Palm Sunday Evening Vespers

Our family was on vacation in February. We went over to Hawaii, as we usually get to each winter since my in-laws live half of the year over there. I’ve told you before we usually feel a family obligation to go visit them! (you laugh- as though you thought if my in-laws lived in Anchorage, AK we wouldn’t go visit in February!)

One afternoon in Hawaii, I was by the swimming pool, reading a book and enjoying the sun. The pool was a small one, enclosed with a wrought iron fence and totally encircled by palm trees.

Now, they were clearly not the same kind of palms present near Jerusalem that people grabbed branches off of to welcome Jesus…but palm trees, nevertheless. They’re part of the wonder of warmer climates. The palm trees in Hawaii are probably 40-50 feet tall, with the graceful swaying branches at the very top of the long, bare trunk. So I laid there reading, hearing the palm branches way, way up at the top rustling in a gentle breeze. It was beautiful.

After a little while, though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, a strong wind came up. It only lasted for about 15 minutes. But as I lay there, wondering about this wind, I heard a ripping and cracking sound way up above me. The wind had ripped off an entire palm branch, probably 8-9 feet long, and it went plummeting those 50 feet to the ground. When it hit the ground, it made a huge smashing sound that was pretty startling. It was such a contrast, this beautiful palm branch coming to such a violent ending.

It was palm branches that people waved at Jesus as he entered into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday. They’d come to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover, and had heard that Jesus was coming there. He had just raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. Everyone was talking about him. He was a celebrity.

Some of you are old enough to remember the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, so popular back in the 70’s. One of the songs in it depicted this Palm Sunday parade: “Hosanna, Heysanna, Sanna Sanna ho, Sanna hey Sanna ho Sanna. Hey JC, JC, won’t you smile at me?, Sanna ho, Sanna hey, Superstar!”

The crowd was ready. They went out to meet him, waving their palm branches. It was a great crowd, John says. Perhaps other people used a different kind of palm, the palms of their hands, for shouting and clapping.

I was noticing Friday night at the Trace Bundy concert in the Fellowship Hall, how we all clapped our palms together, making as much noise as we could to say “We want more! We like you!” The people liked Jesus.

But not all the people. Another group rubbed their palms together in a sign of glee as they plotted the end for Jesus. It was the Pharisees, the religious leaders who said with great bitterness and envy “Look, the whole world has gone after him!”

Perhaps you have watched a football game sometime when the quarterback throws a long pass to a receiver who is wide open, open by yards and yards, all he has to do is catch the pass for an easy touchdown…but he drops it. And the camera zooms in, and the poor guy is in disbelief, and he holds his palms up, looking at them, asking “how could you betray me like this?!”

It is our task in this week to discern how the waving of palm branches, the clapping together of the palms of hands…could lead, in only a week’s time, to nails being driven through the palms of Jesus as he was crucified.

It is our task this week to try and understand how something so beautiful could come crashing so quickly and violently down.

It is our task this week to reflect on the movement: from palms (hands up, waving)…to palms (arms spread, crucified).

It is our task this week to look at our own hands. Our own lives. To wonder how we have contributed to the terrible contradiction that Palm Sunday is.

It is our task this week to wait, and wait and wait for the Easter moment when Doubting Thomas is met by the Resurrected Jesus, who urges him to touch his nail-scarred palms, and believe.

It is our privilege in this week to wonder, and perhaps to join with Thomas, who in the end could only say “My Lord and my God!”

And to figure out that the Pharisees were actually wrong. The whole world hadn’t gone after Jesus. Jesus had gone after the whole world.