Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, April 13, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Ocean
“Why are you untying this colt?”
They answered,
“The Master has need of it.”
So they brought it to Jesus,
threw their cloaks over the colt,
and helped Jesus to mount.
As he rode along,
the people were spreading their cloaks on the road;
and now as he was approaching the slope of the Mount of Olives,
the whole multitude of his disciples
began to praise God aloud with joy
for all the mighty deeds they had seen.
Jesus looks across the crowd and straight into my exhausted, lonely eyes. I remember that he said to all of us, “You belong to this world.” And then he said with certainty, “I do NOT belong to this world.” And because he spoke this way, “many came to believe in him.” Do I?
I stand in the crowd, suddenly, strangely alone.
Jesus doesn’t offer a God-Trek Beam-Me-Up-Scottie miracle to get us out of here. He didn’t have one of those for himself. Suspicious snakes hated him, and he died abjectly on their cross. But Jesus compared himself to Moses’ medallion, the bronze serpent which Moses lifted up to heal the rebellious, bitten, dying people as they seemed to be wasting away in Egypt’s deepest desert.
Jesus died … so we might live. Because we too do not really belong to this world.
What do I do now, as Jesus rides the donkey into Jerusalem, surrounded by worshipping crowds? How do I respond and follow him? Centuries later Christian religion suggests prayer, repentance, fasting, simple belief, works of mercy, works of devotion, sacrifice, surrender.
Theologian and priest Henri Nouwen saw something that underlies all those doings. In South America he journaled about his daily time alone, keeping silence in the convent’s chapel:
My time apart … is full of distractions, inner restlessness, confusion and boredom. It seldom, if ever, pleases my senses. But the simple fact of being for this time in the presence of the Lord and of showing him all that I feel, think, sense, and experience, without trying to hide anything, must please him.
Somehow, somewhere, I know that he loves me, even though I do not feel that love as I can feel a human embrace, even though I do not hear a voice as I hear human words of consolation, even though I do not see a smile as I can see a human face. Still the Lord speaks to me, looks at me, and embraces me there, though I am still unable to notice it. The only way I become aware of his presence is in my remarkable desire to return to that quiet chapel and be there without any real satisfaction.
Yes, I notice, maybe only retrospectively, that my days and weeks are different days and weeks when they are held together by these regular, “useless” times. God is greater than my senses, greater than my thoughts, greater than my heart. I do believe that he touches me in places that are unknown even to myself. I seldom can point directly to these places; but when I feel this inner pull to return again to that hidden hour of prayer, I realize that something is happening which is so deep that it becomes like the riverbed through which the waters can safely flow and find their way to the open sea. – Gracias, p. 69-70
Isaiah spent time like this on his way to the sea of God.
Morning after morning he opens my ears that I may hear, and I have not rebelled, I have not turned back.
We have, as Mark O’Connell remarked in “Splendid Isolation,” an article in The Guardian, moved from being time-keepers to time-savers and now time-servers. This is not what God had in mind on the sixth day, when he created us. The seventh day is what he had in mind. So on Palm Sunday, my rest matters. It’s all that matters. So that I may hear.
(Luke 19, Isaiah 50, Psalm 22, Philippians 2, Luke 22-23)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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