Palm Sunday

This weekend, we celebrate Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord, sometimes simply called Palm Sunday.  But the entire title tells us that we mark two events, the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem and his passion.  The first part of today’s liturgy, the procession into the church with palms, commemorates the first Palm Sunday when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey while crowds laid their cloaks in front of him and waved palm branches in celebration.  The earliest record of this liturgy comes from a famous traveler known as Egeria who visited the Holy Land in the late 4^th century and kept a diary of her experience.  

The liturgical practices she witnessed in 4^th century Palestine, we celebrate today. Egeria tells us that on Good Friday there was a reading of the passion and a veneration of the cross, much like our present-day worship on Good Friday.  Regarding the vigil of Easter, Egeria speaks of the account of the Resurrection being proclaimed and of children being baptized, as is our practice today.  Egeria’s account of the liturgical practices in Jerusalem was unique because the liturgies she wrote about took place at the sites where the events of Jesus’s passion, death and resurrection were believed to have happened. 

But whether we celebrate Holy Week in Jerusalem or in Alpharetta, marking the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus merely through the lens of the past is to miss the point.  Our call is not to reenact these events as if they were a historic play, but to enter into them in ways that make them present to us in the here and now.  One way to mark these past events in ways that bring meaning to us today would be to ask certain question such as: how have I had to walk the path of suffering and death?  What crosses am I being asked to embrace? And how will I hear the Resurrection story differently this year?

We will remember God this week by marking the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.  But this is only because God first remembered us by sending us Jesus.  So whether we commemorate the events of the paschal mystery in the place where they actually took place or far away from there, we will encounter not a God of the past but the living God who chooses to be active among us today, here, now.