those of you who can’t be here all week don’t miss a thing.
But by doing that it all gets either watered down or too amped up---I’m not sure which—leaving preachers and (and no doubt newcomers to the faith) in a bit of a quandary: preach an entire Holy Week sermon or just focus on the events of the first Palm Sunday? Well if the purpose of a sermon is to take the stories as told through our scripture readings and interpret them for our daily life then I need to do a little of both.
This message of triumphal entry transformed into an exit of agony, humiliation, betrayal and denial, this story of a fall from grace, this stripping a hero until he is nothing but a bum, is very human. It is human nature to look for heroes—leaders—to rescue us. But, regardless of who they want to be, who they intend to be, who they really are, we tend to place them on a pedestal, on some pre-conceived notion of what type of hero they should be. And when they don’t? Well, we toss them aside, proclaiming their failure and rarely—if ever—realizing that perhaps we made the mistake. Maybe the hero we’d been seeking wasn’t the hero we needed. Perhaps the hero we’re looking for isn’t a hero at all and perhaps the victim we’re so quick to pity or mock is, in fact, the hero.
This is what happens on this Palm Sunday of glory turned into the Sunday of Passion.
Jesus isn’t the King of the Jews, he is the King of Heaven, the prince of peace. He is the ruler of all that is good and gentle and right in the world.
He just didn’t fit into the image those crowds of first century Jerusalem had of their messiah, their hero. So they turn on him proclaiming him an imposter, a blasphemer, a fraud, kicking him off the pedestal they’d forced on him. A pedestal he repeatedly refused, a pedestal he denied, a pedestal he begged them—begs us-- not to use.
But they didn’t listen—mobs rarely do---they just turned on him. One or two at first, then ten and twenty, then hundreds. People who were afraid, afraid of the Roman rulers, afraid of the crowd-- afraid to break away, to speak against the status quo, to risk that maybe, just maybe, the king they were looking for, the messiah they awaited was not the king, the messiah they needed.
In Holy Week we walk alongside Jesus as he faces the humanity of betrayal and denial, of power run amok. We must accept that we’re all players in this drama. In Holy Week we discover that we’re Peter: denying who are, we’re Judas: turning on the one we love, regretting it after it’s too late. We’re Pilate: bewildered by what he sees, disagreeing with what’s happening but too afraid of the crowd to stand up to them. We’re the disciples: who still wanting to pick up the sword instead of the plowshare.
But we’re also Mary….loyal, brave and wondrous Mary walking the entire walk with her son, having her heart pierced at that cross watching her dear sweet boy die.… and we’re also Jesus….afraid and alone, lashing out at our Creator God wailing why why why?
We’re all the players in the drama of Holy Week because all of us have betrayed, all of us have denied, all of us have wondered all of us have wailed and all of us have had our hearts pierced.
This Holiest of Weeks isn’t easy, and it isn’t pretty, but it is necessary and it is glorious. For what we learn is that even when behaving at our very worst, even when full of denial and doubt, rage and terror, betrayal and hate Jesus is still with us, loving us.
You can call us crazy, but we’d prefer if you just called us Christians.+
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