| "Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!" Hail to the Messiah, the King of the Jews!
Jesus, astride a donkey, with a foal and a string of disciples trailing behind, was just starting his descent from the brow of the Mount of Olives to the Kedron Valley below, on his way westward into the city of Jerusalem, whose walls loomed high beyond the valley. And as Jesus descended, he quickly found himself at the epicenter of a pre-Passover pandemonium. You see, hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims from Judea and Perea, Galilee and Gaulinitis, Egypt and Syria, the Parthian Empire to the east and the Roman Empire to the west-hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims were bivouacking on the slopes of the mountains surrounding Jerusalem and in the valley beds below, all of them raucous and joyful as only a Passover-minded crowd could be. And many of these were calling out to Jesus as he rode: "Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!" Hail to Jesus, the Messiah, the King of the Jews! Never before in all of Jesus's ministry had he been greeted by such an uproarious commotion, by such a hoo-hah of hurrah! Men, women, children-all alike were greeting Jesus with the frenzy we reserve for rock stars. Both the old and the young were tearing off their coats and scarves and strewing them on Jesus's path. And they were also breaking off leafy branches from nearby trees and spreading them upon his route, just as ancestors of theirs had done for great kings and military heroes of the past. So what if the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, was accustomed to parading around town on a snorting, prick-eared stallion while Jesus was forced to make do for the time being with some lop-eared, heehawing burro! Soon, very soon, Jesus would show Pilate a thing or two. Jesus would show all those Romans and their quisling lackeys what you can do when you have God's might behind you. Jesus would settle all his people's scores and punish all their enemies. So: "Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!" Hail to Jesus, the Messiah, the King of the Jews! Now, in my own imagining of these events on that first Palm Sunday, I picture Pilate arriving at just this moment at the eastward-facing parapet of his military fortress, the Antonia-no, not the Ansonia, the Antonia!-the tower that King Herod had built some six decades earlier in honor of his Roman patron Mark Antony. During the dangerous season of Passover, when the Jews were celebrating their deliverance from an earlier "evil empire," Pilate kept a sharp lookout for any sign whatsoever of insurrection, and the uproarious commotion now breaking out on the hill slope opposite was noted by Pilate and followed with mounting alarm. After a half hour or so of it, he dispatched a courier to the forecourt of the Jewish Temple to find the High Priest, Caiaphas, and to deliver to this old and trusted ally of his a message, a message of danger and warning. The priests should stand at high alert, prepared to work with Pilate to discredit this imposter Jesus and end the danger he posed. The crowds would have to be turned against Jesus so that their shouts of "Hosanna!" could be converted into cries of "Crucify!" When Jesus had reached the Kedron Valley he started his slow ascent up the western slope to the gate of the city that led most directly into the precincts of the Temple. Inside the Temple, preparations were well underway for the ritual sacrifice of the lambs that would take place several days later. Crowds of Jewish pilgrims from faraway lands were streaming into the holiday market place that the priests had set up in the porticoed courtyard surrounding the Temple proper. To accommodate the pilgrims' needs, the courtyard had been filled with numbers of money-changing tables and an enormous barn housing thousands of animals. So on this day in that courtyard pilgrims were busily exchanging their native currencies for coinage that the priests would accept when the people were making offerings to the Temple and purchasing Passover lambs. The excited shouts of the throngs, the clanking of coins, the bleating of frightened animals! Such was the hoo-hah of commerce, the uproar and commotion inside the city wall, while Jesus was approaching from outside the wall with his own attendant uproar. When at last Jesus crossed the threshold of the city gate, he found the whole city "rocking," both with people's Passover preparations and with their excitement over who this star pilgrim might be. So as Jesus entered, those inside the city kept noisily asking those entering with him, "Who is this?" And those accompanying Jesus were responding, "Why, this is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee!" A king like David and a prophet like Moses, all in one! What more could anyone want? Thronged though he was, Jesus somehow managed to slip through the narrow portal that led to the porticoed courtyard of the Temple. Most of those trailing him doubtless assumed that he had come to greet the priests, or to pray, or to purchase his Passover lamb. Instead, calling on the books of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, Jesus started shouting and bellowing out: "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer' (Isa. 56:7); but you are making it a den of robbers (Jer. 7:11)." Then, moving swiftly and surely, Jesus proceeded to drive out both all the pilgrims there and all of the others who were attending to the pilgrims' ritual needs. You see, Jesus was saying to all those assembled there -saying both in his words and by his deeds: You have come here in false confidence. You think you can somehow attain safety and security in your relationship with God by performing the sacrificial rituals of the Temple even though your lives are still filled with injustice. But you can't! That won't work! So go away from here! And come back when you have kept faith with God by loving your neighbor. Or else come back when, with hearts humbled, your only desire is to offer prayers of penance and to seek God's forgiveness. Until then, go away! So Jesus drove away all the buyers and sellers and livestock, and only a few were left to stay in that courtyard. Jesus was still there, of course, and scattered around in the corners was a motley array of the blind and the lame, ones who had been sitting there all day hoping for alms. And most amazingly, after all the able-bodied adults had fled, still clustered around Jesus was a group of children, children who had joined Jesus's parade down the Mount of Olives and up to the pillared courtyard of the Temple, singing all the way. And now that a hush had fallen over the Temple their soft voices could be heard still singing: "Hosanna, hosanna, to the Son of David!" Yes, the last hosannas on this bittersweet day came only from the lips of children. You remember that courier whom Pilate had dispatched to the High Priest. Well, it had taken him a long time to find Caiaphas, who had been out, and by the time he did find him and they got back to the Temple, the pilgrims and the merchants and money changers had already been driven away, and the crowds had dispersed. Indeed, the only persons whom Caiphas and his fellow priests could still find in the courtyard were Jesus, the motley group of outcasts and misfits being healed by him, and some children gathered around and singing, "Hosanna, hosanna, to the Son of David." Caiaphas and his retinue came up to Jesus and angrily challenged him: "Do you not hear what blasphemy these children are uttering? They're calling you the Messiah and asking you to save them!" But Jesus looked them straight in the eye and said, "Yes, I hear them! Have you priests never read the Psalms, the hymn book of this very Temple? Do you not know the verse that is written there, 'Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies, you[, O Lord,] have prepared praise for yourself'?" (Ps. 8:2 LXX) And having by his question thus condemned the priests, Jesus turned and abruptly left, exiting the city and traveling back over the Mount of Olives to the nearby village of Bethany, where he spent the night. Caiaphas was left behind in an absolute rage. And as the sun sank, Caiaphas, having carefully considered Jesus's response to his direct challenge and having surveyed the shocking results of Jesus's Temple-action-Caiaphas now had no doubt at all about what action to take. He would join Pilate in seeing to it that thistroublemaker was put to death with the crowd's blessing. Palm Sunday-the day when we recall that our Savior began his final journey toward death amidst a fickle crowd's cry of "Hosanna," a cry that only the children would utter to the very end! You see, the Pilates and Caiaphases and assembled crowds-the rulers and masses of this world-will not for many days longer tolerate this sovereign of children, this monarch of outcasts, this king of the sick and the poor and the oppressed. No, come Friday, just five days hence, Jesus will be put to death. So here's the question we who call ourselves followers of Jesus must ask ourselves each and every Palm Sunday, as we find ourselvesprocessing alongside Jesus at the beginning of each Holy Week. Will we who are shouting loud hosannas today abandon Jesus when the going gets tough? With which other of Jesus's friends will we be found come Friday? Will we have fled the cross, like Peter, or will we be found there, faithfully at Jesus's side, like Mary Magdalene? Could it be that we may become so disillusioned by the apparent weakness in this world of Jesus's kind of peacemaking and love and by the perpetuation of violence and bloodshed in so many places-Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, New York City, and on and on and on-is it possible that we, like Peter, may become so disillusioned by Jesus's failure to end the violence here and now that come Friday we, too, will be found among those denying we've ever been a follower of Jesus? Or will we instead, even then, on Good Friday-like Mary Magdalene-still be filled with faith, still be found standing watch alongside Jesus at the cross, convinced that ultimately his kind of love will triumph? Yes, Palm Sunday-a day that's swept with strong eddies and crosscurrents of emotion, with a hoo-hah of hurrah aswirl with foreboding, as so many of the world's hosannas echo back Friday's cries of "Crucify." For by this Friday, the palms and the branches will have been replaced by thorns and a tree?trunk. And the cloak-strewn road will have led westward right through Jerusalem and far beyond the Temple to Calvary, to Golgotha-to The Place of the Skull. What part will we be playing as the rest of this week's drama unfolds? And what impact will the rest of this week's drama have on our lives? Fellow members of Palm Sunday's "cheering, chanting, dizzy crowd," please join me here again on Thursday evening at 7:00 p.m. so that we can experience for ourselves Christ's last supper with his followers, and then please join me again on Friday between noon and 2:00 p.m. so that we can share in Christ's passion and suffering. Let us be present with Christ not only today, for the hosannas, but through the rest of this week as well, for the tears and sorrow. Amen |
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