I guess I’m at the point where I’m too
stinkin’ old to adapt to change. When I was a kid there was no such thing in
the Lutheran liturgical year as Sunday of
the Passion. The story of Our Lord’s Passion was reserved for Maundy Thursday
and Good Friday. If you really wanted to experience this powerful week in the
history of salvation, you couldn’t just show up on Sunday. You had to journey
through the whole magnificent eight days—the waving of the palms and shouts of “Hosanna!”
on Sunday, the washing of the feet and the Last Supper on Thursday, and the
blackness of the crucifixion as the world went dark on Friday. Then the
community would experience the joy of coming to the garden at sunrise on Easter
morning to celebrate God’s promise of eternal life through the resurrection of
Jesus. It was meant to be a week-long pilgrimage.
You’ll understand, I hope, why I don’t
look at the Sunday before Easter as anything other than Palm Sunday—that day
when Jesus came to Jerusalem, humble and mounted on a donkey, and was greeted
with a carpet of peasants’ ragged clothing, flying pennants taken from the palm
trees, and the desperate cry of “Hosanna!”
This word “hosanna” is a word imploring “save”
in the sense of “rescue me.” We find the acclamation of the crowd welcoming
Jesus in Psalm 118:25-26. The psalmist assumes that the call for God’s saving
action will certainly be answered. It’s
rather like getting a cramp while swimming and calling on a trained life guard
to help you out. You know it’s the guard’s job to pull you out of the water to safety,
and that he or she will assuredly do so. Your cry of “save me” is only an
acknowledgment of your own distress. A good life guard—just like our Heavenly
Father—has already seen your predicament and is swimming towards you before you
even began to call out.
Just like us, those peasants who cheered
Jesus were in need of saving, and they felt confident God had sent the answer
to their prayers in the form of the itinerant rabbi from Nazareth. They were
right that God had sent salvation, but utterly confused as to the way by which
that saving grace would be experienced.
We’re just like them. Today we implore God’s
rescue from a deadly world-wide pandemic, but rescue won’t come from a vaccine.
It will come, perhaps, from a new sense of gratitude, and, as we see in the love
of Jesus, a real, renewed faith in the power of sacrifice. Our salvation will be
in living the words of St. Paul from Romans 12:2
Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the
will of God— what is good and acceptable and perfect.
God bless, my friends. Stay home and stay
safe!
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