SERMON  PALM SUNDAY 2005 

Matthew 21: 1-11 

Gracious God, open our hearts to your presence, our minds to your truth. 

Our annual journey through Holy Week starts with today – with Palm Sunday. I’d like you to try to imagine yourselves into that first Palm Sunday – the dust, the smells, the colour, palm fronds everywhere - all the joy, all the energy and life as Jesus enters Jerusalem. And the noise – imagine the noise – people shouting hosanna, children bashing drums. Children, adults  - everyone rejoicing in Jesus’ arrival. There he is, the teacher, the healer, the person who has done such marvelous deeds of power, the one everybody has been talking about. Surrounded by his friends and disciples. Here is someone notable, someone great, someone whose presence is of the greatest significance and should be celebrated. Is he the one who will overthrow the Romans? Why is he riding on a young donkey? Does it matter? Everyone says he is quite eccentric – great people often are. And just look at his face – such charisma, such love!  

What is it like to be caught up in that crowd? To be swept along in a tide of emotion? It is exciting, filled with hope that things will change, that life will be better afterwards. This is the kind of triumphant procession that heralds the arrival of kings. 

At last there is an amazing public acknowledgement of how important Jesus really is. But it is also much more than this. However inspiring, however overwhelming, it is much more than a human celebration, invested with all sorts of human hopes and expectations. Indeed, it is a cosmic moment. In Luke’s version of this story, the Pharisees tell Jesus to stop his disciples crying out. Jesus responds saying that if the people were silent, the stones would cry out. The whole of creation is party to this moment.  This is the time for a declaration of who Jesus truly is – the king who comes in the name of the Lord. In that sense it is a pivotal moment. What is happening is not just happening on the human stage, it is of significance for the whole of existence, the whole of creation.  

And we, his disciples 2000 years later, both remember that cosmic moment and affirm our own belief in him and commitment to him – the king who owns very little and rides a young donkey, the master who is a servant, the God who has emptied the divine self into human form.  

But I always have some ambivalence about Palm Sunday – at one level it is truly a wonderful celebration and a constant reminder of the true nature of kingship. Jesus is the king who rides a donkey, not a warhorse. But why were the people there at the time? The text tells us that they praise God joyfully for all the deeds of power that they had seen. Did they really understand what was going on, who Jesus was? What were their hopes and expectations? Did they think that this was the person who would free them from the hated Roman occupying forces? Full of the excitement of the moment, did they just put their expectations onto Jesus? Certainly there are many scholars who explain Judas’ betrayal of Jesus in this way. They believe that Judas was one of the Sicarii, one of the revolutionaries of the day, and expected Jesus to overthrow the Romans. When he realized that this was not what Jesus was going to do, he reacted to his disappointment by betraying Jesus to the Romans. How many others were disappointed by Jesus’ refusal to get involved in the politics of the day? 

Indeed, just how many people that day understood the real nature of God’s kingdom, how many understood what Jesus’ ministry was all about? Is the crowd’s welcome of him that day a case of ‘right response, wrong reason’? Of course this is an unanswerable question, but the best guess is that there were all sorts of levels of understanding. Surely some of Jesus’ closest disciples understood something about the kingdom of God, but equally there would have been many in that crowd at Jerusalem who did not have a clue, many who pinned their own baggage on Jesus.  

And the way the story unfolds suggests that some people may have been very angry when Jesus did not deliver what they thought he was going to deliver. The hosannas turn to shouts of ‘Crucify’.  The annual journey that we make from Palm Sunday to Good Friday throws into stark relief how fickle we human beings are, how shallow our support, how easily swayed we are. Yes, it all comes out all right in the end with Jesus’ resurrection – but that is as a result of God’s action, not ours. The tragedy and shame of the crucifixion are transformed into the joy of Easter by God, not by humanity. On the whole, the people don’t come out of this story too well.  

This is a very uncomfortable place to find ourselves. We can try to escape from this insight – we could, for instance, deny its continuing truth. That was them, then – we wouldn’t behave like that! But wouldn’t we? Really? As we look around the world today, can we honestly say that we do better? Wars start and are continued by Christians using Scripture to support their arguments. Conflict and betrayal exist in Christian families and Christian communities, as in other communities. The recent Australian Story series about Bishop Shearman testifies only too poignantly to that. If we see the story of Holy Week simply as a story about what happened 2000 years ago, and do not see it as a continuing commentary on what it is to be human, on human nature itself, we have missed the point. The factors that affected the participants then, still affect us today.  

Where we do have an advantage over the people who surrounded Jesus is that we can see more clearly who he truly is. We know what subsequently happened to him and we have been nurtured by the Scriptures and by the wisdom of 2000 years of reflection and experience. We know that he is the servant king, we know that his kingdom is not of this world, we know that he is the son of God. The life of the Christian is a constant exploration of what all that means for us. How are we to live as the followers of the king who rides on a donkey?  

Day after day, week after week, in our imaginations and in our hearts, let us welcome Jesus as the king who comes in the name of the Lord, the one who is the way, the truth and the life. Unlike so many of the crowd on that first Palm Sunday, our response to Jesus can be ‘right response, right reason’. Let it be for ever so. 

Amen.