Palm Sunday

“And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest. ”

One of the things that we can sometimes find challenging about faith, particularly the faith we proclaim as Christians, is that we live in a kind of liminal time – an in-between time, a place in the middle, touched by two worlds.

What I mean is that, on one hand we proclaim a great and wonderful hope, the hope of the final and ultimate fulfilling of God’s promises, the one-day coming of God’s Kingdom in its fulness, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. This thing-that-is-coming, we are told in scripture, will a place where every tear is wiped away, where former things of this life – our sufferings, our sickness, our sadness, the transientness of this world, will be gone, and replaced with truth, goodness, beauty, and everlastingness.

This is what we call the transcendence of God – the part of God that we don’t yet know fully, the mysterious part, the part that is so totally beyond us.

But yet, at the same time – as we said last week – God is truly present with us all the time. This Kingdom of God’s has already come, though notin its fulness, and we get glimpses of it in this life, foretastes of what is to come. We get it when we love or are loved, when we experience something beautiful and moving, when we pray, when we sacrifice or when someone sacrifices for us. The kingdom is coming, and the kingdom is now. It’s hard to wrap our heads around.

Last week I quoted Anthony Bloom, from a small book he wrote on prayer: that often what we do in our lives is pray to God as we have made God in our own minds. Sometimes, as I said, we think that God is absent, because we aren’t getting what we want, but that these are moments when we might ask ourselves if we are wanting or asking for the right thing. That maybe we can become so blinded by the desires upon which we set our own hearts – the things we think we most desperately want – that, like looking directly into a flashlight we lose all sense of what’s out here, we miss God in the places where we aren’t looking because we’re looking for God in the light, in what we want.

Now it’s true that often we experience this because we are simply wanting and asking for the wrong thing. What our hearts want and what our souls need aren’t always the same, and sometimes God directs the course of our lives – perhaps even painfully – to learn this.

But what today, Palm Sunday, brings out is that other times it’s not that we’re asking for the wrong thing, necessarily, but we’re expecting too little.

Jesus’ earthly ministry has been drawing to a close, of late, and the Father has led him back to Jerusalem, the holy city, to face these final days and to fulfill that for which he came. Palm Sunday inaugurates for us Holy Week the week of Jesus’ passion – from the Latin patior, where we get patience, simply meaning his suffering – in which his purpose here is fulfilled. We fill our time in the parish with times of worship so that we too can enter into the drama of this passion, to get a sense of what it was like to be there, to witness these things, to find ourselves in the narrative.

When he enters Jerusalem, he is greeted by cheering crowds, Matthew tells us, who behave as they would for a King returning from some great victory – clothes and palm branches, symbols of peace, are strewn in the road; the king doesn’t ride a warhorse, but an ass. He enters the city to their shouts and cheers, he enters the temple and cleanses it, driving out the moneychangers, he opens the eyes of the blind. This is to say, he enters Jerusalem with a bang.

And so how do things go from Palm Sunday to Good Friday?

How do we go from cheering and triumph, to mocking and crucifixion?

My point today is that it’s about expectation.

For what was this prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, coming to Jerusalem? Many in the crowd may have shouted Hosannah because Jesus was, to them, a figure of deliverance – with the power to offer a better life here and now, he was the one who had come to fulfill earthly hope and desire; to some maybe he was a force to oppose the Romans, occupiers, enemies. And in a way he was, but not as they wanted.

Often, we get exactly what we need, but not as we wanted. And this is the thing that sticks in our craw. This is the thing that makes us go from pleading to God for what we want, to anger with God for getting what we don’t want, even if we need it. This is how we go from “Hosannah” to “Crucify Him”.

Palm Sunday is a celebration of Jesus’ Kingship, but he’s not the kind of King the world expected or maybe even wanted. He’s a King not riding in glory but on a donkey, a king who doesn’t wear a crown of gold but of thorns, whose throne isn’t in a hall above the other seats, but on a rough hewn wooden cross with nails piercing his hands and feet; a king who shows his power, his might, and his authority not in armies, gold, or castles but in death, in dying  even for the forgiveness of those who drove the nails. How silly this seemed to people then and now. “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God,” writes St. Paul to the Corinthians.

My point is that today is all about expectation; this week is going to be all about expectation: what we are going to get by the end of this week is a God who shows us that it is better to suffer and die for your enemy than to raise the sword against them - what this week should bring us to ask is, if this is what’s on offer, is it what I truly want?

To paraphrase Anthony Bloom’s words from last week – to find God as He truly is, God on the cross, can upset every earthly hope and expectation we have ever had, it can upend the entirety of our lives and how we understand ourselves – in the best way possible. Are we prepared to encounter This God, instead of the one we make for ourselves?

This week, Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is going to rip the lid off of everything, it is going to shine light into the darkest corners of hearts and helps us to see that though at times we are all Judas, we are all Peter saying we do not know the man, we are Pilate, or the nail driver, though our faces and our voices are there in the crowds on good Friday – it is us for whom Jesus goes to the cross, he dies so that we might find forgiveness, we are them when he says, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

This week will move us, God Willing, to see that too often we set our expectations too low, like those on Palm Sunday, imagining God to be less present, or less able, or less willing to be with us in our darkest moments than God is, and it will move us to set our hopes – all of our hopes – not on the things of this world, but on the coming of God’s very strange kingdom, in which the first are last, the last first, and the king dies victorious so that those who betray and kill him might be forgiven.