Palm Sunday 2007
Year C
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter

You may have noticed something different this morning.  It is Palm Sunday and we have processed with palms, as we expected.  But we did not have the moment of Jesus’ triumph and our excitement and hope dashed with the reading of the Good Friday passion.  The liturgy planners thought this would be a good year to let us live in the experience of Palm Sunday for awhile, before moving us into the shadow of the cross, which is of course, looming over everything and has been for awhile in our Lenten journey.

So let us go to Jerusalem, in the first century.  It is the week before Passover, and the normal population of 40,000 is starting to grow to five times its usual size.  This sounds  like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and along with the pilgrims coming to celebrate the most important festival of the Jewish faith, extra soldiers were needed to maintain law and order. 

Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan in their book The Last Week, which chronicles the last week of Jesus’ life, starting with Palm Sunday, say that in addition to this procession that we celebrate every year before Easter, there was a corresponding procession of Pontius Pilate and imperial cavalry and soldiers.  Jesus entered Jerusalem from the East, down the Mount of Olives, Pilate entered from the West.  Jesus represented the Kingdom of God and Pilate represented the Empire of Rome, and it is in the clash of these two kingdoms that the rest of the story of Holy Week can be understood.

Great processions were well known in Jerusalem as well as in other parts of the empire.  There would have been many by conquering generals and numerous kings over the years, and they all shared certain features.  The ruler is escorted by citizenry or the army, the procession is accompanied by hymns and/or acclamations, and then there is a ritual of appropriation where the ruler symbolically appropriates the city, often by going to the temple.

In addition to the imperial formula for processions, the procession for Jesus included some key elements from the history of Israel.  If we were the kind of church that had Bibles in the pews, I could ask you to open your Bibles to passages in Zechariah, Genesis, I and II Kings, Psalm 118, and Habbakuk.  You would find in them all the ingredients for the way Jesus put this procession together.  You have just read Psalm 118, with those familiar words,  “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” 

So we are to see in this procession, something that Jesus has carefully worked out ahead of time.  The donkey was no accident.  The place of entry was no incidental detail.  The garments strewn, the response to the Pharisees about the stones shouting out, are all in these earlier passages. 

You might have noticed if you were listening carefully that there is no reference to palms and no hosannas in Luke, although they are in Mark’s version of the triumphal entry.

Let’s bring it a little closer to the ground.  We aren’t sure how long Jesus’ ministry actually was—one to three years.  This is the first time he was in Jerusalem.  He has saved this for Passover, for when he felt the time was ripe for his message to the temple authorities.

But he has been heading toward Jerusalem for a long time.  The synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke have the journey of Jerusalem begin with the descent from the Mount of the Transfiguration, which is always our gospel on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.  All along the way from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus is accompanied by an ever growing group of people.  There were the people from Galilee, of course, the disciples—the men and women—who had been called or who had come to believe in Jesus’ mission.  But there were others, those he healed and those for whom he spoke a word of hope into their desperate lives.  They were along for this triumphal entry, too.  And of course there would be those in Jerusalem who had heard about Jesus and who would be on hand to give him this king’s entrance. 

He rode in on a donkey—which was a symbol of peace from the Hebrew scriptures.  His kingdom was to be one of peace, not of oppression like that of Rome.  Luke is very clear that Jesus is about peace—you remember the heavenly host proclaiming peace on earth in the story of Jesus’ birth.  Now we have the earthly multitude around Jesus proclaiming him as the king who will bring peace.  Luke talks about peace 21 times in his gospel—almost once for every chapter. 

Who was this earthly multitude?  It was probably the peasants, the ones for whom life had become more and more difficult as Rome became more entrenched and as the temple priests became more and more tied in to the system of domination and greed.  Many of the people had lost their land and therefore their livelihood.  They had little to lose, and most of what they possessed was hope. 

Hope.  Do you remember the story of the couple walking to their home in Emmaus who Jesus joins although they don’t recognize him?  It is Easter but they don’t know yet that Christ has risen, even though strange stories are circulating.  They tell the stranger walking with them that “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

Hope.  Sometimes it is all we have left, and even then, we will pare it down to a possible size.  People who are first diagnosed with a teminal illness hope that they will be able to survive it, and then they hope that they will live long enough for some significant event coming relatively soon.  And when we know that death is inevitable and imminent we hope that we will indeed be reunited with those whom we love.  Hope springs eternal, and there is always hope.

And so the people greeted Jesus with all their hopes.  On Christmas we sing about the hopes and fears of all the years are met in the Christ child.  Here are all the people, dirty, dusty, following, leading, leaping, shouting, singing God’s praises filled with hope that Jesus will be the one to restore their nation and to bring justice and peace on earth again.

Don’t we all have the same hopes?  Often we seem to hope less in God than in a political party or leader, or in some new diet or health regime, but we all hope that life will be better for us and for our children and for our poor old battered world.

It is good that hope and love are placed deep within our hearts, and that God takes what ever feeble efforts we can muster and fans them into brighter fires.

The people’s last hope was riding on a borrowed donkey.  And God was about to do something wonderful and powerful, but not what they were expecting.  We are always restricted by our limited imagination, thinking that we know what God should do, what the world should look like.  But we also know that it’s not so obvious. 

We must find ourselves in this crowd of hopefuls, because we are people of hope.  We know that Jesus had his hopes that his witness would somehow make a difference in the world.  He knew what was probably going to happen to someone who was so bold as to ride into Jerusalem as the answer to Old Testament prophecy, to someone who would go and throw a scene in the temple.  What did he hope would happen?  We don’t know.  We only know that as a completely human person he did not know that God would raise him.  As a truly human person he prayed what we would all pray that night in the Garden of Gethsemane:  Lord if it is possible, take this cup from me.  Yet, not my will, but thy will.  And so he was willing to go ahead even if it meant his death, because being faithful was more important than saving his life.  He was willing to take the next step because he believed that the God he knew so intimately that he called him “Father,” had a plan and would make it into something that would fit God’s ultimate plan for the world.

Hope reigned that Palm Sunday and early in the week.  Disappointment, fear, shock, despair did not come until later in the week.  This is a dramatic journey that Jesus and his followers were on, and we are invited to accompany them, day by day through the week.

If we want to understand Holy Week and ultimately the Day of Resurrection, then we must walk with him each and every day this week, just as we hopefully try to walk with him every day every week.  This means reading the lessons, walking the labyrinth,  coming to the services.  This means first of all taking a nail home with you today as a reminder that we cannot help but rejoice and hope, even in the shadow of the cross.  Bring that nail back on Good Friday, and there will be a use for it.

But today get in touch with that hope.  Let us who know we have no other hope or joy cast the first cloak for Jesus to ride upon.  For we are the Rag Tag Army that has followed Jesus to Jerusalem and we are the ones who proclaim, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!  Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven!”