Laity, here is a secret many of you may not know: tomorrow morning is probably the Sunday your pastor most agonizes over: Is it Palm Sunday? Is it Passion Sunday? Is it Palm/Passion Sunday? Do we march around the church, around the block, through the neighborhood waving our palm branches in a holy parade of joy and keep the emotion of the service up and happy or will we sink into deep despair as we journey with Jesus from the betrayal of a last supper to judgement, walking with Jesus through the streets of Jerusalem as he carries a cross like a common criminal? Will we make the crowd squirm as the details of his execution are described, until there is nothing but silence as he is taken off the cross and sealed in a garden tomb?
The struggle is real.
The movement between Palm Sunday and Easter is filled with shocking twists. The King’s triumphant ride into Jerusalem quickly sours. There is a desire in so many of us to skip those pages in the Gospel story and run to—and then from—an empty tomb. Keep the joy alive!
But Holy Week calls us to not turn away but study what happened to Jesus, how those in political power were so threatened by his teachings that they bribed one of his own followers to entrap him for arrest, to be subject to mockery, disdain, shame, and death.
Between the packed church tomorrow and then again throughout Easter morning, there will be other services, with smaller crowds. Like the women who refused to leave Jesus as he hung dying on the cross, they will come to listen to the story, to take their parts in the Passion play. They will mourn as they sing with trembling voices, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
As a child, my mom had us save our palm branches until the next Palm Sunday. We would come home with those waxy palm fronds and sit at the kitchen table and turn them into crosses. They were nothing fancy, like some palm weavers I have encountered. We used kitchen scissors to make two slits through which a piece of the palm frond was threaded. The cross was placed above a little picture of Jesus that was hung above my bedroom light switch.
I give thanks that at such an early age I was taught of the solemn connection between Palm Sunday and the cross of Good Friday.
Enter into the joy of Palm Sunday. But don’t turn away from the events that followed. There are important lessons for us all to discover: that life can take unexpected turns; that betrayals happen; that the powers and principalities that be will forever be threatened by those who stand with those on the margins; that too often, death feels like it has the upper hand over love.
But that’s not the end of it. God still has more in store for us. When all seems lost, when the story seems like it is over…
(to be continued…)
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