Dear Friends,
Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Even from a distance, a blessed Palm Sunday to you, one and all! Please take a moment and read Matthew 21:1-11, our gospel passage for this Palm Sunday.
As recounted in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem starts boldly, with an action that echoes the prophetic witnesses of the Hebrew scriptures. Of the four gospel writers, Matthew is clearest in defining Jesus’s ministry as the fulfillment of the promises and prophesies of the Old Testament. Remember, for example, how Matthew’s Gospel begins with a long genealogy, placing Jesus in the line of David. In the Old Testament prophesies, it was understood that the Messiah would come from the House of David.
Fulfilling these prophesies is central to the Messianic vision and yearning of the captive Jewish people at the time of Jesus. Their suffering was enormous, and their patience was thin. Their yearning was so severe that a number of false prophets and false messiahs had arisen at this time. One of Matthew’s purposes was to affirm the legitimacy of Jesus as the true Messiah in such an atmosphere.
For the first fifteen chapters, and then in the last eight chapters, Matthew reveals time and again the many ways that Jesus’s life and ministry were the fulfillment of God’s promises.
With that context in mind, try to visualize the day we’ve come to call Palm Sunday. After Jesus and his followers reach the small village of Bethphage, located on the Mount of Olives about a half mile from Jerusalem, Jesus sends two disciples into the village, where he knows they will immediately find a donkey and a colt for his journey into the capital city. We all have an image of Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but here there are two animals! And that Jesus wants to ride is an unusual image in the New Testament. We most often imagine Jesus walking with his disciples, being in a boat, sitting on a hillside; the idea of Jesus riding an animal, no less asking for two, brings us up a bit short. But we discern the reason when Matthew quotes from the prophet Zechariah in Matthew 21:5, “Your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and a foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9) More validation of Jesus as the true Messiah predicted in the Old Testament.
Also important to the earliest of Matthew’s readers is that this parade started from the Mount of Olives. As cited in Zechariah 14, that is the place from which the messiah was to liberate Jerusalem. Our Old Testament reading from yesterday is another such prophesy, as it reminds us of the gates Jesus rides through. “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall enter through it.” (Psalm 118:19-20) And as we noted yesterday, that gate in the psalm was the East Gate, on the road to the Mount of Olives that Matthew cites in the first verse of this chapter.
As Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, the crowds starts to shout, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matthew 21:9) We might assume that shouting Hosanna is like shouting, “Hip, Hip, Hooray!” Indeed, it is that, and much more. In Hebrew, Hosanna means “Save us!” Salvation and liberation are precisely what a beleaguered, captive population yearned for from the Messiah promised to them from Old Testament times. They yearned to be saved from the cataclysm their lives had become under the heavy hand of Roman rule. Even as Jesus entered Jerusalem to the cheering mob, myriad crosses, hung with the bodies of all those executed almost daily by the Romans, dotted the hillsides at Golgotha.
As they watched this humble man enter through the gate to the city, the “the whole [and over-crowded] city was in turmoil, asking ‘Who is this?’” (Matthew 21:10) Try to imagine the astonished murmur that would have swept through the crowd as they heard others say, “‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.’” (Matthew 21:11) How amazing it is that people had only to hear the name of Jesus to know who he was.
As Jesus enters Jerusalem via the East Gate, Pontius Pilate and his army would have been arriving in the city at about the same time, entering by the Gennath Gate from the west.
At this point, Pilate’s only concerns were the crowds and ever-growing unrest in Jerusalem. The crowds, whom we know to be fickle and tragically unpredictable as the week will progress, were swept up by the immediate emotions and drama of such an extraordinary day. Jesus’s disciples limped along beside him, confused by all they’d seen and heard in the days before they came to Jerusalem, and with no idea how all of this was to unfold.
Hosanna! we shout from each of our homes and hearts. Even as we join those crowds in Jerusalem to cheer Jesus’s triumphant arrival, our cheers also mean “Save us.”
Embrace the triumph, and cheer with the crowds in Jerusalem, even though you know the full story – that as he entered Jerusalem to loud Hosannas, Jesus was setting the political and theological table of the Holy Week to come. Our Hosannas will take on new and deeper meaning.
We pray for all who suffer from Covid 19, for all who care for them, and for everyone who loves them. We pray for all who are ill and at greater risk of the virus, that they may find relief from their illness and their anxiety.
We pray for all who lead the fight against the pandemic, including first responders, care givers, researchers, and government leaders. May God guide their hands and minds to solutions and wise strategies.
We rejoice in new-found ways to communicate and be in relationship, even in a time of isolation.
Friends, let us pray the prayers above and together:
Humble and gentle God, you are the soul and heart of life. Open our eyes that we may see the glory of your humbleness, and open our hearts to your love, strewn like triumphant palms across our path. May we recognize your glory as you ride upon a simple beast of burden on the crooked roads that lead to Jerusalem. May we see the truth that we don’t need to wave palms of victory and praise to see that your glory dwells in gentleness, patience, loving kindness, and even pain and death. Your way of peace – of faith, hope, and love – is our path, our joy, our way. Hosanna in the highest! Amen.