Sat down at my computer this afternoon and this splurged out.

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?