Matthew 21: 1-11
People came out of their homes to salute the heroes. They clapped their hands. They banged on pots to make a louder noise. Looking around them they saw their neighbours were there. They felt as one with their neighbours. As one in their desire to show support and say something about what is important and what we hope will happen.
That was every neighbourhood in our country on Thursday night; giving applause to the brave men and women working in our National Health Service. I’ve got a feeling that’s going to be every Thursday evening until we have got through this pandemic. Leave yourself a reminder. It’s 8 o’clock every Thursday.
It’s a wonderful feeling to applaud the health workers together. It makes us feel united. It brings us together with our neighbours. We all know what the others are thinking. We know they are thinking the same thing as we are. We feel grateful to the health workers who are working so hard to heal us. We feel grateful because we know that they place themselves in danger for our sake.
If somebody suggested that we all go out of our homes to applaud the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary, I don’t think you would see such a massive response. Actually, more than anybody else, they are probably the individual human beings who can do the most to save people in this country from this terrible sickness. But we will not achieve a consensus in our neighbourhoods about their motives or their abilities. We can’t unite around them, can we? But we can unite around the health workers; those who bring healing, those who risk their own lives.
If you have taken part in the Thursday night applause for health workers, you will have some sense of what it was like for the people who followed Jesus into Jerusalem. You will know what it feels like to be part of a crowd. To have that feeling that if all these people feel the same way as you do then what you feel must be right; your time must have come.
What a wonderful uplifting feeling it must have been to be in that crowd, shouting hosanna and waving the palm branches in the air.
And they shouted for a man famous for two things:
first of all bringing healing. Everywhere Jesus went people brought out their sick friends so Jesus might heal them;
and secondly for proclaiming the Kingdom of God, in other words saying that from now on everybody would be treated with fairness and justice.
Surely everybody wants that!
And not only did the people want these things; healing and justice; they really thought that they would get it.
Because it seemed that there was nothing that Jesus couldn’t do.
- He could calm storms.
- He could walk on water.
- He could bring dead people back to life.
If he had come to Jerusalem to proclaim a Kingdom of God of peace and justice for all; who on earth would be able to stop him? The first Palm Sunday must have felt like it really was the first day of the rest of human history.
We know now, of course, that it wasn’t going to be as straight forward as that. Jesus took over Jerusalem, occupied the temple, healed the sick, got into arguments with all the leading religious authorities and won those arguments hands down and then, for reasons his followers could not understand, allowed himself to be arrested and tortured and humiliated and crucified.
How quickly that feeling of being unstoppable, that Palm Sunday feeling, how quickly it vanished.
But even that wasn’t the end of the story. After the darkness of Good Friday, Jesus rose from the dead and revealed himself to small groups of his followers and slowly but surely they came to believe in him, and slowly but surely they came to understand that the Kingdom of God wasn’t going to be established by Jesus riding into town one day, but instead would live in the hearts of those who followed him and would be revealed in the way that they lived their lives for him.
So given that we know what happens, we know that Easter is the main event, why do we still celebrate Palm Sunday?
We celebrate Palm Sunday it seems to me because we need to express together that joy we feel when we wonder what the world would be like when the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of peace and justice is established and the joy we feel when we see glimpses of the Kingdom in the way we live our lives.
Like everybody else, I have had moments over the last three weeks when I have been worried about what might happen to us, to me, to my family. But I have had many more moments of joy when I have seen how people have gone out to find ways to love and serve their neighbour in this time of crisis. What I am seeing is, I believe, the Kingdom of God, in small glimpses.
And that is what we are celebrating every Thursday night. If people put their own lives in danger to bring healing to others, what are they doing? They are following the way of Christ; that’s what they are doing. That’s what makes people come out of their houses to applaud them. That’s why we applaud them and pray for their victory.
Let us declare our faith together now.
Our faith in a God who loves us.
Our faith in the Kingdom his son Jesus proclaimed.
And our faith in his victory and his triumph over death.
Let us stand and declare our faith.