Welcome to Holy Week!
Luke 22:14 – 23:56
“Hosanna in the highest!” Those were the cries of the people of Jerusalem as they lined the streets and welcomed Jesus as a conquering hero. As they waved their palm branches and threw their cloaks onto the road in front of Him there was an expectation that Jesus might finally be the one who would liberate the Jewish people from the oppression of Rome. But Jesus wasn’t who they expected Him to be. He was much, much more.
In the Lutheran Church, Palm Sunday used to be just plain Palm Sunday. It was a day when we celebrated that triumphant arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem with our own hymns and the waving palm fronds. We even reenacted this on a much smaller scale this past Sunday at our own church here in Cave Junction, and it’s always very special when we get to proceed into the church waving our palm branches.
But things have changed. Because so many people no longer show up for Maundy Thursday or Good Friday services anymore, the church felt we needed to make Palm Sunday into Palm/Passion Sunday. That kind of makes sense. For many of the people who don’t attend those other services during Holy Week it feels like we’re going directly from the triumphant “Hosanna in the Highest” of Palm Sunday to the glorious “He is Risen” of Easter Sunday while avoiding that horrifying cry of “Crucify Him!” on Good Friday. The problem is, without that part of the story the glory of the resurrection on Easter Sunday loses much of its meaning.
I can understand the impulse to skip Thursday and Friday of Holy Week. After all, avoiding confrontation seems to be part of our nature. Who doesn’t want to go from glory to glory and just skip the messy, embarrassing, and condemning stuff in the middle? But it’s only through the cross that we know that God isn’t just standing smugly at a distance. God’s abundant grace is hiding in, with, and under all this broken stuff because the suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross is for us. All of us.
Nothing separates us from the love of God in Jesus. Not insults, not betrayal, not suffering, and as we’ll see on Easter, not even death itself. So, let’s embrace the split personality of this Palm Sunday. Let’s celebrate the procession with Palms while still embracing the suffering of the cross, because we do that in the company of a self-emptying God who pursues us and saves us with a relentless, terrifying love.
Hosanna in the highest indeed. Welcome to Holy Week!