Upside Down

If you have been attending Palm Sunday services for many years, you may notice that something is a little different this year.

Instead of reading the Passion—Matthew’s telling of the last moments in Jesus’ earthly life—during the customary time appointed for the Gospel, we are going to end today’s joyful service with it.

The Passion is always read on Palm Sunday to make sure that those who are unable or unwilling to attend the services of Holy Week will not miss the fulcrum of the whole proclamation of our faith.

But for years, I have bristled at the way that we oscillate so quickly between the celebration of the procession of palms and the depths of despair in Christ’s crucifixion.

This year we will remain with the joy of Palm Sunday just a little bit longer, and following communion we will hear the Passion of Lord before processing into the world in silence before the postlude.

The emotional and narrative whiplash of Palm Sunday is always difficult, especially because so much changes in an instant.

The services of Holy Week are designed to allow us to engage and process those moments so that we can better come to terms as a community with the way Jesus is hailed with Hosannas one minute and then sent to a torturous death while being mocked and derided the next.

I hope to experience these special services with you this year. 

We begin with Tenebrae on Wednesday evening, remember Jesus’ Last Supper with the disciples on Thursday, go the cross together on Good Friday, hear the story of salvation and celebrate the first Eucharist of Easter at the Vigil on Saturday, and then gather here next week for Easter Sunday.

But in case you aren’t able to be here for the journey of Holy Week and these special services, I hope you do take time this week to reflect on how quickly our Lord’s life was turned upside down.

The same miracle working man who gained a popular following in Galilee because of his teaching, his healing, and his ability to tell the truth to rich and poor, young and old, high-born and low-born alike—the one who all those palm waving people hoped was the Messiah who had come to overthrow the yoke of all empires forever—that unique and beautiful human’s life was extinguished within the span of a week.

The same crowd who lauded him on Palm Sunday cried out on Good Friday to crucify him, and even his closest followers and confidants let him down and abandoned him when all went sour.

I have spent years trying to imagine what such a shift might have felt like for Jesus—wondering where his internal fortitude and strength came from to remain true even in the face of unbelievable suffering and anguish.

It still shocks and amazes me that God’s Son, and the child born to Mary in Bethlehem, was so profoundly rejected, mistreated, and intended to be erased from existence.

The closest we come to fathoming what this week was to Jesus is when we reflect on how quickly our own lives can be turned upside down.

When natural disasters strike, like tornados in Arkansas or earthquakes in Norcia, our lives are upended, and we are left to pick up the pieces.

Or when relationships break down between us and others—when the fragile ecosystem of our own minds and souls becomes unmoored and we are adrift in a sea of uncertainty and unable to orient ourselves to safety—then we might have a sense of the emotional turmoil Jesus must have experienced.

But perhaps more important than whether we can understand what Jesus was going through is the reality that through his Passion, he most intimately understood what WE experience and go through.

All the broken promises, the dashed hopes—all the physical hardship and cruelty—all the greatest accolades and acclamations preceding the greatest abandonment and isolation.

When the Word of God became flesh and lived among us, it was not simply to experience the best that life on planet earth has to offer.

In fact, it was to experience the totality of existence—highs and lows, feast and famine, community and loneliness—so that all creation could be presented back to God in a freely chosen offering of love.

“Surely he has born our infirmities,” and he has also shown us the extreme cost of choosing God’s way over the way of the world.

If the Gospel ended with the Passion that we read today, then I imagine that the good news of Christ wouldn’t have made it out of 1^st century Palestine.

There is more to the story of salvation, but on this Palm Sunday, perhaps it is enough to allow ourselves to experience once more how quickly the world shifts—how quickly our lives can be turned upside down—and how hard it can be to respond the way we would hope in the midst of such difficulty.

And to reflect together this week, on how Jesus navigated the same human hardships we experience, and gave us hope that we might follow him to where his choices and his commitments eventually lead.