Turning Our Palms into Crosses

       What an incredible day Palm Sunday is.  As a kid, I remember going to church and bringing home a palm cross that had been made for me by somebody else, that I put in a drawer in my room.  I really didn’t know what it was all about, except that next week would be Easter and  I could look forward to my Easter basket, some candy and eggs.

After I was ordained and had a church of my own, Palm Sunday became a much more complicated day.  I had learned how to make a palm cross and I would teach everyone how to do it at announcement time.  Taking that long frond of palm and slowly fashioning it into a cross was a great way to dramatize what the day was all about.  How Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and people laid palms before him on the road, those same long fronds that they held in their hands, but it didn’t take long for them to turn on him and cheer as the high priests turned him over to Pilate and the Romans then put him on a cross and killed him. In the same way that we turned our fronds into crosses to take home with us.

The long gospel of the day was also something that we did differently than I remember as a child.  Most years, we would divide it up and take parts, sometimes even in costume and dramatize it.  I would usually be Pilate because of my ecclesiastical robes and we would act out the whole thing.  Bob Lord, our fabulous organist would create grand music at the time of the earthquake and thunder.  We were always deeply moved by the whole production.

Palm Sunday is much more than the beginning of Holy Week.  It is a day to summarize the whole of the meaning of the coming of the Christ to us; his humanness, his divinity and the incredible compassion that he had for all of us.  He willingly went to the cross to die for us and to show us the depth of God’s love for all of humanity.  We don’t always understand that.  We get caught up in the day to day details of our   lives and we often miss the presence of God all around us.  That is what Palm Sunday is trying to drive home.  Sometimes we are tempted to skip on to Easter to make a happy ending out of it all.  Holy Week ought to short-circuit that.  We need to go through the week, experience the pain and the loss before we get to the resurrection.  That is what we all do in our lives.  Death and loss are human experiences.  We all have them and we suffer from them.  It is incredibly important to understand that our God loves us through this experience, and has experienced it also.  This is why Jesus death is important to us.  Without having the loss, the resurrection loses its meaning.  We too will rise.  Those whom we have lost have risen.  We will see them all again.  But without knowing about death, how can God help us with our rising?  That is the meaning of Palm Sunday and Holy Week.