The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee
How to follow that Gospel? What more is there to say?
Palm Sunday is an oddity in our calendar and in our general idea of how things are supposed to go. A few weeks ago we heard the parable of the Prodigal Son, and it played to type: it began with discord, a son demanded his inheritance early, then left to spend it all in profligate living, found himself starving and headed back home, broken, repentant, to work as a slave and instead there was celebration, rejoicing, a son lost as if dead was returned, resurrected.
Today we have the opposite, we began in celebration and end heartbroken, standing beside the disciples, staring at our Lord dead on a cross. We end this Lent and pass into Holy Week, the rising dread of Good Friday, the liminal time of Holy Saturday, without quite knowing what has hit us.
I’ve spoken before about the practice from Ignatian spirituality where one reads a passage from the gospels and then meditates upon the word by imagining yourself in the story, in the place of different characters, perhaps Jesus, or a disciple, or a shepherd passing by, or maybe even a child attracted by the crowd that followed Jesus around by the end of his ministry.
It is easy to do in today’s passage; perhaps you pictured what it might have looked like as the passion was read so dramatically just now. We can all see the crowds gathered around the street in Jerusalem as a scraggly, bearded man enters, riding a donkey, draped with cloaks, his friends shouting Hosanna. Not everyone would know exactly what was going on, who Jesus was, but times were hard, the city was occupied by the Romans, and some folks probably welcomed the disruption to their lives. The crowds grew and palm fronds were thrown into the street for this oddball King, entering in a humble procession, on a lowly steed, with a ragtag band of fisherman, thieves, and women.
Jesus made it clear to his disciples that he was heading toward his death but as so often happened, they didn’t understand, didn’t believe that the strife he was warning of would ever come to pass. And so we can imagine, a few short days later, their confusion to be standing at Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, staring up at their rabbi, their friend, their teacher, their King, hanging dead from a cross.
We might also be asking ourselves, at this moment, quite how we got to this place where we’ve ended up, how these 40 days of Lent have run so quickly, how our lives can be so different, perhaps, than they were on Ash Wednesday. Much has happened in our life as a community. Employment has been lost, or found, the season has changed from winter to spring. Babies have been conceived, and are growing, quietly and quickly. Lives have ended, and families mourn.
Time sneaks up on us, unexpected, shocking us as it passes so quickly. We are often in the place of the disciples, barely recovered from the celebration, with the sorrow overtaking us, not even fully understanding what has happened, what is happening and without a real clue as to what is coming next.
When we find ourselves in these moments of loss, these Good Friday moments, bereft at the feet of our crucified Lord, we have the promise of Easter, at least, the surety of the resurrection, but that day at Golgotha, the disciples weren’t so sure about that part, wanted desperately to believe that their Lord would rise again but were face to face with his body, lifeless, the undeniable evidence of his death, and their convictions shaken. Many of us have also found ourselves, in the midst of tragedy, lost, without hope that our world will ever be quite the same again, and in fact: it won’t. The promise of the resurrection is not that time will be wound backwards and that Good Friday won’t ever have happened, the promise is that Christ will rise, death will be conquered, and the world will become something entirely different.
And we, like the disciples, like Mary, the mother of Jesus, like every parent who has lost a child, like any one of us who has lost someone we love, dearly, will weep, and tear our hair, and beat our breasts, until we learn how to live in the new reality in which we find ourselves.
And so, as Holy Week begins today, we will walk this short path together, to the devastation of Good Friday and the in-between, unknowing time of Holy Saturday, always with a glimmer of the light of Easter morning leading us on, giving us the strength to keep moving forward, into the blazing glory of our resurrected Christ.
AMEN.
