Palm Sunday, April 5, 2020  (today’s lectionary) beginning of Holy Week
Actually, specifically, to be exact, this is the “Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion.” On this precursor to the Easter Vigil, the texts today take a long time to read. In some churches the congregation has two instructions during the reading: to shout at the appropriate time, “Let him be crucified!” and then when Jesus breathes his last on the cross, to kneel in silence. Seattle’s Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral instructs us how to celebrate this year’s remarkable online, in-home Holy Week experience : “Be sure you have your cushions, if you need them, ready in your home.”
This website also suggests having trumpets and noisemakers to carry along with your branch (just any beautiful branch you can find in your neighborhood, even if there are no palm trees) on your parade around the living room. However, the writer says, “Only three verses of the hymn will be sung, so be sure your procession makes its way back to the start as the hymn concludes.”
Andi and Aki and Miles and Jasper spent a little time outdoors today, waving their own homemade palm branches. They traced their hands onto green construction paper, attached the new green palm-like hands to watercolor paint brushes, (you could also use fan handles), and took their party to the streets. Miles shouted his hosannas, and led the parade through the spring-blooming state flowers, Texas blue bonnets. The crowds cried themselves hoarse. Jesus is alive!
Your king comes to you meek, riding on an ass, foal of a beast of burden. We see, but can we share in this procession? Let’s spread our cloaks on the road, let’s all of us wave branches cut from trees above. Cut them, wave them, lay them before the king’s carriage. “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
Who is this again?
Oh, this is Jesus! Man of the well-trained tongue. He has awakened us from our sleep, the sleep of centuries, a prophet in Israel after such long years without. He is surrounded now by protectors, and no one will find him at night or throw him into a well like Jeremiah or Joseph. Jesus has arrived and we are overjoyed.
Jesus, of course, did not see it quite that way. But knowing in his own way of knowing, he set his face like flint, free from shame. (Matthew 21 and Isaiah 50)
O Lord, be not far from me. All my limbs, all my skin screams in pain. O my Help, hasten here to my rescue. I have been pierced, just now I can even count my bones. Still I will proclaim your name, and all your people still will revere you. O my God, O my God!” (Psalm 22) In this form of God I do not claim “equality,” and I will empty myself, my Father, as I am being emptied. do not resist but will obey. (Philippians 2)
 And so the story begins, and so the story ends, and so the story continues on forever.
Thirty pieces of silver, such a paltry price to pay to kill our king. Can this be done in the midst of Passover? What better time? The sultry ugly priests whisper to each other …
Is Jesus listening? How does he know all he knows about the instant, immediate future? The clouds gather, and we sit in silence eating horseradish and drinking wine. The bread is broken and Jesus calls it his body, and the wine is poured and Jesus calls it his blood. Oh my God.
(There is this thing he says, and he has said it before … “After I have been raised up …”)
Just these few days afer triumphal entry, we are not exactly celebrating tonight. The feast, over so quickly, adjourns to a late-night garden, and while we fall asleep against a tree trunk Jesus prays. He wakes us up, and we stay awake long enough to hear him weeping, hear his passionate prayers. And in time, his sigh, his acceptance, his still small voice whispering with such intensity, “Your will be done.” O my Father, O my Jesus, your will be done.
 “Gethsemane” by Mary Oliver
 The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.
Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.
The cricket has such splendid fringe on his feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.
Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did, maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move.
Maybe the lake far away, where once he walked
as on a blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be part of the story.
 So often this story has been told. In the churches, in our own time of pestilence-in-place we can listen all day online to the story told with voices, male and female voices, and the interruptions by the ugly crowd (our congregational accusations). Jesus captured, Jesus questioned, Jesus condemned against the will of the governor, Jesus stripped and whipped and hung out to dry. His head is crowned with thorns, and the idea that “nothing’s gonna stop it,” that nothing’s gonna stop the gospel, even that this could possibly be “Good News” … that idea is suddenly alien and forgotten.
And it’s not only Jesus who is stripped and beaten. Jesus did not encounter shame, but Peter did, and Judas did. “I don’t know Jesus! I don’t even know who you’re talking about.” So did Peter, three times before dawn denying, feel his morning way through tears and broken spirit. And Judas, man of the moment but now regretting wholly what he’s done, throws his hard-earned coins pellmell at any priests that he can find, runs outside the gates, unwraps his cloak and hangs himself with his belt. Dead at dawn, dead enough for birds to find and have their fill.
While we, untouched by shame so far, raise our voices cawing, cackling, “Let him be crucified!”
Pilate washes his hands, disgusted, afraid, unwilling to risk angering the priests. Why should he care, anyway? “No!” His wife waking up from a dream. He turns away from her in his frozen conscience, in his fear. “Take him. It’s his blood upon your hands.”
 Surely … there is no more to this story. So hard to swallow, hard to hear, hard to stay with Jesus walking up the street, out the gate, up the hill to Calvary. But no, not over.
Simon of Cyrene, another Simon, this one with his own chance to deny Jesus, instead leaves his son and carries his cross. The soldiers require it. What is required of Simon? To act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God. He struggles up the hill with Jesus past station after station of their cross, the steep and rocky, long and winding road. The crazed clamoring crowds thinned out toward the top. The thin air smelled of skulls, the blood-guilt of day after day of crucifixions. Golgotha. Calvary. Waiting to receive the blood of Jesus and his sacred heart.
Simon drops the cross. Jesus is still. The soldiers lay him down and nail his hands and feet. They top the cross with a plaque they’ve made which reads, “Jesus, King of the Jews.” And they raise him up into the sky …
It’s three o’clock now, an hour that later will be called Nones. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus knows the psalms by heart, and he feels the presence of the psalmist, writing then about what’s happening now, even as he feels the aloneness made just for him today. Moments later, he cries out one more time. Jesus gives up his Spirit.Â
What did Jesus say in the Nazareth Sabbath service, on the day inaugurating his ministry? “The Spirit of the Lord will come upon you.” This is not a symbolic thing, but a literal one. And now it comes not on Jesus alone, but on us all. But this coming of the Spirit is not by gentle whisper, nor a whimper of the heavens. This is conflagration and  catastrophe. In this instant of the passing of Jesus, his Spirit rises up in a flash and burst of angry, righteous ear-splitting thunder and fire.
The sacred temple veil at last reflects the sin embedded in the hearts of men, and it is torn in two. Top to bottom, head to foot, as deep as deep can be the earth quakes, and tombs are opened. Dead men walking, and it’s not clear who is of this generation, and who is of the last. All of us have sinned and fallen short. The glory of God cries out in the Spirit of God and men and women whisper in shock and awe, “Truly. Yes, this was the Son of God.”
What do you mean, WAS? We cannot escape the deadly web called time.
 There is no more, no more story. Right? Can I go to bed now? I’m mad as hell, and I can’t take it anymore! But no. Stay awake. Listen a little longer.
Not everyone ran. Not everyone gave in to their exhaustion. A few first responders stood up just then as Jesus fell, and with his mother and friend John, pulled that heavy body down. The dead weight of Jesus without breath or muscle, mere body without reflex or response, surprised them and pulled them too down into the earth. They pulled themselves up again. They found a path (with permission) to their tomb, the tomb readied for their own death but now in amazed replacement, anxious to hold the body of Jesus.
Clean linen, cool cave and silence, air breathed in freedom only death can bring, that smell of nard again so soon. “He rolled a huge stone across the entrance to the tomb.” Even after the rich disciple left,  Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus “remained sitting there, facing the tomb.”
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April 6, 2020 (Andi’s birthday) today’s lectionary
My chosen one, God says, who without grandeur and without glory will establish justice on the earth, who without breaking even the weakest reed, without extinguishing the barest smoulder of flame on a tiny candle, with no noise, with no shouting, with no falderol, no ballyhooing, no crying out, THERE WILL BE JUSTICE. (Isaiah 42) So of whom should we be afraid, of which army encamped against me should I fear? Even in the midst of war, pestilence, pain, yes even in the midst of death, the Lord sits strong in the land of the living. We live with him in every instance and at all times as our eyes are opened and our mouths are closed, as we fall on our face and worship. We can wait and wait and wait and see and see and see and be comforted and be held, we can yes! We can be stouthearted and wait for the Lord. (Psalm 27)
Judas speaks with anger, and Jesus – oh, I can your eyes, Jesus – you are angry too. Mary pours the nard over your feet, and the house fills with the scents of a rich man’s burial, and Judas complains. Shut up, Judas. Jesus knows the days are growing short, and knows all his friends might be blown up in the explosion that will take his life. LET HER ALONE! And his words even more frightening … let her keep this perfume for the day of my burial. Jesus, you aren’t going to die. Surely not now, surely not yet.
But Jesus goes on. “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” (John 12)
And now even Lazarus is in danger. Those old and ugly chief priests plot away, wanting to brush everyone away who inspires belief in Jesus. Blot them out.
Jesus, your words are few. More and more you walk in silence, even as your eyes sparkle with intelligence and curiosity. There is more happening in the spirit world than we can imagine, and you see it all. The battles of demons and angels spill out to the horizon. Screams of agony on both sides fill your ears.
I’ve heard that the smells of the spirit world are more potent even than the sights and sounds. What does this kind of spirit-killing smell like, Jesus? Like sweet nard, I am guessing. It has come down to this, and Jesus you know your last days are upon you. This is the only way forward.
I know you would like to understand how I “knew” these things in advance. Was I guessing, or was I talking on the sly to my Father, and was he showing me all ahead of time? Not so much, not the way you imagine it. The way you are and always will be caught in time makes it impossible to see how it was, and is, and always will be … for me.
And still you “stop” and talk. We can sit in our rockers under the awning of the general store, and chew on crackers, suck a dill pickle, maybe have a Cocaine-Cola together, play some checkers until the evening comes.
Yes. And it’s good. Who knows, perhaps without knowing we are entertaining angels.
Come in, Jesus. Take a load off. Rest your bones. Have a nice bath, and let me wash your feet with nard.
Thank you, David. And remember, the time is coming, and it will be soon, when I will be washing your feet. Are you ready for that?
I know the stories, and I know the tradition, and I remember Pope Francis moving the whole thing from the palace to the prison, washing the feet of prisoners, those chosen few representing so many. JUSTICE comes, traveling in joy and celebration into the ranks of the most unrighteous, the publicans, the sinners, the filthy, lost, desperate children of God, their hearts longing to worship once more.
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