Palm Sunday. A reflection.

11 Apr Palm Sunday. A reflection.

Some time ago I watched the movie Moonstruck.  Mostly it’s just a pleasant romantic comedy about a woman who begins with the wrong man and ends up with the right one. Nothing very remarkable about that! It’s a story Jane Austen told, in one form or another, more than once.  But there’s one scene in the Moonstruck version that I find extraordinary—and powerful.  Loretta Castorini is a woman in her thirties.  She’s been badly hurt earlier in her life, and she has understandably opted for security—she’s chosen a nice, safe man whom she likes well enough but scarcely loves, so that she can make a nice, safe, sensible life for herself.  Then she meets his much more disturbing and much less predictable brother Ronnie, and finds herself deeply drawn to him, as he to her.  She is determined, nonetheless, to stick with her sensible plans.  But then –

“Playing it safe is about the most dangerous thing you could do,” Ronnie says to her.

She won’t have it.

“Maybe my nature does draw me to you,” she says.  “It doesn’t matter.  I don’t have to go with it…   I can take hold of myself.   I can say yes to some things and no to others that’ll ruin everything.  I can do that.”

“I love you, Loretta,” Ronnie says.  “But love don’t make things nice. It ruins everything.  It breaks your heart.  It makes things a mess. But we aren’t here to make things perfect.  Snowflakes are perfect.  The stars are perfect.  Not us.  We’re here to ruin ourselves and break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.”

Loretta is deeply disturbed.

And so am I.

“Who do you think I am?” Jesus asked, much earlier in the gospel story than the gospel passage we heard this morning.

“You’re the Messiah—God’s anointed!” Peter said.

Oh, good!

But wait a minute—Jesus hadn’t finished.  Being the Messiah don’t make things nice.

“The Son of Man must be betrayed and suffer and die, and only after that be raised,” he said.

Peter was deeply disturbed.  “God forbid!” he  said. “That’s not for you, Lord!”

But it was.

“If you want to be with me,” Jesus said, “you’ll take up your cross and get ready to die.  Playing it safe is about the most dangerous thing you could do.  Try to save your life, and you’ll lose it!”

So here we are following him into Jerusalem.  It’s nice enough now.  Everything is fine.  The people around us are all shouting with joy and hope! “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”

But we know where it’s going to end.

He knows where it’s going to end.

The cross.  The blood and mortal agony of Calvary, just as he warned.

I don’t know about any of you, but speaking personally, I don’t really want to hear this.  I like to be safe.  God knows, I spend my life trying to be safe, from getting my Covid jabs to checking the brakes and tyres on my car.  I don’t want to die.  Good grief, I expect to have a pain killers before I have a filling removed!  So now we are supposed to preach? To show how this is “good news” on a Palm Sunday?

One temptation for a preacher is to leap at once to Easter.  Let’s talk about something cheerful, shall we?  Let’s talk about resurrection.

But at this point it is a temptation—and a lie.

For  they weren’t able to leap to Easter—the little group of disciples who were about to go through the humiliation of deserting him and failing him.  They couldn’t leap to Easter.

Nor the faithful women following him now who’d later be huddled about the cross.  They couldn’t to leap to Easter.

Nor Caiaphas, faced with what seemed to him to be blasphemy.  He couldn’t leap to Easter.

Nor Pilate, supposed to keep the peace, and now faced with a situation that seemed to spiralling rapidly out of control.  He couldn’t leap to Easter.

Nor the centurion and his unlucky bunch of squaddies, who were going to be detailed for just about the worst job the Roman army had to offer.  They couldn’t leap to Easter.

And Jesus couldn’t leap to Easter, either.

Not even Jesus.

Especially not Jesus.

He will have to go through it all:

sweat like great drops of blood,

prayer for those who are driving the nails into his hands,

pain, desolation.

He must go through it all.

So if we’re serious about this “following Jesus” thing, we must be willing to look at him and listen to him and follow him as he is now: riding into Jerusalem to die.  It is from the donkey, with the crowd shouting around us, that we must hear his invitation to follow him.

“Do you think we’re here to make things perfect?” he says to us. “Then look at me.  Snowflakes are perfect.  The stars are perfect.  Not us.  We’re here to ruin ourselves and break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.” 

 Certainly he loves the wrong people, for he loves us; and he’s going to die for it.

Now I see what it is about Palm Sunday that makes me uneasy.

It’s not merely that it is serious.

It’s not merely that it speaks of someone riding to their death.

It’s that it calls me to my death.

Worst of all—in my heart of hearts I know that it thereby calls me to reality.  For of course, my quest for safety, my denial of death—they’re fantasies.  I know that.  I shall die.  In this world, I am never safe.  That’s the truth.

So my real choice is not between safety and the death to which Jesus invites: it is a choice between dying alone, or dying with him.

All other choice is an illusion.

When I face that, when I grant that even for me there will sooner or later be no other way than that of death—why then, and only then, I may find it just possible to conceive of something more.

Maybe, just maybe, something else might be true.

Possibly, just possibly, the saints might have got it right—Our Lady and Mary Magdalen and Saint Paul and Saint Francis and Thérèse of Lisieux and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa of Calcutta and all those other lunatics who dared to put their trust in the crucified, and so to hope for a hope beyond hope: as it is written, if we die with him, we shall also live with him.

 So perhaps after all I will just dare to say it.  “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Amen.