Triumph and Tragedy

Dave Brisbin 4.5.20 Palm Sunday: On the first day of Holy Week—the week before Easter Sunday that recounts the events of the last week of Jesus’ life and circumstances of his death—the church celebrates Palm Sunday, named for the palm branches waved and laid before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem for the last time. The church has dubbed it the triumphal entry, but Jesus himself considered it a tragedy. Why? In Luke’s gospel, he weeps over the city and predicts its destruction because the people still didn’t know the things that make for peace, that they missed the hour of their visitation. And it’s in the tragedy of the people’s missed opportunity that we find the true significance of Palm Sunday—how it shows us the first step toward Jesus’ truth and only Way to the Father. The people cheering Jesus into the city saw only what they wanted to see, what their fear would allow them to see, as they imagined Jesus as their savior—the fixer of all their problems. And the silent onlookers, invested in the status quo, saw Jesus as a threat to their power base and all they held dear. Jesus was neither fixer nor threat, but something radically different that still requires each one of us to break through the fears and agenda of our egoic selves to see the opportunity for transformation that is riding into our lives at every moment.