Palm Sunday

By Steve Houghton

Purpose: To incite curiosity and inspiration for Holy Week 

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love  Overflowing. Amen (Br. Aiden Owen, OHC) 

Good Morning 

I think we are doing the right thing when we don’t read the Passion of  Jesus on Palm Sunday. The reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday  began in 1954 when I was four years old. The church was concerned  that the numbers of people attending services during Holy Week was  dropping off and it was important that the faithful hear the story of  Jesus’ suffering. So they changed the name of that Sunday from  Palm Sunday to Passion Sunday and made the principal gospel the  reading of the Passion. For me, the impact of Jesus triumphant entry  into Jerusalem is dwarfed into non-existence by the reading of the  Passion. That is as it should be if this were not Palm Sunday.

I think Jesus and God and the church had a plan in mind when they  structured the events of Holy Week the way they did. As a result, I  like it when we “stick to the script” and follow the events of the week  as they occurred. I think when we don’t stick to the script we run the  risk of missing things as we rush to get it all out there. If you think  about it, a week, well really four days, of nightly services in reliving  Jesus’ final story on earth is not so much. Islam has a whole month  of Ramadan in comparison. The Jewish Holiday of Passover is  celebrated over eight day. 

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, a teacher and a monk, a  Lutheran and a Roman Catholic respectively, were part of a  movement undertaken in the middle to late 20th century to try to  discover the historical Jesus. Together in 2006, Borg and Crossen  produced a book called The Last Week in which they suggest,  through scripture and historical record, the day by day, hour by hour  activities of Jesus and his followers during the seven days leading to  the death and resurrection of Jesus. A good deal of what I offer this  morning comes from or is inspired by that book. It is a great read and  raises some interesting considerations and I recommend it to you. 

In order to experience Palm Sunday I think we need some  background. When the Jewish people celebrate the Passover they  do two things that are important to remember. First, they don’t just  remember the Passover, they relive it in the actions of the celebration,  much like we relive the washing of the disciples feet at the last supper  on Maundy Thursday. Second, the Jewish celebration of Passover  concludes with the words, “next year in Jerusalem”. A Haggadah is a  book of the Jewish celebration of Passover. In the New American  Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer with a new translation by  Nathan Englander, Jeffery Goldberg says “Jerusalem is the symbol of  peace, the destination of the Messiah, the holiest place on earth, the  purest expression of the profound Jewish belief that the world will  one day be a better place. It is this idea of Jerusalem for which we  reach. When we reach it - and we will, for that is the core Jewish  belief - there will be no more need for seders and Haggadot: We will  live in a world in which the poor are fed and sheltered and the sick  are healed; in which no one is persecuted or enslaved.”   

Jerusalem, at the time of the crucifixion, was a city of about 30, to  40,000 people, pretty large for the period but only about the size of  Northampton. At Passover the population of Jerusalem grew to  somewhere between 80 and 120 thousand. Imagine packing the  population of Springfield into Northampton. Normally only a cohort or  500 Roman soldiers were stationed in Jerusalem to keep order.  During high holidays the crowd sizes really required a substantially  larger contingency to maintain order and thwart any potential  uprising. 

Roman Governor Pontius Pilate and the bulk of the Roman soldiers  assigned to the area of Judea were normally stationed in Caesarea  Maritima. Caesarea Maritima was located on the shores of the  Mediterranean Sea, west of Jerusalem. They were stationed there in  part because it was cooled by the breezes of the Mediterranean Sea  and made for much more comfortable living than in the near desert  area of Jerusalem. During the high Jewish holidays, Pilate and two  additional cohorts of Roman troops would travel to Jerusalem to insure Roman order. Pilate and his troops would be moving from the  west toward Jerusalem, the center of Jewish faith. 

Off in the opposite direction, Jesus and his followers had been  traveling toward Jerusalem from Galilee, east of Jerusalem. For most  of the people traveling with Jesus, the goal of the journey was to  arrive at Jerusalem in time for Passover. Jesus, however, had  different plans. Jesus had been in Jerusalem for many Passovers  beginning at least when he was twelve and gave his parents a scare  by staying in the temple with the teachers after his parents had  headed home. Jesus knew Jerusalem and how the population of the  city swelled at Passover. He also knew that religious fervor swelled in  the city at this time. He knew too that those who hoped to throw off the Roman yoke were at their highest number in the city at Passover  and so tensions between the Romans and Jews were higher than  usual.  

We can guess that at least 3- 5,000 were traveling with Jesus based  on our understanding of the feeding of the crowd not long before  Jesus’ arrival at Jerusalem. These were people who had followed his  teachings for quite a while, and many were convinced he was the  Chosen One who was going to liberate Israel. Word of what he was  doing was well known in Jerusalem. It had motivated religious  leaders from the temple to go out into the desert country to challenge  Jesus’ teachings. 

We also know that Jesus has been telling his closest friends that he is  going to Jerusalem to die. If they had understood him clearly, he was  telling them that he is going to die in a very unpleasant way.  

When I got to this point in my exploration of the last week before the  resurrection, with the help of Borg and Crossen, I began to see some  pieces fall together. Somehow, even though I had heard all of the  gospel readings about Jesus foretelling his death, I got the  impression that this was something that was happening to him from  outside. He was an unresisting victim. Then it started to dawn on me  that Jesus had this all planned out. He knew how he was going to  die, at least in part, because he was planning it. Some would say the  donkey being ready for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem was a miracle or  the hand of God. I think you could also conclude that Jesus had  arranged for the donkey to be there. It was where he said it would be  and the owners had no problem with it being taken away. A donkey  was a pretty valuable possession and an owner would not easily let it  be taken away. It makes sense that Jesus had already arranged with  the donkey’s owner to allow his disciples to borrow it.  

With that in mind, I think that if you approach Holy Week with an  expectation that Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and what  would happen it offers a different way of looking at the events of that  week. I think that the possibility is great that the last week was well  planned by Jesus. But why? 

Let’s go back to that Sunday the week before the Passover. It is  about mid-morning. If we sent a drone up over the city we would see  Pilate on a great horse, in full battle regalia, a thousand troops  marching behind him also in regalia and the standards of the rule of  Rome entering the west gate of the city. The occupants of the city are cowed and seeking shelter in doorways. Some of the children are  trying to get outside to see what is going on as adults try to pull them  back inside to safety avoiding the horse hooves and marching  soldiers. No one speaks. The only sound is the tramp, tramp, tramp  of the soldiers feet.  

On the eastern side of the city, at the eastern gate, there are throngs  of people lining the road into the city waving branches and cheering.  They are cheering a young man on small donkey who seems to stand  out from the crowd with a crowd surging behind him shouting cheers  and dancing. They are jubilant. Mothers and fathers are hoisting  their children on their shoulders so they can see this teacher from the  wilderness. What a difference the west is from the east. What a 1 juxtaposition between the oppression of the existing order and the  promise of a new order. And they are on a collision course. As Borg  and Crossen say, this has all the earmarks of a pre-planned political  demonstration. What clearer choice can there be between 2 preserving the oppressive political and religious establishment and  the new world Jesus talks about where all are equal and all have free  access to God. 

Interestingly, Mark’s gospel says that after entering Jerusalem, Jesus  walked through the city, looked around, then left to spend the night at  his friend Lazarus’ house. It isn’t until Monday that Jesus returns,  goes to the temple and causes quite a disturbance with the money  changers. Luke and Matthew have Jesus going to the temple that  same Palm Sunday and overturning tables. John says nothing about  going to the temple at this time. I guess I rely on Mark in large part  because his detail of that week is the greatest and because Mark’s  account is the lead for Borg and Crossen. Which ever way you lean it  is clear that not long after Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem he  is challenging the authority of the existing system. I think the bottom  line in all three is that Jesus is in control of what is happening. Pilate,  the chief priests and the established order are all reacting to what  Jesus does. So what the heck is Jesus up to? That, I think, is the  beauty of this week. We get to struggle along side Jesus’ followers in  discovering what he is truly trying to say to us. 

Kelly Brown Douglas in her article for Sojourners magazine entitled “A  Christian Call for Reparations” says “That Jesus was crucified, and  refused to save himself from being crucified, reveals that he emptied  himself of all privilege that might separate him from the victims of the  deadly political, cultural, and religious realities of his day.” Is that the  lesson of this week? Is that the reality that Jesus was trying to lay  down in a way that we would never forget it? How many lessons  might there be in his actions? 

The gift of this Holy Week is that we each get to struggle with what  Jesus and God are trying to burn into our minds through Jesus’  actions during this week. As we walk with Jesus through Thursday,  Friday, Saturday evening and Sunday morning we have the chance to  listen and dwell on the words of scripture as individuals, and then  collectively, to try to hear God’s messages. Rachel Held Evans, a  Christian writer who died far too young wrote “Inspiration is not about  some disembodied ethereal voice dictating words or notes to a  catatonic host. It’s a collaborative process, a holy give-and-take, a  partnership between Creator and creator . . . . God is still breathing.  The Bible is both inspired and inspiring. Our job is to ready the sails  and gather the embers, to discuss and debate, and like the biblical  character Jacob, to wrestle with the mystery until God gives us a  blessing.” My wish for all of us this Holy Week is that we all take the 3 opportunity to wrestle with the mystery and on Easter Day find we  have received a God given blessing. 
Amen 

1 Marcus J. Borg & John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week (NewYork, HarperCollins,2007) 2-3

2 Ibid, 4 

3 Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible 3 Again(Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2018), xxiiii-xxiv