What can we say April 13? Palm/Passion Sunday

    For years in worship planning, my musicians and clergy ask, annually, “Are we doing Palm Sunday? Or Passion Sunday?” I get it – but is there really a choice? There’s a tragic dimension to the Palms entry, no matter how cute or fun we try to make it. Jesus comes surrounded by great joy but into the teeth of mortal danger; he comes to tackle the powers, and to be killed by them. And there’s a joyful dimension, paradoxically enough, to the Passion. Gruesome, horrific, unjust suffering, transformed by the miraculous way of God into immense life, light, joy.

   Psalm 118 could be preached upon; but even if you don't, its cadences are well worth mentioning, or even deploying as a call to worship. It’s about a royal victory in ancient times. “This is the day the Lord has made” doesn’t mean Oh, God made a pretty day for me to enjoy, but “This is the day the Lord has acted,” brought deliverance, re-established his people once peril was eluded. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Did Jesus or any of his friends ponder this as he rode right by the huge ashlars of Herod’s temple mount?

   And Philippians 2:5-11 fits the day marvelously as well. I love the little translation quandary that needn’t be resolved but simply pondered: is it “although he was in the form of God, he humbled himself to death on a cross”? or should it be “because he was in the form of God, he…” I lean “because.” Jesus wasn’t pretending to be what he wasn’t, or what God isn’t. Precisely in his humility, in his shattered heart and body do we see the truth about God.

   So, Luke 19:28-40. Donald Senior wrote a thoughtful book about the peculiar angle Luke takes in his entire Passion narrative, including the triumphal entry. Luke’s whole Gospel has emphasized (more than the other 3) the hysterical, mounting opposition to Jesus among the powers. And Luke makes no secret of Jesus’ royal identity. The conflict is at fever pitch by the time Jesus enters Jerusalem. Why did Jesus die? For our sins? Why did they kill him? Security. Fear of a tumult. A greedy, steely, violent decision not to share a shred of power.

   Luke’s contrasts are brilliant. When Passover came, Pilate and his legions marched into Jerusalem from Caesarea – to the west! – just as Jesus entered with his “fans” from the east. Roman arms clattering, swords glinting in the sun, the thunder of hooves and chariots meant to intimidate, vs. Jesus, not on a war stallion (like Alexander’s fabled Bucephalus or Robert E. Lee’s Traveller) but on a donkey, unarmed, not meant to intimidate anybody, but to unmask the powers, to conquer evil and hate with mercy and love.

   Notice – although you needn’t alarm anybody by mentioning it in the sermon! – there are no palms in Luke, and no Hosannas! There are also no homiletical takeaways. What’s the moral here? There isn’t one. We are simply transfixed by Jesus’ courage, his peaceful witness, his rock solid determination to fulfill whatever God was asking of him. The moment is politically loaded. Jesus doesn’t shirk, or say Oh, you’re mistaken, I’m nothing to worry about!

   David Lyle Jeffrey reminds us that this colt is untrained, undomesticated, never ridden – and so we’d expect such a creature to be difficult to mount or to stay on task. Instead, he’s docile, cooperative – even amid all the clamor, racket, flapping cloaks and branches. He doesn’t buck, but carried his load beautifully. Luke does linger over the disciples securing this creature. “The Lord has need of it.” It’s thin, and a tad corny, but the preacher isn’t off target to ask “What do we have tied up that the Lord has need of, and could put to lovely use? Does the Lord have need of me?"

   The cloaks laid along the path: do we think of Sir Walter Raleigh doffing his coat for Queen Elizabeth to walk across a muddy path? What about Francis of Assisi – whose conversion was hastened by a peasant who laid down a cloak for Francis to walk upon in front of Assisi’s equivalent of Herod’s temple? Francis wasn’t St. Francis at all – not yet. The peasant foresaw what would unfold. Were Jesus’ fans unwitting foreseers of the Lord Jesus would later become?

   Who was in the crowd? Had formerly blind Bartimaeus followed him from Jericho? Mary Magdalene surely was there. Lazarus? What about James, Jesus’ brother – who could well have accompanied Jesus’ mother to the triumphant but hauntingly ominous scene. Howard Thurman thoughtfully includes Mary in his pondering on Palm Sunday:

   “I wonder what was at work in the mind of Jesus of Nazareth as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey. Perhaps his mind was far away to the scenes of his childhood, feeling the sawdust between his toes in his father’s shop. He may have been remembering the high holy days in the synagogue with his whole body quickened by the echo of the ram’s horn. Or perhaps he was thinking of his mother, how deeply he loved her and how he wished that there had not been laid upon him this Great Necessity that sent him out on to the open road to proclaim the Truth, leaving her side forever. It may be that he lived all over again that high moment on the Sabbath when he was handed the scroll and he unrolled it to the great passage from Isaiah, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor.’ I wonder what was moving through the mind of the Master as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey.”

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   Check out my book on, not how to preach, but how to continue preaching, The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.