Palm Sunday is always one of the great delights of the Christian year. Across our Diocese and beyond, congregations will be gathering to remember Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Many of us will join in processions waving branches of greenery, and shouting ‘Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’. To mark this, we will be given a palm leaf. It’s a glorious moment only enhanced by the delightful cacophony of one end of the procession singing at a different pace to the other and that great moment when they are connected as we come into the church building.
It would be easy to stop here. A triumphant entry that makes our hearts sing. But the palm leaf we are given is shaped into a cross and the principal reading of the day is not the triumphal entry but rather the account of the crucifixion that marks our entry into the events of Holy Week. We omit it from our worship at our peril for it speaks to the reality of the human condition and to the saving work of God in Jesus Christ.
This is always so but perhaps especially necessary when this year our observance of Holy Week and Easter is lived in the shadow of the war in Ukraine. The sounds of this conflict and of those others in Afghanistan and places that so easily fade from our news headlines will mingle with the sound of our lives, and we need to join these sounds with the words of Jesus from the cross ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me…’ (Psalm 22 and Matthew 27). Jesus does not evade the darkness, avoid the pain and the suffering but faces it, embraces it, in order that the darkness might not overcome the light.
Our is an Easter Faith, our hope is in the empty tomb and the triumph of Christ over death itself. But this victory is of the cross and is hard-won. ‘It is finished’ cries Jesus (John 19) accomplished, a victory of blood, and nails, and bone, and hammer. Omit the reading of the passion from our worship on Palm Sunday and the danger is we jump straight from the ‘hosannah’ of the triumphal entry to the ‘Alleluia!’ of resurrection and know not how we got there. Our palms are cross-shaped for a reason, for the victory is cross-shaped.
Our world and our lives need more. If we are to speak of our confidence in the resurrection we must, with Christ, be willing to face the reality of darkness and know that it is over this that Jesus conquers. Do this and we will have an Easter faith that brings true hope and assurance even to the darkness of our world today, a confident hope that we, that our world, so desperately longs to hear.
May God bless us as we keep this Holy Week, that the way of the cross may indeed lead us to life.
Join in the Palm Sunday celebrations at your local church – find out what’s happening in your parish at www.AChurchNearYou.com
News Hub
