andygoodliff: Measuring Time with Jesus: A Homily for Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday
5^th April 2020
Belle Vue Baptist

We are living in strange times, unique times. Some might even suggest apocalyptic times. Time is different at the moment. For some time feels slower, for others there is new busyness. We are trapped by this time, we can’t go backwards, we can’t go forwards, all we can do is dwell in the moment. We are waiting for it all to be over. We are waiting for the next news bulletin, the next announcement of the number of those who had died. We are waiting to see how close this virus might come to us and to those we love. We are consumed, overwhelmed, plagued by COVID-19. We measure our days in terms of the lockdown.

Listen to the Psalmist:
            ‘Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am in distress;
            my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
            my soul and body with grief.
            My life is consumed by anguish
            and my years by groaning.’ (Ps 31)

We recognise what he is feeling.

Today is Palm Sunday and just by calling it Palm Sunday it is a reminder that our lives are also measured by a different time, God’s time, and we are the beginning of the climax of that time, when all time is caught by the events in and around Passover in Jerusalem in AD 33. We are catapulted back in time to the arrival of Jesus riding on a donkey as it climbs up into the city. A crowd cheering words from the Psalms: ‘Hosanna’, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ Branches waving, cloaks being laid on the ground. A cacophony of noise. This journey to Jerusalem has been slowly made from Galilee, passing Jericho and Bethany, a growing crowd accompanying. The reputation of Jesus of Nazareth going before him.

I wonder how Jesus felt? I wonder how the disciples felt?

There is a definite purposefulness about his arrival. This is street theatre designed to be noticed. There is nothing quiet about this coming. Jesus knew his time was coming, his hour was approaching. The road laid out at his birth, at his baptism was coming to an culmination. We can well imagine Psalm 31 were part of Jesus’ prayers.

‘Into your hands I commit my spirit.’
‘My times are in your hands.’
‘Let your face shine on your servant.’
‘Let me not be put to shame, Lord.’

Every year we tell this story of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Each year we are drawn into the events because here we learn the mystery of grace, the mystery of Christ, of how God has disrupted our time. ‘This week the church of Jesus Christ gathers around the heart, the centre, the guts of its claim to know the truth.’ [i] ‘What we see and hear in the passion and death of Jesus is the decisive intervention of God to deliver his children from the unspeakable fate of ultimate abandonment.’ [ii] ‘The testimony of the Gospels, the testimony of the Christian Church, is that in this event, in this godforsaken death, the cosmic scale has been conclusively tipped in the opposite direction, so that Sin and Evil and Death are not the last words and never will be again.’ [iii] Into our time God comes to redeem and rescue on a donkey, with bread and wine, with garden tears and heavy heart, a crown of thorns and a wooden cross, and in a stone–cold tomb.

This is his story. This is our story. We measure our lives with this story. We have been baptised into it.

In our current predicament, in this time of the virus, we hear the Psalmist and we hear Jesus, declare, ‘But I trust in you, Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ We walk the way of the cross, the way of death, and sing Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. We follow Jesus asking him to save us, to deliver us from Evil.

We can sing hosanna today because this time does not define us. We can sing hosanna today because Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. We can sing hosanna today because our time is in God’s hands and he holds us in life and death. We can sing hosanna today because the Jesus, who enters Jerusalem, who carries the cross is the same Jesus we worship today.

Passionate God,
draw us into your time
as we wonder at the faithfulness of your Son
who carried the cross
to free us from fear,
and deliver us from Death.
Help us cry hosanna
and commit ourselves to
Your great mercy
In the name of Jesus our Lord
Amen.