Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel: Palm Sunday

The readings for Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021:

Liturgy of the Palms:

Psalm 118:  1-2, 19-29

Mark 11:  1-1

John 12:  12-16

Liturgy of the Passion:

Isaiah 50:  4-9a

Psalm 31:  9-16

Phillippians 2:  5-11

Mark 14 - 15

Here we are at the second Palm Sunday when it is not safe to be together in large groups or in most small groups.  Our Jewish friends are preparing for their second Passover when they must celebrate from a distance.  Humans have created holidays to be celebrated in person, not by way of a Zoom meeting.  How do we make sense of all of this?

Palm Sunday (and Passover too) has always reminded us of the danger of crowds, although it's a different kind of danger than the viral kind.  The crowds that gather to give acclaim on one day may turn into the crowds that call for crucifixion not that much later.  If we put our faith in the acclaim of the world, we are surely doomed.

Palm Sunday reminds us that life is precarious.  We might protest that we don't need that reminder.  We've known it.  We see Jesus riding on a donkey, a lowly animal, and we say that we understand the signal he's sending.  In the time of Christ, a leader recognized far and wide would come riding in on a magnificent horse.  Christ is not that ruler.

We claim we've learned the lessons of Palm Sunday.  We swear that we can do better.  Our pandemic year has taught us how to be better humans, citizens of Palm Sunday's hope and optimism, not of Good Friday's demand for punishment and agony.  

Yet it's been a week of not one, but two mass shootings, one in Atlanta and one in Boulder.  We get out of lockdown with some of us determined to go back to our old ways, ways that embrace of power for the good of the few, the embattled, the threatened.  And all sorts of people end up dead.

Let us return to our lessons.  Let us think about the lesson of the palms.  Let us go forward, forewarned about the fickleness of the world's acclaim.  Let us work return to God's vision of leadership:  providing for the poor, binding up the broken-hearted, preparing a meal.

Let us think about the other meaning of palms, the part of our hands that can hold this work.  One of my favorite images of God comes from Isaiah 49;15, which tells us that our names are written on the palms of God.  God hold us in this way.

And in this way, we can be strengthened and comforted to do the work that our broken society needs us to do.