Palm Sunday – George Yandell
This day in our calendar is Palm Sunday / the Sunday of the Lord’s Passion. It moves from pageantry to horror. Our palm procession mirrors the excitement in Jerusalem 1,992 years ago. Jesus was entering the great city, the crowd was chanting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” His disciples were giddy, I imagine. Then so quickly the joy turns to sadness on Maundy Thursday, then disbelief and horror on Good Friday.
None of my feelings or thoughts pondering the events of Holy Week comes remotely close to what Simon of Cyrene experienced on the day he ventured into Jerusalem and suddenly found himself carrying a condemned man’s instrument of death. But they are similar, in that reality has intruded on the joy of palms and hosannas, and somewhere in that reality Jesus is going on to die.
We moderns feel helpless about the coarsening of our world. We endure it, we try small survival strategies, we wish for better, but in the end we lock our doors and hope that the angel of death passes by.
Jesus is just as helpless today as we are. The Christian era has witnessed humanity’s worst barbarism – entire populations slaughtered, peoples enslaved, compulsory ignorance made public policy. Lies have been treated as clever, thievery as necessary and cruelty as manly. Much of that barbarism has been done in the name of Jesus, as if he were an angry volcano-god demanding human sacrifices.
All that Jesus has ever been able to do is walk to Calvary. He cannot wave a wand and make history disappear and human choices become benign. He can only walk on to die and hope that we will see him, weep for him, weep for ourselves, and for at least a heartbeat allow ourselves to carry his cross and to know that this cross is the answer, not lock or gun or hatred or bitter nostalgia.
We ache for our children, our country, our friends who struggle, and in all of that, we ache for ourselves. Love is an aching. Love might be patient and kind, a brave tulip on a spring day, but love also hurts…
Love goes to the home of a friend and discovers that the friend has died. Love stands before his tomb and weeps. Love feels that helpless pain that springtime and blossoms bring to the surface. Love stands outside the child’s door and weeps, or outside the hospital room and weeps. Love walks and touches, and knows the pain of absence. Love knows hope, and hope dares to see death.
And we, at our best, walk behind love, carrying his death. By the time love cries out in agony, we might be standing nearby or continuing onward. Either way, we are changed and made less numb. We know through his death that Jesus loves everyone, all people equally, even his tormentors and those who betrayed him.
We’re next going to pray a song, to know that love and live in it: “My song is love unknown, my savior’s love to me, love to the loveless shone that they might lovely be. O who am I that for my sake, my Lord should take frail flesh and die?” We enter the passion of Jesus together, so that we might be renewed in the only love that endures even death- the love of God for us.