Today is Palm Sunday, which is a weird weird holy day in the Christian Church (by which I mean the one holy catholic and apostolic, to borrow language from the Nicene Creed). In many ways each Sunday is a lifting of the Lenten burden. If you are fasting, you don't fast on Sundays --etc. Palm Sunday which remembers the triumphant entry into Jerusalem is a little more festive than other Sundays in Lent. The difficulty is, for me at least, how does one celebrate with the crowds who welcomed Jesus without flashing forward to the end of the week and remembering the behavior of these same people or recalling why this is holy week at all.
I think about the disciples and how pumped they must have been it would have felt like all the hard work and suffering they had gone through for the last three years was now finally paying off. I think about the crowd, so many of them in from the surrounding countryside, what it must have felt like to have been a first time visitor in Jerusalem for passover. I think about the way that every year or so somebody would come along promising to rid Israel of the Roman Occupation/ restore the splendor of the old Kingdom. I think about all of these people looking to Jesus to give them something, some kind of hope, having all these expectations of him.
As a Christian in this modern era, I interpret the observation of Palm Sunday in this way: We stand with the disciples and the members of the crowd. We too are among people who are looking for Jesus to give us something, to change something about us, to give us some hope, to make the world a better place, to make us rich, to smite our enemies, to agree with our judgment of others, whatever. We have all have things that we want to project onto Jesus, ways in which we want to classify and pigeonhole him. Palm Sunday reminds us of our place in the massive crowd of people who still have room to grow in our understanding of who/ what Jesus was, and what he was up to.
To that end I have some suggestions about changing the way we celebrate Palm Sunday. Let's stop making Palm Sunday the day where we parade the children around the church. It's not scripturally accurate anyway. Let's say words about the ways we seek to define Jesus rather than letting him define us (I like responsive litanies for this). Finally we should refrain from preaching holy week and certainly refrain from preaching Easter on Palm Sunday and just preach Palm Sunday.
