Palm Sunday

Which is it? Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday? Can we have it both ways? In some places the palm procession is like hors d’œuvres, lightweight food to nibble on before the main dish is served. We view it as an amusing preliminary. Afterward we all hunker down in our pews and put our minds to the more solemn business of the eucharist, introduced by the reading of the entire passion according to Matthew.

But, really, a joyous procession followed by an abrupt shift to a minor key can be defended. The mood shifted just that way in Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem. Perhaps the change also reflects the chronic fickleness of humanity: we greet Jesus with palms and loud hosannas one moment and cry out, ‘Crucify him!’ the next.


Viewing the Palms and the Passion as a single event yields a single, complex truth: the resurrection follows suffering, something we don’t like to acknowledge. This Sunday emphasises that Christ’s resurrection does not happen all by itself—Jesus must walk through the Passion and so must we. The risen Christ is the crucified Christ and no other. We can’t get to the resurrection without going through the journey to the cross ourselves.

With Palm/Passion Sunday Holy Week begins. Passiontide—the intense and exclusive concentration on the suffering and death of Jesus—unfolds in seven days. It has been in the past the custom of many to make Lent a remembrance of the passion, complete with thorns, whips and nails, but these symbols miss the point of Lent. The ancient and still appropriate focus of Lent is baptism and its implications for living given that it was the period of preparation for baptism which would take place at the Easter Vigil. Holy Week—first observed formally in the late fourth century—is the appropriate and useful time for attention to the cross, the symbol so associated with Christianity. This attention is exclusive for, in the Orthodox, Roman and Anglican traditions, no other celebrations are appropriate during this time. No holy days that may fall during this week are celebrated, no weddings. For example, Saint Joseph, whose feast day is the 19th, is postponed until March 31st. All that can be postponed is moved out of these seven days to make room for the unique meditation and reflection upon the suffering and death of the Son of God.

We now have officially entered into that intense period of reflection. We sang the ninth- century hymn, ‘All glory, laud and honour,’ and we marched in procession waving palms, praising Christ as sovereign, yet as a sovereign who will reign from a tree. Do we realise that our procession is also an expression of our willingness to take up the cross and follow Christ on the way of sorrows, through death to the life that lies beyond? And yet that is where we are headed this week.

The procession of palms is but the introduction to the purpose of this day: the proclamation of the passion of Christ. On this first day of the week, we read about how Jesus died as he becomes increasingly isolated and alone. Taunted by the two robbers who surround him, Jesus utters perhaps the most terrifying cry of dereliction in scripture, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He dies isolated from his followers, the priests of his religion, the people, and the two executed with him. Isolated from the human race, he is at last abandoned by God. And yet… and yet. For Jesus and us that is not all. The passion account, for all of its desolation and terror, does not leave us in that abandoned place. The crowd, who witnesses the crucifixion, confesses, ‘Truly this man was God’s son.’ And so we know. We know this story is about God’s son, our salvation and it is for all humanity.

Telling this part of the story is not reserved until Good Friday. In the richness of our worship and celebration, we are not just walking in Jesus’ steps from entrance (today) to controversy (Monday and Tuesday), to betrayal (Wednesday and Thursday) to death (Friday) to the tomb (Saturday morning) to resurrection (Saturday Vigil and Easter morning). Today sets the week’s tone of deep emotional and spiritual involvement in receiving and exploring the richness of a mystery ever new and ever old.

Ponder the gospel message and then come back, day by day, this week, to be drawn ever deeper into the journey to Golgatha, the cross and the tomb. For, without this journey, Easter morning light will seem less bright and, quite honestly, not make sense.



END NOTE
Based on Gerard S. Sloyan, Holy Week, Proclamation 4, Series C (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 7; Robert H. Smith, Holy Week, Proclamation 5, Series A (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 7; Philip Pfatteicher, Holy Week, Proclamation 6, Series B (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 7, 10-14; Patricia Wilson-Kastner, Holy Week, Proclamation 6, Series C (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 11.