Waving Palms

This Sunday we in the Christian faith celebrate Palm Sunday, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on an ass. Our scripture is from Matthew 21 and I believe we like those present want to ask, “Who is this?” It’s no wonder they asked. We wave our palms and smile at the children and feel the joy of—well, what is the joy we’re feeling, exactly? We’re likely remembering being little children ourselves, going to church and having something to do that wouldn’t happen any other day of the year, marching either from outside near the Church building and into it or around the sanctuary and waving the palms. We feel festive!

Palm Sunday is one of the few days in the church year when pastors wear red vestments and we use the red hangings or ornaments around the Church. It’s a party! Even good Australians, many of whom would never want a king, love King Jesus riding into the city, and the sweet hosannas being sung, asking him to save us. Who is this? A man on a donkey, riding into town, was not the amazing sight. It was the people around him and their clear adoration of him that got the attentions of the authorities, which set the events of the rest of that week in motion.

In the days to come, we will remember events more dramatic and less celebratory. We will follow Jesus to the upper room, and out to the garden of Gethsemane. We will hear him pray and feel his disappointment when his friends can’t stay awake and wait for him even for an hour. We will shudder at his arrest and trial and crucifixion. We will wonder how anybody could think of betraying him.

Maybe for a minute we’ll realize that we would have been just like the people around Jesus, as helpless to stop the earthly powers, as sleepy as the men and as silent as the women who followed him from Galilee into Jerusalem, the same friends and followers who started the week cheering for him.

Maybe, just maybe, we will step outside of our own stories and wonder how it felt for Jesus. The letter to the church at Philippi stresses that Jesus lived the human experience right up to the end. He had both the form of God and the form of a human. He rode into Jerusalem on that donkey as both. He did not use the power of God to save the mortal body. He rode in that day prepared to take whatever would come.

And that makes me want to celebrate, although the form my joy takes, feels as solemn as it does festive. We come to the end of Lent, to the beginning of this Holy Week, and we gather to worship God who loved us enough to be one of us: to live as one of us and to die as one of us.

Who is this? The whole city asked the question, says Matthew. It must have been on everyone’s lips. And the answer is simply “the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee”

Notice that here the crowds identify Jesus as a prophet.  Can you think of current figures who have received such overwhelming support, only to quickly fall from grace shortly after? This is a passage that aches to be visually depicted in our Christian congregations who meet this Sunday for worship. That’s why we wave the palms. We need to see it, experience it, and be part of it. Is the triumphant entry like a protest march? Upsetting the order of the day?

There are other dreadfully practical ways to welcome Jesus as well. Be a peacemaker; love and pray for your enemies; go an extra mile with someone; stop striving to be first or best or most powerful. You may say that these practical instructions amount to being nice to others and being a good person but carry very little spiritual weight. We would all prefer merely to contemplate the mystery of God’s coming near and follow Jesus’ journey with a spiritual devotion to the suffering servant.

It is true that many of these instructions don’t seem spiritual in themselves. We must do them, not because of their own spiritual weight, but because our hearts are very small. We clutter them daily with concern for ourselves, misplaced loves, and hurt feelings. We must make room for Jesus in order to welcome him properly. Somehow this practical work done with spiritual attention prepares the way of the Lord as nothing else can. It changes us. It makes room in our hearts that Jesus can fill with the kingdom of heaven. This is the way to make straight the path of the Lord: self-emptying.

There is no other way to let Jesus’ message sink in, and there is no other way to follow our Lord than to walk in his footsteps. Jesus’ life was one of self-emptying and service to God and humanity, and so we make our lives in his likeness. If there was ever a week to get this right, this is it. If there was ever a point in the Christian narrative to step out of the way and let the story of divine love continue, this is it. Let this work be the homage you pay to the king as he comes.