It was a humble entrance, to be sure. But soon it turned into a triumphal procession. The people of the Holy City were well-acquainted with the miracle-working Carpenter from Nazareth, and the word "Messiah" had been bandied about quite a bit. Everyone was aware of Jesus's royal ancestry, and surely defeating the Roman Empire would be child's play for Someone Whom the elements themselves and even death itself could not withstand. The population of Jerusalem was well-acquainted with the story of the Maccabees, the high priestly family who had led a rebellion that had ousted a haughty pagan conqueror centuries before. They thought history was about to repeat itself.
"Hosanna!," they cried. "Save-now!" And soon, from a Roman point of view, the cry grew even more ominous: "Hosanna, Son of David!" To all intents and purposes, they were calling out "God save the King!" They waved palm branches and strewed His path with them along with their own outer garments, a sign of submission and allegiance.
Fast forward to Thursday night. That same Jesus, knowing what was about to happen, had gone with his inner circle of disciples to a lonely garden to pray. The disciples, at a distance, had fallen asleep. With all due respect to the hymn-writers and poets who tell us how Jesus faced the supreme crisis of His earthly life with dignity and calm, unwavering serenity, the Gospels tell a far different story. In an agony of anxiety and very human fear it was He, now, who cried out, in effect, "Hosanna," pleading with His Father to "Save-now!"; that if there be any other way- any divine "Plan B," as it were- He be spared the terrible things to come.
We're tempted to turn our face from Jesus at that moment in embarrassment. We would not want to be contemplated reacting that way. If ever there was a private moment, this was it, and we instinctively want to give Him His privacy. There was, after all, a reason why his disciples were waiting for him "at a distance."
But more than that, this is just not the way we want to think of our Lord and Savior. In A Mighty Fortress and a hundred other hymns, we sing of Him in the same way the people of Jerusalem had thought of Him on Palm Sunday- as a mighty and invincible Warrior, the general who leads us in victorious battle against our enemies. We don't like to think of Him kneeling there, saturated in perspiration, doubtless tears in His eyes, begging the Father to save Him from that which, as He would shortly say, was the entire purpose of His having even been born.
We shouldn't. We should kneel there with Him in His fear and anxiety, but while at the same time remembering just Who He is. We should kneel there with Him in our own fear and anxiety- yes, and in our own shame, and our own guilt- and seeing Him, realize that He is also kneeling there with us and sharing ours.
He is as fully human as we. He got sick. He injured Himself. He knew all about rejection and the pain it brings. He came, after all, to suffer what we suffer, and to share it with us. Nobody ever knew heartbreak like Jesus. And despite being without sin Himself, in a matter of hours, He would take the thing of which we are most ashamed, along with all our other shame, off our shoulders and put them on His own.
He came, not to be served, but to serve. He did not come to have crowds cry "Hosanna!' and strew his pathway with palm branches and their own clothing. He came to share our anxiety and our fear and our weakness and most of all our shame.
No, don't look away, thinking to spare Him embarrassment. We might be tempted. As the prophet Isaiah wrote,
(H)e had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not (Isaiah 53: 2b-3).
But look at Him. Look at Him now, and in the hours to come, in the very way He came among us so that we might look at Him: sharing out fear, weeping our tears, bearing our sorrows, dying our death, and taking every bit of shame from us and placing it upon Himself.
"Behold the Man!," as Pilate will say in a few days. And when life is too frightening and uncertain, and our pain seems unbearable, and our consciences torment us, and God seems not only far away but to be attacking us like an enemy we cannot withstand, come back to Gethsemene and see His utter terror. and the loneliness and hurt of friends who betray Him and flee from Him at the very moment He most needs their comfort and support. Go to Golgatha and see Him a naked, bleeding carcass hanging from a cross, surrounded by jeering enemies, and know that it is our shame that He bears.
We are living through a particularly frightening and uncertain time this Holy Week. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is loose in the world, and the disease known as COVID-19 has us huddling at home, staying physically distant from other people. Many of us have lost our incomes, and in addition to the fear and anxiety, the pandemic is forcing us to live with we also face the uncertainty of a looming financial crisis whose severity and length are far from clear. For most of us, we have the companionship of our families or at least the human company the Internet and social media provide us with, as poor a substitute for real-life friendships and face-to-face contact as these may be. Internet and texting, as well as old-fashioned telephone calls, can still bring us into contact with one another with no risk of being infected by the virus or infecting others.
But it's easy to feel alone. It's hard not to feel anxious and afraid. Sometimes tears come to our eyes, and whenever we have too much time on our hands our minds work overtime to bring old sins to our memory and our faults to the forefront of our consciousness. Death lies heavily in the air, and nothing can cause us to contemplate the things of which we are ashamed like the combination of uncertainty and the prospect of possible death.
So now is the time to see Jesus at His low point, because He came so that we might take comfort in them at our own low points. Are we afraid? Jesus, too, has known fear- and that makes it possible for Him to make our very fear a place where He can meet us, and share it, and help us through it. He has known anxiety, so our anxiety, too, can be a kind of "sacrament" that allows us to find Him precisely in His.
Do we fear death? Jesus feared it, too- and died it. Even at the hour of death, we find Jesus waiting for us, having arrived before we did, so that by contemplating His death we may know how very far from being alone we are in our own.
And when one of the more ridiculous aspects of scrupulosity assails us, and we are tempted to the inherently prideful thought that we are a Special Case, a Super Sinner who is so bad that the promises of God in Christ don't apply to us and the warranty on our baptism has expired, or that despite the pains Jesus takes to make His promises so categorical that no reasonable doubt can exist that there is not a single human individual Whom Jesus will not welcome and embrace and forgive and heal if they are only willing, it is in the suffering and all-too-human Savior that we find modeled the humility and the realism to get over ourselves and understand that we are not special exceptions to the Gospel after all.
Make no mistake. Jesus is still the Victor, the Conqueror, the One Who treads Satan under His feet and brings to nothing everything we dread. He is the One to Whom we cry, "Hosanna- save, now!" But sometimes- and especially in times like these, we need to see Him consumed with anxiety, wracked with pain, bearing the shame we deserve and walking the path of sorrow and suffering and above all humility to Calvary.
Easter will come in its own due time. But maybe before we're ready to celebrate Easter, we need to be saturated in the realization that Christ the Victor is also Christ the Victim and let it firmly soak through our thick skulls and pride-encrusted hearts that the whole point of His going through the trouble of being incarnate of the Virgin Mary and living a human life and going through the pain and sorrow and hardship that comes along with all of that, and finally of His passion is precisely that we can't win our way to Him, and so He comes to us precisely in our fear and our weakness and, yes, our guilt and shame- and that it is in them that He chooses to meet us because it is there that we need Him.
Not in warm fuzzies or emotional highs. In the valleys. In our suffering. In our anxiety. In our guilt and our shame, and in our death. Do not despise times like these. Do not take your eyes from the Christ of Gethsemene and of Golgotha, even though there is nothing that seems attractive or winsome about dwelling on those things.
It is there that He meets us, and it is there that He sanctifies the places in our lives where we need Him the most by sharing them with us.
Palm Sunday Drawing
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