PALM SUNDAY DEVOTIONAL
Photo from Unsplash.
The past two years have disrupted our experience of time. What day is it? What week is it? How long have we been doing this? It seems like forever, and yet it’s not. Holy Week – and the Sunday of the Passion (or Palm Sunday) in particular - also upends our perception of and location in time. This week, we are caught up in the pivotal events of time and history in ways that are wondrous and jarring. Like no other day in the Church year, Palm Sunday is jarring. It reminds us how hard it is to think the whole story of Jesus at the same time. On this day, we hear the paradox that echoes in the chasm between the shouts of “Hosanna” and the cries of “Crucify him!” in our two Gospel readings. It’s a paradox that reminds us that the people who greet Jesus as he comes in triumph and the people who call for his death are the same people. And that those people, quite alarmingly, are us.
Each year, we come to Palm Sunday to be confronted by Jesus in ways that leave us reeling from liturgical whiplash. Each year, we are faced with the question that Jesus asks each of us in the silence of the human heart, that silence that looms between the shouts of “Hosanna” and the cries of “Crucify him!” Each year, we look within ourselves and look around, desperately looking for someone else to blame, someone else to take the fault.
We want a scapegoat for what’s about to happen, and indeed this is the root of so much Christian antisemitism that has been so deadly throughout the centuries. But this day says to us, don’t look around, don’t look at the person next to you, don’t look at that out-group over there. Look at yourself. Look inside yourself. Look honestly at what you find there. When I look, I see my own fickleness, my own worst habits, my own capacity for casual betrayal. I see all the ways that, like Pilate, I want to wash my hands of it all and walk away.
The sickening turn from triumph to betrayal isn’t the only paradox of this day. It’s no accident that Paul’s words from Philippians come just before the reading of the Passion Gospel. This week, we hear again the story of Christ’s saving work. But before we do so, we need to hear who this Jesus is, because otherwise the story of Holy Week risks incoherence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it succinctly when he says that when it comes to Jesus, the person interprets the work. That is to say, who Jesus is gives us the meaning of what Jesus does.
In just a few short verses, Paul sweeps from Christmas to Good Friday, from the manger to the cross, from the descent of the Word made flesh to the vision of that same Word as he is lifted up and, as we read in John’s Gospel, as he draws the whole world to himself. Here is the one whom God highly exalts, the one to whom God gives "the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend... and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." Here is the one before whom every knee will bend one day, "in heaven and on earth and under the earth," and every tongue joins in confessing together that he is Lord.
Even now, we are being lifted up with him and drawn into unity with God in a way that will one day be complete when we see face to face, though in the meantime we see it only all too dimly. In the meantime, we follow with faltering steps and failing hearts on this side of the last day. We do this not for our sake, but for his - not for our glory, but for his. We do it in the hope of things not seen, the truest things, the most real things.
