This is a special post that honors the twentieth anniversary of the Creator blog. The first Creator blog post was written on March 29, 2006 Palm Sunday. Click the Holy Week - First Blog link on the right to see the entire 2006 Holy Week's posts.
Creator, like many congregations, often celebrates Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday together on the same day (commonly called Palm/Passion Sunday) Palm/Passion Sundays together carry very different tones and purposes. The contrast is intentional, drawing us from celebration into suffering.
On Palm Sunday celebrations, we lift our palm branches, wave them in the air like a forest bending toward one man. and lay them down reverently when we enter. We cry Hosanna without hesitation, as if we have always known what we meant by it. Palm Sunday is joyous, everything feels clear: God comes near and is recognized. Or at least, we think we do.
We welcome a king, but what kind of king? Is Jesus bringing everyone victory? Is he a restorer of order? Will he take what is broken and make it right in ways we can understand? The palms in our hands are not only symbols of praise; they are also our quiet declarations of expectation. 'Save us', we say, but have already decided what salvation looks like. This is a king like no other, and the truth of what the "Jesus way" offers can suddenly inspire or elude us. We arrive at the Passion Sunday piece.
The tone shifts, and usually the dual liturgy turns. The story deepens. What began in procession becomes confrontation. What sounded like praise begins to echo with accusation. By the time we are in the midst of a dramatic reading of the Passion, we are no longer standing at the roadside. We have been pulled into the crowd. Now we are given lines to speak as the crowd, we call out "Crucify him".
It is unsettling. We do not leave the crowd behind; we become it. The same voices that welcomed now reject. The same mouths that cried Hosanna now form the words of death to the savior. Something within us resists this. We want to step back, to say: That was them, not us. Yet the liturgy suddenly will not allow us that distance.
On Passion Sunday, like Peter, we see how thin the line is between devotion and denial. How quickly love turns when it is not met on its own terms. The palms we carried so lightly that we have strewn across the sanctuary suddenly gain a new, unfamiliar meaning. How easily we follow Christ until he refuses to be the kind of savior so many hope for.
Today reveals that we are not only those who welcome Christ, but also those who misunderstand him. The triumph we celebrated was real, but in the end, we judged it to be incomplete. It had not yet undergone the required suffering. It did not yet reckon with the cost of the kind of kingdom he brings.
And still, Jesus enters. He does not turn away from the crowd that turns on him. He does not withdraw the gift of himself when it is refused. He continues towards betrayal, towards judgment, and towards the cross.
There is a strange mercy captured in Palm/Passion Sunday. That Christ would accept our praise is one thing. Enduring rejection is another, but that he would hold both together, that he would receive the Hosanna and the Crucify from the same lips and still go on loving that is the mystery at the heart of this day.
Perhaps the only honest prayer left to us is not the triumphant Hosanna we began with, but something quieter, more uncertain:
Lord, save us even from ourselves.
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