Palm Sunday

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Palm Sunday 2021 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

There are certain images that when seen can’t be “unseen.” One such image I can’t “unsee,” comes from a Chinese Christian artist, He Qi titled “Jesus’ Triumphal Entry.” All the usual elements are there--street people tossing down their cloaks, waving their palms, Jesus seated on a donkey. But what I can’t “unsee” has nothing to do with those usual, expected elements. It has to do with the perspective. Jesus, riding on a donkey, is depicted coming at the viewer head on, set for a head-on collision. The oncoming freight train feel of the work is unmistakable. Despite its beauty, it’s a little scary. Challenging. Every time I look at it I feel a quiver of holy fear of God in the flesh come near, coming for me. It’s unsettling. The man on a donkey throws me off my high horse.

If we’ve been to Palm Sunday before we know it as the day when we wave our palms, sing our hosannas, and then hear the Passion Gospel. It strikes us as a slightly schizophrenic liturgy--happy, joyful, and celebratory at one moment and searingly painful the next. Some suspect that the dual nature of the liturgy is because not too many people attend Good Friday (too depressing, no vestments, sad music), so it’s the only chance you get on a Sunday to remind people that there is no Easter without the Crucifixion. There’s something to that, but it’s not the reason. 

What are we really doing when we wave our palms and utter our full-throated, off-key hosannas? What are we doing when we declare this man on an under-fed donkey whose legs seem about ready to buckle with every step, “Lord”? We’re so used to the story that we often miss the obvious contrast between the Roman Imperial Entry that happens every time Herod enters Jerusalem and Jesus’ Triumphal Entry. Herod on a warhorse surrounded by soldiers, silk banners, trumpet fanfare, and people prostrating out of fear that if they don’t they’ll end up like those other dissenters against Empire like the 6,000 soldiers of Spartacus’ army crucified along a 200 mile stretch of the Appian way in 71 B.C. Bow and scrape or else.

The ordinary, unkempt folks around Jesus don’t have trumpets--they have only  their unwelcomed voices worse hoarse by crying “how long Lord, how long? Their banners? Palms grabbed from the roadside (not shipped by refrigerator truck from Denver!). The red carpet? Clothes off their own backs. They bow, they kneel,  not out of fear of reprisal, or threat, but because the only object truly worthy of worship, Love Himself in human form has come near. When they hoot their reedy-voiced hosannas it is an act of protest against Roman Imperial Power--the top-down oligarchy that keeps poor non-citizens poor and rich citizens rich. It is a declaration that Jesus, boundary-crossing Love, is Lord, not Caesar. It is a profession of faith--that this man on donkey making his humble way through the city gates on the wrong side of town, Love, not Herod, not by extension Caesar, is the only life-giving thing worthy of true worship and devotion. 

Those hosannas are the exact profession we make at our baptism where we profess, “that everything in our life and in the world belongs to him; that there is nothing over which he is not, for us, the true ruler; that we subject every area of our lives to him, to save and redeem. Taking up the palms and making this proclamation is a renewal of our baptismal pledge: that Christ and his Kingdom is our only reality.” We die to what Paul calls “the old man” who seeks to secure identity on the the ego’s craven need for power, control, affection, esteem, safety and security, and allow ourselves to be raised as the “new man” in Christ and live as members of his one body pledged to one another in solidarity and compassion--truly members of one another as self-offering participants of the community of love. 

But that’s not what happens in the gospel narratives, the Palm Sunday liturgy or in our lives. Things take a disturbing turn. The very people who wave their palms are the ones who, a few short days later, shout “Crucify Him!” When we read the Passion Gospel with assigned parts, those words are on the lips of each one of us. Hosannas and calls for crucifixion come from the very same mouths. Our lives. Why, dear Lord? Why is this so? It seems a truth about ourselves too terrible to bear. 

It’s because our idea of a King, a Savior, a Messiah, is decidedly different from what we see in the life, teaching, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. We like Jesus as the embodiment of the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. We like the talk of being made beautiful as he is beautiful. We can even quote Dostoyevsky when he says that “only beauty can save the world.” What comforting uplift! But what kind of beauty is this man hanging on a tree, mocked and scourged, his blood-spattered clothes gambled over in a dice game at the foot of the cross? We want beauty, goodness, and truth, without the suffering. We want a King who doesn’t die as a criminal of Empire. We want a winner.

But that’s not the way to true peace, joy, recognition of God’s abundant provision in our lives--our enoughness. The way to that peace doesn’t exclude the cross. There’s no Easter without Good Friday. Paul’s Letter to the Philppians, the kenotic hymn that is among the earliest hymns sung by the first Christians gives us the shape, the pattern, our lives are to take if Christ is indeed to be the one reality that governs our lives. “Have the same mind you,” Paul exhorts us, “That was in Christ Jesus.” The same mind. Not just the nice bits. Not just the comfortable bits. All of it. And what is this mind? What is this heart? What is this life to look like? Paul continues, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, then humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross.” Sacrificial love. Being emptied of the ego that Christ might live in us. Humility. Taking last place. Not winning as the world gives it to us. But losing for others in love. Being weak, dependent, that God’s strength (and not just our great ideas) might live in us, shape our imaginations and direct our wills. 

That is what the truly Beautiful, Good, and True life looks like. A self poured out so that it can be filled with Christ who then pours Himself out in and through our lives for the whole world--to the widow, the orphan, the stranger in the land. Syro-phonecian women included. People left in the ditch included. Centurions included. Ethiopian Eunuchs included. It’s madness in the eyes of the world and polite society. That’s not how to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie would be appalled! No wonder, when the woman at Simon’s house crashes the party and pours out a costly alabaster jar of nard on Jesus’ feet in an embodied enactment of Jesus’ life poured out for others, “There were some who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way?” It doesn’t make sense in terms of cost-benefit analysis. 

But that is the way of love. That is what it means to take up our cross and follow Jesus. That is what it means for us to fulfill the grand destiny of what it means to be a truly human human being--finding our lives by losing them in Christ’s love. That is what it means to walk the way of the cross and be drawn from image as potential into realized likeness uttering our hosannas and living in such a way that that hosanna is manifest in our lives. 

That must be, I think, why I can’t “unsee” He Qi’s image of “Jesus’ Triumphal Entry.” I get the distinct impression that He’s coming for me. A good part of me wants to duck out of the way. But faith tells me, scripture tells me, prayer tells me, baptism and eucharist tell me, acts of mercy tell me, that letting that strange man on a donkey run me down holds the key. So every day I swallow hard and brace for impact--the impact of grace, love, and His warm embrace. Is it what my “old self” wants? Certainly not. My old self would rather hoist this annoying stranger on a tree and be rid of him. My “old self” would rather use whatever I can grab (like a palm) to fend off this pesky stranger. That insanity that is one aspect of the cross--that by killing God we think we can get what we want. But the other aspect of the cross is God’s victory. My insanity doesn’t have the last word. Love does. And so I utter my trembling Hosanna in the knowledge that it means the end of the world as my old self would like it to be, needs it to be. I utter my Hosanna in the faith that the narrow way of losing will make me the person God made me to be and His Kingdom come. That’s a picture I can’t unsee either--but it’s not painting in oils. It’s a life lived poured out for all. Jesus’ life. Jesus’ life in us waiting to be lived. Our life for others painted by grace one brushstroke at a time.  Hosanna!