Palm Sunday

One of the drawbacks of keeping a blog is its regularity. That’s a problem common to columnists and cartoonists and preachers and anyone else who has a weekly deadline. Ideas tend to wane after a while. If I were more self-indulgent I could talk about myself all the time, but I’ve already done that in past journals and oh my goodness are they boring to read.

The truth is that it’s hard to write about the passion of Christ. I’m tempted every Palm Sunday to let the passion narrative speak for itself and forgo even a homily. It would make the clock-watchers and stomach-growlers happy, and there would be one less sermon to write for Holy Week. But it isn’t really fair. People yearning for good news want to find it somehow in that narrative, and it’s the job of the preacher to do so.

Palm Sunday is particularly hard because it starts out so well but ends so badly. It begins with a bit of a circus atmosphere in the parish hall, with noise and confusion and people scrambling for palms and the choir and congregation singing a hymn at several different tempos (if not keys). But then everything slows down for the long passion narrative. By the end of the service Jesus will be dead. We will have acknowledged our own complicity by calling him king and then shouting that he be crucified. Where’s the hope in that?

Well, I guess there isn’t any. That’s the point. Left to our own devices, we’d just as soon crucify God as praise him. I’m not about to say “Christ died for your sins,” in part because that’s self-evident. We’ve just demonstrated it. And that truth is just too painful to bear.

The temptation is to quickly say that that’s not the end of the story. True, it isn’t. Yet it’s worth dwelling for at least a moment on what that painful truth means. It means that we can’t save ourselves by our own efforts. If we can go so easily from praise to blame, there’s no assurance that, on our own, we can come through when we need to.

And that fact tells us something about the Jesus who died. If he was just a good man, a really good man, to be sure, someone who had a special relationship with God, but just another human being like you and me, there’s still no hope for us. Ultimately, he can’t do any more for us than we can do for ourselves.

That’s where the rest of the story comes in. Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. Because Jesus Christ was not just fully human but also fully divine, the resurrection of Christ revealed what God has in mind for us. Death is not the end. Our sins are not the end. We have new life in Jesus Christ. We still have to wait for both the resurrection of Christ on Easter and for our own resurrected life. But God promises that both will come in time. For that word of hope, thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.