Thought for Palm Sunday

Today we start again to tell the story of a week which changed the world so much that we still have to almost act it out every year in order to begin to comprehend what it meant, to remind ourselves that what happened two thousand years ago was not a dream, not even a nightmare, not the beginning of the end, but the end of the end. Today we do this rather dramatic thing, even bringing a donkey along, and wearing vestments which are blood-red, because at the beginning of Holy Week we anticipate the week’s end. The One who enters Jerusalem today is already a dead man walking. There was no earthly hope for him since his enemies had made up their minds: judicial murder would be his end. And for the judicial murder the instrument at hand would not be a clean or antiseptic one like the lethal injection is at any rate supposed to be. The preference of the Roman authorities for crucifixion was even more blood thirsty than the Jewish method of stoning. And so, it’s blood we’re thinking of already. Soon blood will be flowing. You may say, so what? There’s so much blood shed in the world: in accidents, wars, gang stabbings and murders, natural disasters, political atrocities. Yes, but this blood is different, this blood do we remember after two thousand years, even to the point of wearing clothes to keep that blood fresh in our minds.

This is saving, salvific, redemptive blood. It is the blood that came streaming through the firmament, and St Catherine of Siena perceived as soaking the Church in its flow. It is royal blood, the blood of the Messiah, to be shed in a self-giving whose effects are so wonderful that this coming murder is a triumph, and not a defeat. This is not just the red of blood. It is also the red of the victory of the King of Kings.

The place where it all happened matters. The location is not without significance – not by any manner of means. Today the Lord sought to enter his own city, Zion, Jerusalem, the holy city. That he chose to do so with such a rag tag army of the dispossessed, the forgotten, the despised and in one extraordinary case, the recently smelly dead, should tell us as much about what kind of King he will be as we could ever wish to know. It was the city of the Most High God whose vocation was to be the dwelling-place on earth of the truth, closeness and love of God. It was a city that belonged to Jesus Christ by right – not only owing to the fact that he was Israel’s true Messiah , but because of the way in which he was so: a way unthought of even by the most far-seeing of the prophets: he was incarnate God and so in his divine-human person he is the measure of all truth, all closeness and all love. The relationship between God and the world finds its highest embodiment in his person which now walks into His own city, to the cries of ‘Hosanna’, which means, ‘save us’. Oh, but that they only could know how that salvation was to be wrought. Oh, that we could understand.

But the entry into the city was an echo of the past, Scripture knew of cities that kept their gates firmly closed, to their loss. Jericho closed its doors against Joshua and ensured it would miss out on the moment of divine history sweeping up with the tribes of Israel escaping from Egypt. Despite this morning’s hosannas, later this week Jerusalem will close its doors on Jesus. It will not simply bar him, as Jericho barred Joshua. It will have him contained in the praetorium and crucified outside the gate.

We know parallels to such closure in our own lives. We can close the door of our own self, of our hearts, of even our churches, snap them shut, when to open would have meant healing for ourselves and others. On Good Friday the Saviour will do the opposite to what Jericho and Jerusalem did. He will open his arms as wide as they can go, so that all the world may march in through the wound in his side, into the spacious welcome of his Sacred Heart, where all may find a home, and where pain and sorrow are no more. Now we know what kind of King He is to be, we ask ourselves what kind of disciples we are asked to become.