Over the past forty days we have been together on a journey through the season of Lent. Some of us have given up something precious to us in the form of fasting (chocolate, fast food, alcohol, or social media). Others of you have picked up something new (quiet times of meditation, morning/evening prayer, praying the Anglican rosary, Adult Forum Lenten Program) so that we may grow closer to God while preparing our own hearts for the revelation of resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.
But before we can get to Easter, we must first experience together Holy Week and the passion of our Lord. Or as my friend Father Clarkson likes to say, “before we get to Easter and the resurrection, we must first go through Good Friday.”
Which brings us to today, Palm Sunday. The day that Jesus entered triumphantly into the holy city of Jerusalem in all humility riding on a donkey. The crowds around him broke into a spontaneous liturgy of laying palm branches upon his path and shouting out in worship, “Hosanna!” which means “save us” or “rescue us” we beseech thee oh Lord, “Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest!”
So we too remember Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem by reenacting the liturgy of the palms, pinning our palm crosses upon our hearts and singing together with that celestial chorus singing, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest!”
For Jesus has entered into Jerusalem, which means for us today that Jesus has fully entered into the human condition, filling our emptiness and alienation with his life by taking our sin and death upon himself and nailing it with his body upon the cross.
Jesus entered into Jerusalem to take the sin of humankind, our separation from God, to the cross where it is destroyed once and for all.
The curse is lifted and the temple curtain is torn in two, and now a new man, a new Adam sits at the right hand of the Father making all things new in the glory of his resurrection.
Yet we must also recognize today that the same crowd that worshipped Jesus on Palm Sunday abandoned him by Good Friday, and their shouts of exaltation turned into the hostile and violent words of “Crucify him, crucify him!” We too must painfully remember and reenact this scene as well, for it was our sin as well that drove Jesus to the cross.
Yet in Christ, God takes our hostility and rage and violence upon himself. In fact, Christ submits to our hostility and allows it to be the very catalyst that leads to his crucifixion. In his death, our sin is then swallowed up, crucified, obliterated and removed as far as the rest is from the west. The human race is made clean and now reconciled back to the Father in the Easter resurrection of the Son.
This is why the theology behind the palms is so fascinating to me, for every year the left over palm fronds are gathered up and burned. The ashes are blessed and used to make the sign of the cross upon our foreheads for next year’s Ash Wednesday service.
Do you see the beauty of what is happening here? Do you see how these two symbols bookmark our season of Lent? Like the shouts of the crowd turning from worship to crucifixion, our palms turn from a symbol of worship into a symbol of death in the form of the ashes of Ash Wednesday. Yet every year we are given new palms to declare our resurrection in Christ.
Lent begins with the harsh reminder that we are but dust, and to the dust, like the ash, we shall one day return. So we enter into a season of self examination, preparing our hearts to receive the transformation the takes place during Holy Week. For every year we are given new palms to lay before the path of Jesus, as he makes his way to the cross to destroy the very thing inside us we are powerless to overcome, our sin, our separation, our death.
So let us then turn back to our second reading from Paul’s letter to the Church at Philippi, and let us hear this ancient song of praise to recognize and to remember that this Palm Sunday, Jesus’ journey into Jerusalem has given us a crown of beauty in place of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise in place of a spirit of despair.
5-8 Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.
9-11 Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever, so that all created beings in heaven and on earth—even those long ago dead and buried—will bow in worship before this Jesus Christ, and call out in praise that he is the Master of all, to the glorious honor of God the Father. Amen.
(Philippians 2:5-11; The Message)
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