Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021

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For a perspective on the events beginning on Palm Sunday I can do no better than to paraphrase Mark Twain: History does not [exactly] repeat itself but it [certainly] rhymes.

Jesus is coming to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. Travelling from the house of his friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary at Bethany – a stone’s throw from the city – Jesus enters Jerusalem through one of its eastern gates as a dangerous rumor takes hold among the pilgrims and citizens overcrowding the city. The crowds are awaiting his arrival with dangerous anticipation.

Jesus could slip unnoticed into the city. Instead, he is choosing to announce his arrival in a tableau – a vivid and dramatic reenactment from the prophet Zechariah:

“Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O Daughter of Jerusalem behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is He, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” 9:9

Surely this is a dangerous play – feeding into the growing ecstatic expectations among those carpeting his way with palm fronds stripped from the date palm groves surrounding the city.

The waving of palms is a significant echo in the crowd’s Jewish collective memory – a particular echo that tells us most about their expectations. For some 160 years before, the triumphant Judas Maccabeus, the last leader of a successful Jewish rebellion against foreign domination, led his victorious partisans into the Temple – defiled by the statue that the Syrian tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes had placed of himself in the Holy of Holies. Using palm branches, the Maccabean partisans cleansed and rededicated the sanctuary after its defilement – an event Jews, today, commemorate in the festival of Hanukkah.

A question remains for us however. Is it not curious that Jesus seems to play into the false expectations the crowds have of him as a latter day Judas Maccabeus – a liberator king come finally to lead an overthrow of the hated Roman occupation? Continuing in the mold of Judas, Jesus’ first action after entry to the Holy City will be to cleanse the Temple of the forces of exploitation – those who motivated by greed exploited the necessity of the people – an action of Temple rededication – no longer a den of robbers but restored as the house of God.

The question remains unanswered. Jesus’ consistent stance on his own messiahship has been to play down conventional Jewish expectations – and in the end – only a week away at this stage – to dramatically frustrate and disappoint the crowds who like modern fickle voters inflict their disappointment on him with a vengeance.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

At the same time as Jesus was entering from the East, another triumphal entry procession wound its way into the city from the West. The Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, at the head of his Roman Legion had also come up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

Pilate did not live in Jerusalem – preferring the sea breezes and all mod-con conveniences of Herod the Great’s former capital at Caesarea Maritima, now the administrative center of the Roman occupation of Judea. Pilate loathed and feared Jerusalem’s ancient rabbit warrens seething with civil and religious discontent. He most feared the pilgrim throng crowding into the city for the Passover- which required him to come up to the city with a show of preemptive force in order to forestall the potential for insurrection.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

For Passover was Israel’s collective memory of liberation from an earlier period of slavery. Pilate’s arrival was indeed a wise move, for the crowds that hailed Jesus’ arrival were in insurrection mood.

Holy Week commemorates the events beginning on Palm Sunday of Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem before the Passover. This is a week in which conflicting narratives or storylines intersect and clash with alarming result.

1. There’s the storyline of worldly oppression and political violence intersecting with a storyline of populist resistance and nationalist longing.
2. Both are confronted by the storyline concerning the next installment in the epic narrative of God’s love and vision for the world-through-Israel.

This clash of storylines leads events take an unexpected turn – and rapidly spiral out of control.

Things come to a head  on the eve of the Passover (Maundy Thursday) when Jesus celebrating the Passover meal with his disciples graphically demonstrates the kind of messiah God, not the people, hs in mind.  Turning hierarchy on its head he washes his disciples’ feet. Taking the Passover bread and wine he associates them with his body and blood – soon to be broken and poured out. He leaves them with his simple mandate – maundy in Middle English: love one another as I have loved you; by this shall all know that you are my disciples.  Jesus’ kind of love has consequences: arrest, show trial, and crucifixion – the actions of a loving God’s costly confrontation with a sinful world.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

Holy Week is the week during which we accompany Jesus on the way of his passion. For some of us, this can be an intensely personal experience as our own experiences of loss and suffering – our passion – surfaces in identification with that of Jesus’. For most of us, however, the nature of our Holy Week experience is less personal and more communal. After the shutdowns of 2020 this year we are relieved to return once again – if somewhat piecemeal – to an experience of Holy Week and Easter as a communal celebration.

For we journey with Jesus as a community journeying to the cross – bearing within us not only our own individual maladies and sufferings but the overwhelming maladies and sufferings of the world around us. Liturgy is the form this journey takes. Liturgy is the transport – taking us together through sacred time. In sacred time – where there is no past and no future only the eternal now – we move beyond memory, becoming in present time – participants in the timeless events that engulf Jesus.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

Like the crowds praising Jesus as he entered the Holy City, we enthusiastically hail our next political savior until that is, – he or she no longer is.

We long to do the brave thing – until that is, the moment when we don’t.

In sacred time we become participants with Jesus – as if we too are part of his band of disciples during this eventful last week.

With the disciples, we will share in the breaking of Jesus’ Passover bread and drink from his Passover cup – actions that constitute us a community that ministers to the world.

With the disciples, we will accompany Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane where we too will fight sleep to keep watch with him.

With the disciples we will follow Jesus on the way of his suffering and we will long do the brave thing – until the moment when we won’t.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

History’s associations trigger memory in real time – uncannily echoing within our contemporary tensions. You see, human beings don’t change much.

Like the crowds praising Jesus as he entered the Holy City, we enthusiastically hail our next political savior – until that is, he or she no longer is. We long to do the brave thing – until that is, the moment when we don’t.

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