How Quickly the Crowd Turns! - April 9, 2006

Palm Sunday Meditation
Mark 11: 1-11

This is the one Sunday a year when preachers find themselves walking a liturgical tightrope. The conundrum is this: to preach Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday? Many like me, choose to do a little of both, and pray that we don’t do short shrift to either. Because both events are part of the same story.

This story starts with a rather strange and long discourse about a donkey. Now the donkey is something that all the gospel writers agree on…well, almost all agree on. Matthew has this strange little detail about there being two animals that Jesus has to straddle on his way into Jerusalem. I was reminding someone of this the other day, and he remarked that it sounded more like a circus act than a bible story.

Maybe that’s not too far off the mark. Maybe Matthew’s circus act and Marks’ preoccupation with the fetching of the colt are there to remind us that this was something surreal to watch—something exaggerated, ironic, and almost cartoonish—that the King of the Jews should ride into the Passover festival not robed in splendor, carried by adoring servants in a pallet made of gold, but on a lumbering, borrowed animal with his feet dragging the ground and nothing but his friends’ clothes to soften the ride. Some king he turned out to be! For this they waited thousands of years?

And yet…and yet despite the strangeness of the scene, they are caught up in the excitement of it all. They throw off their clothes and line the street with them. They spread leafy branches in his path. I can imagine the parts of the crowd that hadn’t quite gotten a visual of him yet straining to see down the road, asking each other “Who is it?” “I don’t know. I think they’re saying it’s the King the Jews?” “You don’t say! I’ve waited my whole life to see the King!” And before you know it, they are caught up in the excitement, like a sports crowd doing the wave at the championship game.

But what happens when the crowd dies down? What happens after this King of the Jews, this humble one riding on a donkey passes by and the shouts melt into either silence or the ordinary bustle of the festival? What do you do after the parade passes by?

I was preoccupied this week with this final verse of this passage for today, verse 11. It’s very sparse and businesslike. You see, we picture this triumphal entry, and imagine that it takes place in the city Jerusalem, but Mark reminds us that all this hurrah and hosanna take place before he gets there. Jerusalem is for Jesus, not the place where he will triumph, but the place where he will suffer. And his suffering begins as soon as the parade ends.

In an excerpt from an as yet unpublished Palm Sunday story, novelist Patry Francis describes a woman coming home from the hospital following a debilitating accident:

“Matt was in the drug store when the door to the church across the street opened and the congregation spilled out, each holding a palm in hand. "It's Palm Sunday," I said out loud, speaking to nobody (a friend I'd met in the middle of the night at the hospital.) I hadn't been to church in years, but I spoke as if the liturgical cycle still meant something to me. I struggled to sit up straighter, to get a better view of the waving fronds. Maybe it was just the drugs—or the pain—which was itself a kind of drug, but I was more strangely moved.

Most of the people leaving the church seemed to be elderly women; they clung to their palms the way they clung to the church bulletin or their purses or their own weakening hold on life. But there was a cavalcade of school children in uniforms that suggested parochial school. Uniforms like the ones I had once worn. I struggled to roll down the window so I could ask if they had sung in the choir during mass, perhaps even participated in a passion play, but no one seemed to see me. Three of the boys were chasing each other, flicking the palms like towels in a locker room. When his parents called to him, one of the boys dropped his palms on the ground and ran. By the time Matt returned to the van, the abandoned palms had been thoroughly trampled by distracted parishioners as they made their way to their cars, and tears were streaming down my face. Matt struggled with the pill bottle and opened a bottle of water. "I'm sorry, Lyd. There was a line; I got them as fast as I could," he said, placing a tablet into my hand.

For a long still moment, I stared into his strained, earnest face. How could I make him understand? It wasn't the meds; it wasn't even the pain. It was the palms. They had been thrown away and ground into the sidewalk by dozens of shoes, and they were holy. Holy! Didn't he see? It was all of it—the sky cut into shapes by the windows of the van, and the wild faces of the boys, the path of tears etched on the old women's cheeks as they clutched their palms and disappeared, and Matt, worried and optimistic and foolish, too; all of it was holy beyond description.”

By the time the crowd had turned on Jesus, everything that was holy, everything that was triumphant had been trampled into the ground like trash. All that was left was some leafy branches, looking worse for the wear I imagine, and the unmistakable evidence that there had been animals in the street.

When we hear this, and consider it we are, of course, looking back through the lens of Easter. We are putting Palm Sunday in that context. But the Passion portion of today’s liturgy asks us to consider taking off our Easter glasses and seeing the story with Holy Week eyes, in order that we might more fully comprehend the loneliness that Christ felt when everyone he loved, everyone he came to save turned on him. Hear the second part of the story now, as we read from Mark 15.