Palm Sunday, 2nd April 2023
Readings: Psalm 31.9-24
Philippians 31.9-24
May these words and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord.
We know the story: the first ‘Palm Sunday’ Jesus, his celebrity status confirmed by the raising of Lazarus from the dead just days before, rides into Jerusalem to popular acclaim. Loud hosannas reverberate throughout the city. Shouts proclaiming him the Son of David, the Messiah, add a political dimension to the event. This is the man of the Moment.
But let’s pause and try to imagine the scene. Some things do not quite add up. Even if we take into account the fact that horses, two thousand years ago, were not the magnificent beasts we imagine bearing Napoleon or Wellington as they head a victory parage, a donkey or a donkey’s colt (it’s not quite clear which Jesus chose) is definitely not the ideal mount for a popular figure launching his publicity campaign. An objective spectator would have seen something faintly ridiculous. The legs of a grown man, rising a donkey, would have dangled down practically reaching the ground. He would have been barely visible above the heads of the crowd lining the streets. It is unlikely that Jesus would have done anything to encourage those cheering his entry. Perhaps he kept his eyes down. Perhaps he stared straight ahead. What he would not have done is nod or smile; there’d have been no regal wave, none of that pointing, beloved by American presidents, seeking to convey a personal connection with individuals in an exultant crowd. For all the cheering, for all the exuberance. Jesus – the focus of it all – would have been curiously, peculiarly unresponsive. ‘What’s going on here?’ our objective spectator might ask. ‘This guy’s not playing his part. Seems like he doesn’t want to be here. This publicity malarkey doesn’t appear to be his sort of thing at all.’
Jesus’s ride into Jerusalem was his last major, public appearance. If he cleansed the Temple of moneylenders, later that day (the chronology is not absolutely clear) that would not have attracted the same degree of notice as this parade. The next time he had the attention of the whole of Jerusalem was when the citizens were baying for his blood, switching their support to Barabbas, less than a week later. The contrast could not have been greater.
So it’s worth considering the significance of this massive disjunct between the events we now commemorate on Palm Sunday and Good Friday.
The conventional explanation of Palm Sunday is that this was an example of the Jews’ total misunderstanding of what sort of person the messiah, long awaited, long foretold, was. They were expecting a political figure, a liberator, someone to free them from Roman rule, who might overturn the puppet-monarchy and restore the land to God’s chosen people. We can see how potent this idea was from the fact that, within a generation, there had been a major uprising against the authority of Rome, culminating in the last stand of the Jewish people at Masada. It failed, of course, and the Jews were deprived of their homeland for nearly 2000 years. So we can understand how hungry the Children of Israel were for this type of messiah, for a political liberator. To be free, to be led to freedom, was so embedded in their cultural and religious DNA that they snatched at the possibility that this charismatic miracle-worker form Nazareth was The Man.
They cast Jesus in a role of their own creating.
Of course ‘freedom’ is not just a political or social concept. It has a spiritual dimension too. The tangle of the political with the spiritual is a particular issue for the Jews, whose identity as a nation is inextricably tied up with their identity as a chosen people, spiritually marked out as distinct from all other races. It would, in fact, be odd if they did not conflate spiritual salvation with political emancipation.
So what is the spiritual significance of Palm Sunday? I think, if we ask this question, the answer will have a relevance to all Christians, including us in the 21st century.
Which brings me to Psalm 31. Which we heard earlier. This is a classic appeal to the Lord, uttered in desperation. But the focus is absolutely not on God but the psalmist. He laments his situation:
“be gracious to me”, “I am in distress”, “my life is spent with sorrow and my years with sighing”, “my strength fails”, “my bones waste away”, “I am the scorn of all my adversaries…they plot to take my life”, “I have become like a broken vessel”.
The psalmist is obsessed by his own personal predicament; he cannot see beyond the circumstances that hem him in.
Eventually, perhaps having exhausted himself with the litany of all his woes, the focus does shift. He recognises that help can only come from God. “But I trust in you, O Lord,” he says, “My times are in your hands.”
But then, he starts to give God instructions:
“Do not let me be put to shame…let the wicked be put to shame”. “Let them go dumbfounded to Sheol.” “Let the lying lips be stilled that speak insolently against the righteous.”
The psalm does indeed end with a sense of salvation but even this is presented as praise to the Lord for doing what was requested:
“You heard my supplications when I cried out to you for help. The Lord preserves the faithful but abundantly repays the one who acts haughtily.”
Psalm 31 is not unusual. It is an example of a mindset that we see repeated time and again, throughout the Old Testament, as the Children of Israel try to make sense of their relationship with God ‘Spare me’, ‘save me’, ‘free mee’, ‘protect me’, even ‘avenge me’. These are the sort of phrases that reoccur. These prayers are all ego-focussed. The relationship with God hinges around God stepping in and doing what his mortal creatures demand. Salvation is limited to the immediate, pressing present.
This could be termed ‘Palm Sunday behaviour’, where the hosannas and the jubilation are offered up because God has obliged us. We knew what was necessary and God has done what was needful.
We knew what was necessary…or did we?
If Psalm 31 is an illustration of ‘Palm Sunday behaviour’, the passage from Philippians could be ‘Good Friday behaviour.
‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,’ we are told. Not the other way around! It is for us to conform to Jesus. Not the other way around. It is for us to shape ourselves to a Jesus who ‘emptied himself’, ‘took on the form of a slave’, ‘humbled himself’, and ‘became obedient’.
The language here is all about surrender. It is about sloughing off one’s personal ambitions and shedding all that constrains us. It is about losing oneself within the wide embrace of Jesus.
The imagery of triumph is wholly absent.
The spiritual journey from Palm Sunday to Good Friday and beyond is therefore symbolized by the physical journey that Jesus made in the last week of his mortal life. This surely is the spiritual journey we should all aspire to make.
Of course, God wants us to confide in him. He wants us to admit to what frightens us, to confess to what distracts us, to lay before him our concerns and dreams and aspirations – after all, we are only mortals, living in a time and place not of our own choosing, affected by so much beyond our control. Unburdening ourselves to God is natural because we know him to be a loving God and Jesus has revealed him to be an intimate God.
I am not denouncing the Psalmist for his wholly human cry for help; heaven knows there are millions of people who have to endure similar attacks and abuses. But I am suggesting we strive to move beyond Palm Sunday, casting God as the agent who will lift us out of our own personal predicament. I am suggesting that, to reach Good Friday, every time we pray we should end our prayer with Jesus’s words in Gethsemane, “nevertheless, not my will but thine be done”.
Surely, only in this way, can we make real headway on our spiritual journey from a Palm Sunday mindset – casting God in the role we have assigned for him – to a Good Friday attitude – when we place ourselves in complete submission. From there, we can hope to journey further to that ultimate Easter Sunday, when every tongue confesses “that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father”. Amen