From the Rector
Dear Friends in Christ,
The biblical story of Palm Sunday is recorded in all four of the Gospels (Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-10; Luke 19:28-38; and John 12:12-18).
Five days before the Passover, Jesus came from Bethany to Jerusalem. Having sent two of His disciples to bring Him a colt of a donkey, Jesus sat upon it, and entered the city.
People had gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover and were looking for Jesus, both because of His great works and teaching, and because they had heard of the miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus.
When they heard that Christ was entering the city, they went out to meet Him with palm branches, laying their garments on the ground before Him, and shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he that comes in the Name of the Lord, the King of Israel!”
In the fleeting moments of exuberance that marked Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the world received its King, the king who was on His way to death.
His Passion, however, was no morbid desire for martyrdom. Jesus’ purpose was to accomplish the mission for which the Father sent Him.
The ancient hymn of light puts it this way, “The Son and Word of the Father, like Him without beginning and eternal, has come today to the city of Jerusalem, seated on a dumb beast, on a foal. From fear the cherubim dare not gaze upon Him; yet the children honor Him with palms and branches, and mystically they sing a hymn of praise: ‘Hosanna in the highest, Hosanna to the Son of David, who has come to save from error all mankind.’”
In Jerusalem there is an ancient Roman stairway known as the Holy Steps. Standing beside these steps on a hot Jerusalem afternoon, you realize, Jesus walked here.
Your whole view of place and time changes when you see it.
Located in the southwest quarter of Old Jerusalem, the Holy Steps are the route by which anyone in the first century would have traveled between the lower city and the upper city.
Jesus must have used these steps often to descend from Mount Zion across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives, where He regularly spent nights while in the city.
If, as is probably the case, the Upper Room was located in the aristocratic district of Mount Zion, upon completion of the Last Supper Jesus and His disciples would have traversed these steps to the Garden of Gethsemane.
Later that night, after His arrest, He would have been brought back up this street to the house of the high priest Caiaphas to stand trial.
Today this stone stairway is located beside the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu (Latin for cock’s crow). Surmounted by a golden rooster, this church is built on what is thought to be the site of the palace of Caiaphas, where Peter’s triple denial of Christ took place.
The last supper has been had. The betrayal has unfolded. The trial is to come.
It’s the inverse of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem—or is it? This walk in shame, after betrayal, toward agony. It’s hardly a scene we can imagine.
The man we hear of, the Savior we worship, God Himself in flesh—His feet touched these stones.
The path to Caiaphas’s house, the path to the judgment seat, was Jesus’s true triumphant entry—it was the royal way.
Those well-worn steps were the way of love. That walk which so many had taken was one that changed our lives and still can.
The whole turbulent scene of that distant Passover eve swims into view: Jesus bound, hustled along by a cohort of Roman soldiers, accompanied by an incensed delegation of Jews and the temple guard, a disciple or two trailing at a distance.
What comes home in Jerusalem is how intimately human the whole scene and story are.
That walk along that path was not to some distant place but a walk ever closer to us. In that brief walk along the short trail from the Garden to the judgement place Christ bridges the vast chasm between the hearts of humanity and the heart of God.
Palm Sunday reminds us that this walk is ongoing. The royal way is still there to be walked. It challenges us to walk alongside him in faith with the sure and certain hope of nothing but the love of God. Christ walked into all that was to come arrayed only in the splendor of the noble poverty of true faith.
That faith is ours to carry, too. Into all that may yet come, we can look to that royal way and know where faith leads.
It does not promise we will avoid suffering—that is something we will all know—but it does promise that through it all Christ walks with us. At the end of it all lays the death of death and the harrowing of Hell. At the end of it all is true life.
At the beginning of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, we are invited to the observance of a holy Lent. Some of us may have spent it less focused or distracted. This final week is our chance to redeem that.
We can bear down and focus. We can let our worried and wandering spirit find new grounding this week. Palm Sunday begins the central, pivotal point of the Church year.
It is the point of the rest of it.
So let us walk this royal way together this week and in this brief window of life rediscover the point and promise of the rest of it.
Yours in Christ,
—Fr Robert
