Everything that matters in the Christian story happens this week; though we must wait until next Sunday for the event that makes sense of it all. Today is Palm Sunday, and I remember how as a child in church we’d all be given twigs of pussy willow to wave; we called them palm branches even though they were willow. These days people get crosses made of real palm leaves. But I still think of the palm branches of my childhood whenever I see the pussy willows in bloom.
Like the people who greeted Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem, we waved branches cut from our own local trees. Theirs had been real palms, and the road Jesus rode along was strewn with their branches. And if ours were willows instead, perhaps it was more authentic in a way to be using branches from our own trees rather than importing palm branches from somewhere else. Of course, it was also cheaper.
Today we remember Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, something that drove the crowds wild. These weren’t citizens of Jerusalem welcoming their king; to be honest, Jerusalem folk would have seen it all before, things like this happened often at the time of the Passover. Though they might have felt concerned, as they thought about how the Romans might react to yet another so-called Messiah come to stir up trouble. Otherwise, though, it was probably all a bit of a bore.
The people doing the cheering were those who’d been travelling with him, pilgrims making the journey everyone who could would want to be making at this time of the year, to celebrate Passover at the Temple. This man they’d seen and listened to and been impressed and amazed by up in Galilee was now doing something that was a very deliberate statement of intent. For this is how the prophet had said the new king would enter Jerusalem, meekly riding on a donkey. So they cheered and chanted, and shouted Hosanna, hosanna to the Son of David.
And that word hosanna is more than a simple hooray. It’s formed from the Hebrew words yasha, meaning deliver or save, and anna, meaning to plead or beg or beseech. It might sound like a shout of praise, but it’s also a prayer saying “Please save us, please deliver us”. And of course, as they shouted Hosanna they also addressed Jesus as “Son of David”, recognising him as their new king, come to save them.
They’d mostly have been thinking about being saved from the Romans and from the sons of Herod, from the pagan emperor and from client kings not of the house of David. I wonder how the disciples felt? They weren’t in the loop, it would seem; Jesus seems to have planned this event with others, making the disciples as much part of the audience for his entry into Jerusalem as were the rest of the crowd.
They must have been really worried about going there. Here was where the enemies of Jesus were strongest, and Jesus had made no bones about telling them his life would be in danger. In fact he’d told them he was going to die there, not that they’d understood or accepted everything he’d said. Palm Sunday for them must have been a mixture of fear and excitement. It was very dangerous to go to Jerusalem, but Lord’s Messiah was bound to go there; now Jesus had declared his hand - and like the cheering crowds they must have expected that great things would now happen.
There’s a mystery at the heart of this and other events of Holy Week. Who did set it up? The disciples were expected, and the donkey had been made ready for them. Who by? In Jerusalem a room had been booked for what we call the Last Supper, and a secret sign arranged, so that safety was assured. Who did it, and who was the man carrying a pot of water - normally a woman’s job - that the disciples followed to find the room?
Perhaps Jesus had arranged all this with Mary and Martha, his friends in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem. They were on the scene, and they’d surely have had all the right contacts. Not that it matters; the mystery isn’t so much who set things up so much as why the disciples weren’t involved. There’s a simple answer to that, of course. Jesus knew that one of the Twelve would betray him, so security would have been compromised if the disciples had been allowed to know too much too soon. Yet Jesus did need that betrayal to happen, when the time was right. The events of this week aren’t God’s plans for salvation being thwarted and defeated, though it must have seemed like that to the disciples as their Lord was arrested and taken from them, and as they themselves turned tail and ran for their lives. Far from it - the events of this week are God’s plans for salvation being accomplished and completed in the most decisive week in the whole of human history.
“He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant . . . and became obedient unto death, even the death of a cross” - so wrote St Paul, probably echoing or using the words of an early Christian hymn. Here is the heart of our faith. This week God shows us he loves us, loves us despite our sin, despite our wilfulness, despite our past mistakes; and loves us too much to leave how we are. People shouted hosanna expecting a new king in Jerusalem, and the end to Roman domination. That didn’t happen, and by the end of the week the shouts of the pilgrims had been forgotten; by then it was probably as well not to be speaking with a Galilean accent. By then the louder shouts from the Jerusalem rent-a-mob had prevailed, stirred up to yell “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
And for all that had been said to them, we find the disciples as much in the dark about what’s really happening as everyone else. For them this week of highs and lows would end with the lowest low ever: fear, confusion, defeat, dejection.
It’s good to feel a bit of that ourselves. The cross, we’re told, convicts us of sin. We have helped hammer in the nails, and it’s our sins this man is bearing: the bad stuff we’ve done, and more to the point, the good stuff we’ve passed up on, the times when self interest, short-termism, even just not being very organised, have meant we weren’t there when needed, we didn’t do what could have been done. Evil, we’re reminded, comes into the world not so much when bad people do bad things, as when good people do nothing and let them.
And yet at the very heart of these events Jesus explicitly includes us and shares himself with us. The clouds are at their darkest when he shares a supper with his friends, and by extension with all of us too. He breaks bread, he passes round a cup of wine, using words which must have sounded strange and even shocking when they were first said: “This is my body; this is my blood.” And he says, “Do this to remember me.” The sense of this word is stronger than just calling to mind old memories, it’s about active presence - it’s almost “Do this, and I will be with you.”
I remember being very moved by the way the Last Supper was staged in a performance I went to see of the musical Godspell. Controversially, Godspell ends with the crucifixion, and with the body of Jesus being taken down and taken away. The story doesn’t include the resurrection, or at least it’s implied at best, it’s not enacted. But I don’t mind; Godspell is still a wonderful story of love and bravery and sacrifice, it’s still an inspirational story. And maybe it’s the story as far as we need to hear it this week, for then, like the first disciples, we can experience the wonder and the pain of this holiest of all weeks as it unfolds, without needing to know yet how the story really ends, how next week begins.
Jesus makes it our story as well as his. He connects us in to the sacrifice that is made once and for all, made at that one and only time in history by the one man qualified to make the offering, and consisting of that one man as the only true and unblemished sacrifice, to which we are connected by bread and wine and by love.
The disciples, this bunch of frightened and confused people ended this week in hiding, hardly daring to speak for fear of betraying their identity, waiting for the chance to sneak back home and pick up the cast-off bits of their former lives. Of course they’d have remembered him whatever happened next. They’d have remembered his bravery and their own cowardice; the words with which he taught them, the hopes those words inspired, even now their hopes had been so cruelly dashed.
Yes, they’d still have remembered him, for as long as they could. But there’d have been nothing more than a good story, and fading memories of an heroic defeat.
There’d have been no Church, for the founding of the Church needed this week to be about victory and not defeat, it needed the hosannas of the people to have been decisively answered. And that did happen, it’s just that they hadn’t seen it yet. Everything important in the Christian story happens this week, except for what happens next Sunday. Only then do the events of this week make sense, not as a defeat, however heroic, but as the great and decisive victory, the last battle won, and love and light triumphant forever over darkness and death. Hosanna, this week’s prayer, is answered by the great shout of Alleluia, next Sunday’s song, meaning “Praise the Lord of life”. Look around the world today: everywhere people are praying hosanna prayers, everywhere people are longing to be saved. And our holy task is to be light and life and alleluia for the desperate and the suffering of the world, even if in doing this we take our share in the cross.
And doing that needs I think each year a visit to this week as it is, experiencing something of the time when it looked as though the darkness had taken control and sin held the upper hand. The world still looks a lot like that today, as we watch the news bulletins. But the story doesn’t end at the cross; we see Jesus surrender to the darkness, and we mourn, because we have helped make that darkness. But then we see that only through that act of surrender could the darkness have been transformed, beaten back, and turned into light. So this week let’s follow Jesus on the road to the cross, the Via Dolorosa, sharing that pain, breathing in the sense of unfolding tragedy, that nest week our alleluias may be all the more joyful, and an empowering, encouraging and enabling force in our lives and the life and witness of our Church.
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