Palm Sunday
Donkeys, palm
leaves, coats on the ground, crowds of supporters and detractors, big
city, small people, peasant revolution, truth versus power, love
against profit, immoveable object meets irresistible force, empires
clash, and in the middle of it all a man ambles into a city on a
humble beast of burden and looks at all he sees and has tears in his
eyes because no one truly recognises who he is but he knows them all
intimately and understands their deepest needs and in less than a
week will carry every single one of their burdens individually on his
back and drop them all into the deepest darkest pit and fall
exhausted on top of them himself with sweat and bruises and blood
only to be buried alive for three dark days.
And we will
celebrate this by bleating “Hosanna” in embarrassed voices
outside our church, because we’re Anglican and British and really
don’t want to give offence.
The earth will
shiver and convulse and finally crack and give up its dead in a blaze
of morning glory and the Broken One will stride out with a smile like
the sun and will scatter petals of surprised delight on his mourning
friends whose eyes will be on stalks at the impossible things they
are seeing and whose sobs will turn to gulps of laughter and his
opponents who thought he was a danger and wanted to keep the peace by
killing him will be shocked to the core and confounded by the tidal
wave of new belief and hope in uneducated disciples telling this
story to amazed ears everywhere.
And we will have an
easter egg hunt for the children and try not to mention the
embarrassing argument about the National Trust, because we really do
want to be welcoming to people of all faiths and none. Yes we do –
no irony intended.
And God will smile
at the Anglicans doing their best, and turn his attention back to the
Sarin fumes in Syria and the dust settling on the Columbian mudslides
and the coughing outrage of the Panamanian parliamentarian rebels and
the poker-faced machinations of Putin and Trump.
And in forty days,
will he pour out again great waves of his transforming spirit, to
give damp Anglicans courage and hopeless Syrians fresh air to breathe
and victims of tragedy and injustice a chance to hope and will he
distract powerful men (always men!) from their concentration on the
games they play in secret against each other and put into their
hearts the wild longing to do things a different way?
Will he?
Will anyone ask him
to?
Will you pray with
me, that Jesus will not come into Jerusalem this Palm Sunday without
you and me in his wake, to march with him in his cause, to watch with
him in his agony, to weep together at the price he paid, to laugh,
impossibly, that this story was not ending but only beginning and
then be part of the spreading wave that circles and re-circles the
world?
This year, I want to
be swept off my feet by the story of Easter, swirled along by a wave
that transports me to somewhere new, taken beyond myself by a Power
that I cannot comprehend but which comprehends and apprehends me.
Please?
