PALM SUNDAY
COVID-19 can cancel a lot, but it can’t cancel Holy Week.
Tomorrow, the world’s Christ-followers start an entire week of remembering the final week of Jesus’s earthly ministry, and it begins with Palm Sunday.
FROM CORONATION TO EXECUTION
If you came to read the story of Jesus with no background information from childhood and our surrounding culture, Palm Sunday seems like the logical climax to his story. He had spent three years displaying his absolute authority over sickness, nature, demons, the religious authorities, and even death.
So, it would not surprise the reader to see Jesus being lauded as the rescuer and liberator of his people as he rides into Jerusalem. Indeed, that image is exact one a person would expect — a king coming to take his throne. The imagery is clearly kingly — riding in, atop a beast, a royal procession with the accompanying adulation and celebration.
However, we all actually do have that background information. We know how the week ends. In a matter of days, Jesus goes from hearing people praising him as “Hosanna” and “Son of David” to hearing some of those same voices shout, “crucify him!”
The beginning of the week looked like a sure coronation, but the end of the week was an execution.
If we look at the week deeper, though, we find that the coronation Palm Sunday promised did emphatically take place. It just happened in a way that surprises us all.
CONSIDER THE KINGLY ELEMENTS
It isn’t just the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem that indicates Jesus was heading for enthronement.
Jesus gets to Jerusalem and goes straight to where a king would be installed — the temple.
New kings also come with feasts, and Jesus instituted his own feast in the Lord’s Supper that week.
This sounds disorienting, but during his trial and crucifixion, he is pronounced as king (by a soldier declaring it in mockery)
Jesus is given a crown and robe.
These are all the trappings of a king being led to the moment where he finally takes a seat on his throne. Of course, the way we read it, though, Jesus isn’t enthroned. Instead of being lifted up on a throne, he is lifted up on a cross.
Consider what happens when he is on the cross, though. Among many other highlights, Matthew records in his Gospel that at Jesus’s death, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51).
The curtain that separated God and man for millennia was torn open, inaugurating a new reality of the access humankind now has to God, through Christ.
It was from the cross that Jesus did his royal work — absorbing the wrath of God for sin and re-establishing an Edenic reality of God dwelling with his people.
Reflecting on this, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this:
”A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom. For while the kingdoms of this world are built by force, the kingdom of God is founded on grace. In his crown of thorn and purple robe, we see him adorned as a king. In his crucifixion, Jesus takes his rightful throne on the earth.”
Palm Sunday hinted at Jesus being enthroned as king, and he was. It just happened in a more cosmic and glorious way than we could have ever imagined. He wasn’t installed as a king of just an earthly kingdom with its own borders, laws and customs.
On the cross, he was enthroned rightfully as the King of All Creation for all of time.
The people on Palm Sunday we’re crying out to be saved from an earthly oppression. Jesus delivered an even better liberation: liberation from sin and ultimately death.
Final Thought
We are often like those folks at Palm Sunday. We cry out for rescue, and we think our desired version of events is the exact rescue we need. All the while, God is rescuing us — but doing it in a better way than we could have imagined ourselves.
