Palm Sunday Sermon
A Palm Sunday sermon by Jamie Howison
At saint ben's we do something a little different with the readings for this Sunday. Rather than following the lectionary and reading the full Passion Gospel, we open with the Palm story, follow that with the story of the last supper, and then close our liturgy with the Gethsemane story. For us that sets the tone for the week to come, in which we retell the crucifixion story on both Tuesday evening in our Stations of the Cross and then off course on Good Friday.
Early in the season of Lent, an order for palm branches was placed at Stephanchew’s Church Goods store on William Avenue, as we always do at this time of the year. Palms to be used by All Saints in the morning, and by saint ben’s at both our 4pm and our 7pm liturgies. And then a call came about two weeks ago, that the unexpected cold weather and snow in California had wiped out the supply of palms, and so they were having to cancel all of their orders. There was a bit of scrambling in the All Saints church office, and ultimately the administrative assistant found a church goods store in Toronto that did have palms from another source; just enough for us to make about 50 crosses for each congregation.
It is nice to have an ample supply of palms to display at the front of the church, and to fold into crosses for people to take home with them. It is a touchstone, really, and a marker that we’re beginning to make our way into Holy Week. Interestingly, though, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, people who live in areas without palms use pussy willow branches in their celebrations of this event; something very common in Ukrainian churches here in Winnipeg. And here’s a fascinating observation. Did you hear any mention of palms when Murray read the palm Gospel at the beginning of the liturgy? You might have imagined that you did, so familiar is the imagery of Palm Sunday, but in fact what Matthew says is that many “spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.” Similarly, Mark references “leafy branches,” while Luke writes only of the cloaks, making no mention of branches at all. Only in John’s account is it specified that they are palm branches—“they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, Hosanna!” And why does John specify palm branches? In all likelihood because some 200 years earlier, an uprising led by Judas Maccabaeus had quite surprisingly defeated the occupying army of Antiochus, and then marched into Jerusalem to reclaim the city and its temple for Judaism. As they marched, the 2nd Book of Maccabees tells us, they carried “ivy-wreathed wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm.” So it could be that John—always the most poetic and symbolic of all the gospel writers—identifies palms as a way to connect this story to the one from 2nd Maccabees.
And just why might John do that? The Maccabean rebels were reclaiming Jerusalem and its temple from an enemy occupation and doing so by force. It was a revolutionary uprising, and one commemorated in Judaism by the eight-day observance of Hannukah. Jesus, on the other hand, represents an altogether different sort of revolution. He does not wield a sword nor seek to defeat the Roman occupying forces and establish a new government in Jerusalem. To wave palm branches and sing Hosanna was to hope that he would be a new Judas Maccabeus. But he isn’t that; not at all. This is how Stanley Hauerwas describes things in his commentary:
Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem is an unmistakable political act. He has come to be acknowledged as king. He is the son of David, the one long expected, to free Jerusalem from foreign domination. Yet this king triumphs not through violent revolt, but by being for Israel the one able to show it that its worship of God is its freedom. He is Israel’s long-expected priestly king whom the prophets said would come. His entry into Jerusalem is, therefore, rightly celebrated by those who are not in power. (Hauerwas, Matthew)
Those who held power in that city, however, are less enamored by him, and in almost no time they will be colluding with Judas Iscariot to entrap him. Meanwhile even those who have sung their hosannas and placed their hope in Jesus as a new revolutionary king are about to face a serious disappointment. This, of course, includes Peter and the other disciples, who will follow him so closely through those days in Jerusalem, and find themselves sitting with him in the upper room, celebrating a Passover meal unlike any they’d ever experienced.
Breaking that bread and giving it to them, his words were striking and strange: ‘My body, my very self… here it is.’ And then the cup, with even harder words: ‘My blood, my life, my death, all for you, all so that sins can be forgiven… here it is.’ Those are Bishop N.T. Wright’s interpretive words on the sharing of that bread and wine, to which he then describes how it was all received:
Look around the room in your mind’s eye and see the reaction. Peter, furious that Jesus is still talking about dying, and on such a special evening as well. Thomas, giving a little shake of the head. He’d not understood more than a third of what had gone before, and he doesn’t understand this at all. John, looking up in astonishment, in a mixture of love and fear. Judas, frozen in place, wondering how much Jesus knows and how much he’s guessed. (Wright, Matthew for Everyone)
The disciples, in other words, completely miss the point, and not for the first time. The gospel accounts show this focused, solid, challenging teacher surrounded by followers who have their own sense of what his ministry must be all about. It must be about the defeat of the Romans, it must be about establishing a new kingship in Jerusalem, it must have seats for them at his right and left hand in his victory. As the musician Nick Cave commented, “Even His disciples, who we would hope would absorb some of Christ's brilliance, seem to be in a perpetual fog of misunderstanding, following Christ from scene to scene with little or no comprehension of what is going on.”
And even after that extraordinary Passover meal in which Jesus had taken the very familiar symbols of bread and wine and spun them on their heads, they still can’t see what he is pointing them toward. In Matthew’s telling, after they had finished that strange meal, they sung a hymn—quite probably a psalm—and then went out to the Mount of Olives.
“Then Jesus said to them, ‘You will all become deserters because of me this night,’” and it seems that finally something has dawned in Peter’s mind. Oh… this is a critical and dangerous night, and it is going to push us right to the breaking point. And then with that boldness so typical of Peter, he said to Jesus,
‘Though all become deserters because of you, I will never desert you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I tell you, this very night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.’ Peter said to him, ‘Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.’ And so said all the disciples.
Bold as brass they are, and without any comprehension of what is to follow. “Even though I must die with you,” Peter says, “I will not deny you,” but the reader knows Peter is just blowing smoke. He thinks he is that brave, he imagines he will stand as firm as a rock right beside his teacher and leader—after all, Jesus had nicknamed him Cephas, the rock—as do all the disciples. No, no, we’ll never abandon you, rabbi Jesus. Never!
Until they do. And that’s part of the sorrow that characterizes the story as it moves forward. Every good intention to stay awake while he prays in Gethsemane, every bold promise to accompany him right to the end whatever that end might be… evaporates.
The deep human pathos of the Passion story tells us not only of how they stumbled, but also how we too stumble. The great promise of the story that follows in a week is that even in our stumbling—even in our hardest falls—we can again be lifted up, dusted off, and sent along the road to try yet again. But that is getting ahead of ourselves; we’ve got a week of harder stories to tell.
