Palm Sunday: …and no wonder…we are not God

Palm Sunday

Sally and a Lenten Walk

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

--Rilke

Palm Sunday is my least favorite Sunday of all. The bipolarity of it makes me anxious in ways I can’t even articulate, and the deep solemnity that emanates from it, permeates the whole of Holy Week and leaves me in a state of what I can only describe as a profound mix of sadness and awe and emptiness.

We go from standing in the parking lot, shouting “Hosannas”, waving our palm fronds, and welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem, to standing up in the nave, shouting “Crucify Him!”, and leaving the church in silence. It’s the liturgical equivalent of a really bad case of whiplash. Two thousand years on, and it still makes me slightly ill, every year. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to actually have been there.

The walk to Jerusalem must have been a difficult one for Jesus and His friends. I imagine they took a route they’d walked a hundred times, probably stopping at the same places they always stopped, walking with the same friends they’d walked with for the last two years. I imagine that they were by turn excited, nervous, afraid, thrilled, terrified, and resolute. I also imagine them as hopelessly naïve…they wouldn’t know what hit them until Friday morning rolled around, and the sky turned black, and everything changed, only not the way they thought it was going to.
I’m left wondering what Jesus thought about all this: the long walk, the incredible and joyous reception at the gates, cleaning out the Temple, Passover with His nearest and dearest, and a horrible betrayal. Because I believe in the duality of the nature of Jesus, I have to concede that He must have known what was happening, and at the same time, was shocked to His core that this was the way things would have to play out.

To know that one must lose in order to win…the cost and the pain of that is so very high. Who but God could feel the weight of it without being crushed? Who but a God who loves us, who does more for us that we could ask or imagine, would be willing to be crushed, so that we could be made whole, again? Who but a God who loves us would be willing to hold all the hate and meanness and brokenness and death in this world, so that we could truly know love, kindness, wholeness, and life? Even the people closest to Jesus, who had been with Him, seen the Transfiguration, witnessed miracle after miracle couldn’t believe it, couldn’t hold it, couldn’t bear to look this full in the face…and no wonder…we are not God.

We are invited each Ash Wednesday, to practice a Holy Lent. May the holiness of the journey to Jerusalem, the confusion and hurt of that week, and the starkness of the borrowed tomb remind you that even betrayal and death never have the last word, even as you feel the sadness and weight of Good Friday. Sunday is coming…

Love,
Sally