The Path of Palms
- 21 hours ago
- 5 min read
A sermon on Matthew 21:1-11, Philippians 2:5-11, and Zechariah 9:9-10.
[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash.]
Have you ever wondered why palms?
It’s a legitimate curiosity, because palm branches are not a thing in our culture. Other than associations with Palm Sunday processions, I doubt any of us would think of waving palm branches as a sign of honor or petition for salvation.
But, of course, the practice came from somewhere, and that originating source is the Hebrew Festival of Sukkot, which translates as Booths.
The palms are explained by the specific practices of the festival – the people would parade around the altar in the Temple waving palm branches and then build “booths” (temporary shelters) with the palms to commemorate the time when the Israelites slept in tents on the journey from Egypt to Canaan.[1]
The festival is, as you might have guessed, a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt and of the nation’s deliverance from bondage.
The celebration is specifically linked to the people’s profound and defining experience of being saved from foreign oppressors.
So, when Jesus enters Jerusalem from the East, from the Mount of Olives, riding on a donkey, reenacting the prophecy of Zechariah, which explicitly names the entering savior as a king whose rule will stretch from sea to sea…
And when the people respond to his entrance by waving palm branches as they would in the Festival of Sukkot, a celebration of deliverance…
And when, in their celebration, they shouted out Hosanna, which means save us, and called Jesus the Son of David, which is a royal title…
The people clearly had some expectations… expectations that were fair, really, considering the prophecy that Jesus was re-enacting.
They expected him to act like a conquering king who was entering Jerusalem to save them from their Roman oppressors.
That is clearly what they expected, and we can understand why…
But the same indicators that formed those expectations also complicate the story.
For one thing, there is some unexpected nuance in Zechariah’s prophecy.
It defines the coming deliverer as a king, and even as victorious… but it’s not clear how the victory will be accomplished.
Weapons of war are evoked in the prophecy: chariots, war horses, and bows, but the claim is that they will be “cut off.”
The original Hebrew word, כָּרַת (kârath), can imply violence, but it can also mean that they will “fail.”[2]
And this seems to me to be the more likely interpretation in this context because the prophet then proclaims that the deliverer will “speak peace.”
Add to this ambiguity the fact that Matthew chooses to reference the part of the prophecy that declares Jesus will come in a humble way, and it seems much less likely that the people were supposed to be receiving Jesus as a military conqueror who will violently expel the Roman Empire.
Then, too, there is the story evoked by the Festival of Sukkot.
Yes, it’s a story of deliverance, but that deliverance did not come easy.
Those “booths” made of palms were built to represent the tents that sheltered God’s people in the wilderness, for forty years.
And even before the people failed to trust God’s promise on the event of the first time they arrived at the promised land, the initial journey out of Egypt was marked by fear, and hunger and thirst, and distrust, and complaining.
The people were freed from slavery, but there was still suffering to endure as they learned that deliverance requires trust, and sometimes even suffering, because change takes time and hard-learned lessons.
Even the path travelled by the crowd as they accompany Jesus from Bethphage to Jerusalem is a clue.
As I mentioned in a sermon during Lent, the Temple Mount in the City is divided from the Mount of Olives by the Kidron Valley.
The Palm Sunday path is not a smooth and easy one.
Jesus’ palm-strewn path had to go down, physically, quite steeply, before it could rise again.
And, yes, that word choice of rising again is, of course, deliberate.
The story we will hear this coming week is one of descent into the grave before hope and life can rise again.
That pattern is also the shape of today’s reading from Philippians.
Now, I’ve already taught you a new Hebrew word and described the rituals of Sukkot in this sermon, so I’m not going to completely geek out and diagram the chiastic structure of Philippians 2, but please believe me that it can be done and it literally makes a shape that looks like a valley between two hills.
At the most basic level:
Jesus starts at a level of equality with God;
but then empties himself in a series of debasements that lower him into the grave;
Before he is exalted by God and praised throughout all of creation.
Just like all of the other threads that are woven together in the allusions and actions portrayed in today’s gospel, the Philippians path mimics the Palm Sunday path in that the road to overcoming descends into struggle, before it ascends into transformed life.
This is the journey we have been talking about all through Lent.
It’s a journey that challenges us, because we cannot skip the middle.
We cannot, like the Palm Sunday crowd, wave our palm branches in celebration at salvation, while ignoring the part about tents in the wilderness.
We cannot magically teleport from the Mount of Olives to the Holy City and skip the climb in and out of the valley.
We cannot expect Jesus to liberate our broken world with a snap of his fingers, and avoid the struggle, and push-back, and growing pains that come from any meaningful, lasting transformation that can actually, as Zechariah prophesied, “speak peace.”
And that’s actually good news, because we can trust it.
It deals with our lived experience which has taught us that real change does take work.
A world as broken, and hate-filled, and imbalanced as our world is won’t change at the drop of a hat.
And it also won’t change if the mechanism of change is just more violence, or coercion, or exclusion.
Jesus cannot defeat the oppressive empire by using the tools of oppressive empire.
Instead, Jesus humbles himself…
He empties himself…
He takes the road down into the depths of suffering and even death…
So that, he can rise again…
And so that he can actually change the world having proved that death does not get the final say.
Jesus has come to “save us” as the palm waving crowd celebrated, just not in the way they expected.
He saves us, and the world, by walking the path of transformation… the path that is willing to give up power, and glory, and control to demonstrate the thing that is more powerful than any of these can ever be: self-giving love.
And he invites us to “be of the same mind,” and to follow him on the same path.
In her reflection on these texts, Episcopal author Sara Miles puts it this way:
“In the presence of Jesus’ love, a love that goes beyond death, we want to fall down. At his name, we have to bend our knees. Because the truth is every one of us is going up to Jerusalem, down to our deaths. Every one of us will suffer. But we do not have to do it alone… (as the hymn intones) from his beautiful, bloody head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down. Look, Jesus says: this is how you do it.”[3]
His is a path, and an example, that shows us how to pass through the valley and rise again.
Thanks be to God.
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