Remember that? If you do you either were in a parish that made Morning Prayer the main service. Or perhaps you were in another denomination. I experienced a little of both. So I assumed this was what everyone heard. We read the story of the Palms, and we received our palm fronds. And there were lots of flowers. That’s what I remember.
I also remember not understanding it. It felt as though it were the end of something: a happy ending to a story. Calm, fragrant. A sigh of relief. When the Gospel began to sink in this was reinforced. A victory parade, cheering crowds and triumph. Isn’t that how stories are supposed to end? Wouldn’t anything further be anticlimax? Shouldn’t this be the part where “they all lived happily ever after”?
But they didn’t live happily ever after. What came next was Holy Week. And Palm Sunday, for me, just got lost. We forgot about it. Holy Week of course gave us the real end of th Gospel story: the tender farewell, the betrayal and the intrigue, the horror, the grief, and the joyous surprise ending which, the hero says, should have been no surprise to anyone who was listening.
Palm Sunday just did not seem to fit the sequence.
What I didn’t know of course was that this Sunday had been split in two. You see, the problem I had with Palm Sunday wasn’t due to my childish misunderstanding. The problem was that precisely ½ of the meaning was there. The other half was there, in the Communion service–but many many parishes whether Eucharistic or not –understandably–wanted to keep Palm Sunday, so they found that story and made it the center.
Then midway through my life, we put the two halves together again. Like so many things in our generation–the Church recovered something very old. The Passion Gospel. The Gospel that all along was there for the Eucharist on this day, but which very many parishes like my church skipped over.
But the early Church knew better. They knew that these two Gospels belong together.
There is a fearful symmetry to these two Gospels. The Gospel of the Palms and the Gospel of the Passion.
In one Jesus enters the city, in the other he leaves Jerusalem.
Hailed by the crowd * Cursed by the crowd
Mounted on a foal * Mounted on a Cross
Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord * Cursed is the one who is hanged on a Tree.
And these two Gospels are read differently today. Every other Lord’s Day and every other Feast, a Deacon proceeds into your midst and chants or reads you the Gospel. Not today. Today the Gospel is divvied up and acted out.
Why? To place you within it. Ignatius Loyola made a whole art form out of this: locating yourself within the Gospel. Today you can’t help but do it.
During the Palms Gospel, you are the crowd. There is no way out. You get handed a palm frond for a reason and it’s not because it’s lovely.
Palm procession–why did they greet him this way? The scholars have given us a guess.
But the Gospels don’t give us the reason. Why?
Gospels are on a “need-to-know” basis. Frustrating sometimes: we’d like to know all kinds of things. But they tell us what we need to know, not what we’d like to know. So why that crowd hailed him is curious and interesting but it isn’t the important thing. Its that they hailed him–and obviously for the wrong reasons.
You will never know for certain why that crowd welcomed him. But you know that they did, and that they turned in just a few days to curse him.
Deliberately have holes in them, gaps. These gaps are there to leave us room. The question is, not why did they do it, but how have I done likewise.
Palm Sunday stands forever for all those who hail Jesus for the wrong reasons. For 2000 years we’ve had great examples of this. Jut last night we were at the bookstore. I spotted something. It looked like a self-help book–one of those that have grown like mushrooms after a storm in our anxious era–positive thinking and positive reinforcement and that kind of thing. But this volume linked it all with Jesus: as though what Jesus taught and what Jesus died for was believing in yourself and succeeding in business and in love. I thought perhaps it’s a put-on. But no, it was serious — a perfect example of hailing Jesus for wrong reasons. Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord because he gives me such solid tips on how to make it in this life. No wonder the cry turns to “crucify him.”
But bring it home. If we ever have hailed Jesus because it seemed the thing to do, or because someone else wanted us to and rewarded us for it, or because it made us feel superior to others, or because that’s what gentiles do, or for any other half-way reason, then we belong there with palms in our hands shouting blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! And then turning on him the moment things do not go our way.
I wonder when the cost of discipleship comes, what the person with the self-help Christian book will do. And I wonder what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have thought of it.
So we begin outside the city gates and finish where we started. In this stark first Gospel, one by one they desert him. He is left alone. No angels come to bear up his feet lest he crash against the stone.
The terrifying symmetry is there.
This is the best year for Passion Sunday. Why? Because this year is the year of the First Gospel. The year of Mark. What that great master of the dark side of our Gospel, Graham Greene, called the “dark and magical heart of the faith.”
You will deepen your experience of Holy Week this year if you will take an hour and read Mark all the way through. Read it as though this Good News were news to you, as though you had never heard any of it before. Read this oldest, most reliable, most authentic account of Jesus that exists in this world.
Mark is the shortest Gospel, the minimalist one. The one where the “need to know basis” is most obvious. But if you read it as I just urged you to you’ll notice something odd. When the story of the Passion comes Mark floods the story with detail after detail. The kind of details completely missing in the whole first half of the story: the color of a toga. The precise hours in the day. The direction people are moving. Whole dramatic conversations. What everybody is thinking.
In other words he floods us with real-life details so we cannot mistake it: this really happened and this is a word-for-word and blow-by-blow account.
And it has an unmistakable shape. You cannot miss that either: one after the other, everyone abandons Jesus.
Take your pick. With whom will you identify today in the Passion Gospel?
Perhaps you still stand with the Crowd. Then you who welcomed hi with blessings now damn him with curses, simple as that.
But now you have other choices.
First Judas. Judas was the treasurer. The treasurer is responsible for the funds of the group. Not only keeping them safe–a vault could do that. The treasurer is charged with seeing that the funds are flowing in the right ways. Judas betrays him for money: in other words the treasurer uses money in the wrong way. Judas abandons Jesus; Judas betrays himself.
Pontius Pilate also was had his charge. He was charged with keeping the peace, with handing out justice. He was the trustee of the Roman Law, the most powerful system of justice the world had ever seen and which today informs at least half of our own system of justice. It stood rock solid on the four strengths that make for decent humanity. And yet Pilate knew this Jesus was innocent: Mark tells us so: “he knew that the high priests were saying these things in jealousy.” In other words Pilate knew they were lying. Yet he condemned him. Pilate abandoned Jesus, and Pilate betrayed himself.
Those chief priests were entrusted with the Religion of the Old Testament. The Hebrews were the people to whom God had revealed God’s sacred self, taught them God’s own name, and showed them what God demands. Their faith proclaimed to the world that God is one and God is a moral God. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet, thou shalt do no murder. And yet they broke those commandments. They bore false witness against Jesus. And they coveted his power. And the stole his authority. And they murdered him.
Peter was Jesus student. More than a student his disciple. More than a disciple his lieutenant. And more than a lieutenant his friend. Look back through this Gospel we have been reading bit by bit for Sunday after Sunday this Church year. When Jesus steps aside, Peter is always there. When Jesus retires, Peter goes with him. Peter went up the mt of transfig with him, Peter walked the waters with him, Peter it was who said you are indeed the Christ. Yet Peter abandons him. And betrays himself. Peter, the disciples, the crowds, the Priests, Pilate, Judas–one by one they have abandoned Jesus.
Who is left? Who else will abandon him? The answer is the most terrifying thing of all.
Jesus’s last words are: My God My God why are you abandoning me?
And even God is gone. He asks Why? Why have you forsaken me?
It’s a real question, not just an exclamation of pain, not merely rhetorical. Why?
And the answer is... well, it cannot be said in a sentence. Indeed it cannot be said in words alone. But we are going to say it. We are going to answer Christ’s question this week, in words and actions, in sacraments and remembrance, in sprit and in truth. It will take precisely 8 days.
But at the end of the story those two Gospels Passion and Palms will be reconciled. And the fragrance of the flowers will be there to stay. And the part I was waiting for when I was small will arrive. The part where they – I mean we – live happily ever after.
