For most church people, Palm Sunday is a favorite day of the year. It kind of feels like the dress rehearsal for Easter; we gather the children at the back of the Sanctuary and each one gets a palm branch and they march around as the worship service starts. Some of them are old enough they’re being pushed into it by Mom or Dad, others are young enough they don’t really know what’s going on, but they do it year after year and it’s one of the tangible ways we teach a fundamental story in the life of Jesus Christ.
Frederick Buechner was one of the best Christian authors of the last century. He wrote an essay about the story of Noah and the Flood in which he noted the irony of making it into a children’s story. “When I was a child,” he writes, “I had a Noah’s ark made of wood with a roof that came off so that you could take the animals out and put them back in again, and my children have one too; yet if you stop to look at it all, this is really as [bleak] a tale as there is in the Bible, which is full of [bleak] tales. It is a tale of God’s terrible despair over the human race and [God’s] decision to visit them with a great flood that would destroy them all, except for this one old man, Noah, and his family. Only now we give it to children to read. One wonders why.” And Buechner goes on to surmise that it has little to do with how much children may want to read the story, and much more to do with the fact that adults don’t really want to read the story for what it says, so we make it into a fairy tale instead. (Buechner, “A Sprig of Hope,” in The Hungering Dark, 35) Much the same is at issue, I’m afraid, with the story of Palm Sunday. We make it a children’s activity because we don’t want to think about what it really means.
For Jesus’ ministry, this story is the beginning of the end. It starts with a pointed reminder of who Jesus is, when he somewhat mysteriously sends two disciples up the road to untie and bring to him a donkey and a colt; they turn out to be exactly where he said they would find them, and this fulfills an Old Testament prophesy from Isaiah and Zechariah, reminding us that Jesus is the Messiah the world has been seeking. When they return with the colt, they spread their cloaks upon it and as he rides into the city, a large crowd gathers and the people tear branches from the trees and lay them in his path like a red carpet, and they shout “Hosanna,” meaning “save us,” an exclamation of praise. This is their humble, loving, servant king. And in the account from the Gospel of Luke, some tell the crowd to be quiet, for they understand the risk of suggesting that anyone other than the Emperor might be king.
And that’s where the good part ends. For in a few days, the powers that be—the ones who wish to quell this uprising—will look for someone to betray Jesus; they will find the betrayer in one of Jesus’ closest friends, who will lead the Roman soldiers to a garden, where they will find and arrest him. Peter is there, and pretends to defend him before the guards, but once he has been arrested, Peter will deny knowing him three times. As formal charges are brought and a trial ensues, the rest of the disciples will quietly disappear, and the very crowd that shouted “Hosanna” only days before will stand outside the trial shouting “crucify him.”
In order to appreciate what is going on here, and what it has to do with you and with me, we have to look beyond the Palm Sunday parade to what happens next. In the very next verses of the Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, enters the Temple, and we see the one story in his ministry in which Jesus really loses his temper. Entering the Temple courtyard, where people have come from all over the region to engage in spiritual practices, he finds deceitful moneychangers, gauging the religious travelers who have come to pray. It’s like a combination of all of the most predatory practices of our economy: subprime mortgages and payday loans and and cash for blood plasma, all going on in your church’s Sanctuary at the expense of the poor. And Jesus, furious, knocks over the tables and throws them out.
That extreme example, right on the heels of Palm Sunday, is supposed to wake us up to the choice that is being made in the days leading up to the death of Jesus. In the past three years of his world changing ministry, Jesus has given hope to desperate people through his ministry of healing, forgiveness, and love, and his cleansing of the Temple shows that he does it in the very face of the greed and violence and malice that mark so much of human behavior. So when, inside of a week, the people change their shouts from “Hosanna” to “Crucify Him,” we know what they have done. They have chosen their king. They have chosen the moneychangers over Jesus. They have made gods of the corrupt and damaging and deceitful elements of the human condition, and they will allow the true God who has shown them nothing but kindness and love to hang from a Cross.
It’s not so hard to imagine, when you consider the obsession human beings seem to have with choosing death over life. The horrors that populate our newsfeeds from Ukraine and our southern border and Nashville; people on fire, children killed in their schools, bodies lying in the streets…these things are commonplace to us, and leave us feeling numb; and in a way that seems to keep growing, we seek comfort in drugs and drinks, we are anxious and depressed, and we try to purchase our way into temporary comforts that will help us to forget the plight suffered by the children of God.
And it’s not that we’re bad people, or that we intend the harm that falls on others and on ourselves due to our human failings. It’s just that perhaps chief among our failings is our stubborn sense of pride. We know better than sweet old Jesus. We know the world is broken, so we choose the best among less than perfect choices. We make our own way in the world. We need no Savior. So when Christ comes among us and offers another way—for free!—we are suspicious. He threatens our self-reliance and independence when he offers himself as the way, the truth and the life. We don’t believe his way of love will really work; or we fear that if we accepted his love, we would never be able to rise to the challenge of living a life as brave and beautiful as his—so we don’t try. So this is the real tragedy: that Palm Sunday is not just a story about ancient people in a distant place; we ourselves join those who thought that they loved him on Palm Sunday, but who stood in the crowd on Good Friday and chose death instead.
These are our broken roots, and we share them with all of humanity. We like to think that we come from strong, healthy stock, but this story, and so many like it flood our newsfeed and trouble our consciences in the dead of night. These stories show us that brokenness is part of what it is to be human; and like those who stood on the roadside shouting Hosanna, we too are in need of saving.
It is the depth of our brokenness that makes the next part of the story so incredible. Jesus was no naïve Pollyanna—the kings of the world had been trying to put him to death since Herod sent out soldiers on the night of his birth. So Jesus knew the betrayal and deceit that even his closest friends would display when push came to shove, and not even in spite of it, but because of it—he chose to do the loving thing. He gave up his own life willingly, like a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his platoon, and he told his friends what he was doing so that later they would remember. At supper, he took bread and wine, broke and poured it, and told them of how his life was being poured out to heal a broken world. He forgave them for all the failings that would ever be a part of life on earth. He invited them all—the deniers and the betrayers and the complacent ones, and all of us—to take part in that meal, where our brokenness is met by his grace. And at that Table, he gives us a foretaste of a heavenly Table where people “come together as human beings in such a way that the differences between them stop being barriers…” (42) Because we cannot save ourselves, Jesus is our Savior.
It’s so much nicer to tell the story of Jesus by allowing our children to do the work for us; to turn Palm Sunday into a photo op and a fairy tale, and head off to brunch without having to think too hard about our brokenness. But if we want to appreciate with any kind of fullness the tremendously loving thing that God does on Easter Sunday, there is no shortcut to getting there. The road to the Empty Tomb goes through the Cross. And the path to a joyful embrace of God’s love can only be found if we first confess how much we need it.
Let us pray: Gracious and Holy God: Help us to know our own brokenness; help us to relax our controlling grip on life; help us to accept that there are things we cannot change, and give us courage to change the things we can; help us to see with clear eyes and an open heart the incredible depth of Christ’s love for us just as we are. And bring us to the empty tomb with a sense of awe at how very deeply you love the world you have made. Amen.