Have a blessed Palm Sunday my friends!
Weird to think about Jesus riding a donkey into the city of Jerusalem amidst Covid19. Looks more like Will Smith’s “I am Legend” than the Gospel accounts. The streets empty, no pruned palm branches waving or cloaks laid out. Just Jesus socially distancing himself while riding a donkey into the city. Essential work to be sure. But such a different image.
For some kids in our communities this will be the first Holy Week they remember, for others it will be their last… i guess that’s always true. Yet it feels culturally significant today.
This morning I spent some time with all the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ “Triumphant entry” into Jerusalem. As always, I find it so beautiful and inviting to note the similarities and the differences in how the stories are presented. Today, I was taken by Luke’s account (Luke 19). I strongly encourage the reading of the whole chapter, including the two stories leading up to the palm sunday story and the one following it. And then to think about it. Invite the Spirit to help you make connections.
But on this day i was really struck by Jesus’ interactions with a little group Pharisees while on his way into the city.
Everyone in that day knew what was going on. This way of entering the city was a direct reference to the way Ceaser would enter Rome after winning a battle/colonizing another culture. This was a prophetic statement in the face of oppression by the empire of Jesus’ day.
God bless those Pharisees, they didn’t want to see any more of their people die at the hands of their oppressors. So they come to Jesus and plead with Jesus to rebuke his followers, stop this parade… Rome won’t like this. Make it stop!
In response Jesus quotes Habakkuk: “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
Habakkuk was a prophet during in the era of Jewish oppression/exile by Chaldeans (aka Babylonians). He called out the unjust, slave labor used to build wealth for their oppressors, 600 years before Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem. Habakkuk, was a spoken word poet – of sorts – claiming that the very walls of the city of Jerusalem were a testament to the evil of the wealthy and powerful gaining off the backs of the poor.
So what was Jesus saying to the Pharisees?
He was saying a lot more than suggesting that in some miraculous way inanimate stones might sing, if the people stopped chanting “Hosanna!” Jesus seems to be prophetically saying something about those who profit through others’ pain… what do you think Jesus was saying?
Today I hear Jesus saying the rocks in the very walls of surrounding Jerusalem cry out against oppression. Personally I picture the testimony of a planation in the American South…I think it’s likely that kind of image.
…whatever it was …whatever Jesus was seeing & saying… it broke his heart! Jesus wept! This is one of the two times we see what makes God cry.
Woe, to those who pursue profit at the expense of the suffering amidst this pandemic, the rocks will cry out!
The story of palm sunday is not just a cute story for kids. Read it at your own risk!
Peace, dwight
