Who is this?

Who is this? It’s no wonder they asked. Anybody not familiar with the Christian Faith considering our celebrations this Sunday would wonder what was going on. 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 around the sanctuary and waving the palms. We feel festive! Palm Sunday is one of the few days in the church year when red vestments are worn. It’s a party!

Even those Australians, who 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 of a celebration time.

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 realise 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.” They don’t know who he is. Do we?

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 congregations. 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 upsetting the order of the day like a protest march? But again, the question, they don’t know who he is, do we?