Palm Sunday (March 28, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

“Truly this is the Son of God.”

It always strikes me as odd that the proper Gospel lesson we read today isn’t about Jesus’ Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem. Of course, we hear that reading during the Liturgy of the Palms.

In that reading, Christ enters Jerusalem on a donkey and is greeted with great enthusiasm by the crowds who greet him with palms and shouts, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

That story is a preface to Holy Week, which is why we observe this day as the final Sunday in Lent, the introduction to the Triduum sacrum (which is Latin for 3 Holy Days) in which we observe Maundy Thursday, the night in which our Lord washed the feet of his disciples and was betrayed, Good Friday, the day he was crucified, and Holy Saturday which culminates in our Easter Vigil.

Because Palm Sunday functions as the foyer which opens into the rest of Holy Week, the proper Gospel Lesson was Matthew’s entire account of the Passion in order to prepare us for what is coming.

But, in a sense, we did read an account of the Triumphal Entry. That’s what our Zechariah 9 reading anticipates because it depicts a king riding on a donkey and a colt, the foal of a donkey. He rides into the city at great rejoicing to bring peace to the nations with his universal reign. Further, verses 11-12 tell us, “because of the blood of my covenant with you I will set your captives free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, o prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore you double.”

It is easy to read the celebration of the Triumphal Entry in the Gospels as a phenomenon unique to the historical crowds they depict. In fact, some readers of the story might even feel self-righteously condescendant towards these crowds because it’s the same group that turns into a mob by Good Friday, demanding Christ be crucified.

But I think that attitude misses the point. We aren’t so distanced from this crowd because the crowd is us. Our fickle hearts oscillate between rejoicing at what Christ has done for us and yelling “Crucify him” through our sin.

We know our goal, our end, our telos is to praise him evermore with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven but our hearts our restless and our disordered desires participate in the blood lust of the crowd. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me…Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

So the crowd during Holy Week is for us a mirror, simultaneously reminding us what we should strive toward while also shining a spotlight on what holds us back: our own sin.

But this is why Holy Week is so important: we walk the footsteps of Christ ultimately leading to the cross.

Paul’s pre-occupation with the cross appears in the reading from Philippians 2.

The purpose of the passage we read is to exhort Paul’s audience towards imitating Christ: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.” So what about Christ are we imitating?

The answer is the self-sacrifice of Christ: “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”

The result of this self-sacrifice is the glorification of Christ by the Father: “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Pauline scholar Michael Gorman points out that the fundamental character of the form of God and the form of the slave share a common, downward movement. Christ humbled himself because he is God and the Cross reveals to us who he is. But he also recreates humanity, thereby giving us an ideal toward which we are to strive.

Our calling is to live in perpetual doxology. Our praise of God is not just something we offer with our voice but our lives. That praise is made manifest when we live in a cruciform way.

This begins with the observation of the Centurion at the foot of the cross: “Truly this is the Son of God!” Such a realization leads us to deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow him. We need to be co-crucified with him.

So this Holy Week, as we follow in Christ’s footsteps, let us stand at the foot of his cross and, with the Centurion, say, “Truly this is the Son of God!”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.