Palm Sunday

Many of us, I’m sure have had the experience of being asked by a born-again Christian: “Have you received Jesus into your life as your personal savior?” It has happened to me a few times and I have been tempted to ask them where in the Bible does it tell you that Christianity is all about receiving Jesus into your life and making him your personal savior. Because I can save you the time of looking – nowhere in the Bible does it tell us that we must receive Jesus into our lives, on the other hand, there are many places where we are told to let Jesus receive us into his life and to make his life our own. Part of making Jesus’ life our own is being prepared to follow him to his passion.

Jesus rides into a Jerusalem that is ripe with expectation for a King, a Messiah. These expectations were disparate, some wanted political liberation, others wanted a reform of the Temple while others wanted economic liberation, and were unconcerned with politics, as long as their lives got easier. All these expectations coalesced around the person of Jesus. The people who thronged the streets of Jerusalem, acclaiming Jesus as their King, all saw what they wanted to see in him. They projected their own hopes and expectations onto him. It was populism at its best. In his heart of hearts, Jesus knew that his popularity would not last, because it was constructed out of a patchwork of different expectations of what he might do and accomplish as Messiah, some of which were even mutually exclusive. Riding the crest of the wave of this popularity, Jesus did not for a minute have any illusions about its ephemeral nature. Neither did he seek to prolong it. He knew the fickleness of the crowd, and he did not seek to pander to these expectations. Throughout the roller-coaster ride of emotions, highs and lows, Jesus keeps his eyes fixed on one thing and one thing alone – doing the Father’s will. He knows that this will not please everyone, in fact it is quite possible that it will please no-one. Given the diversity of expectations in amidst this crowd, it would have been impossible to please everyone. But Jesus goes further, not only does he not aim to please everyone, he doesn’t even try to please even one group. In fact, over the period of the next few days before his death, he manages to alienate all his potential supporters.

After his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, Luke gives us little vignettes of Jesus’ words and works that end up upsetting those on the left and on the right. Jesus alienates the liberals who have been yearning to throw off the yoke of Roman colonial power by effectively endorsing the payment of taxes to Caesar. He then goes and alienates those on the right, the Temple authorities who have opted to co-operate with Roman power by prophesying the destruction of the Temple. He preaches several parables that cast the history of the nation of Israel in a dark light and illustrates how time and again it has failed to recognize its hour of visitation. Now, as the people become increasingly disenchanted with this prophet who initially showed so much promise of fulfilling their expectations, they once again fail to recognize their hour of visitation. As it slowly dawns on people that Jesus will not be the Messiah they were expecting, they withdraw their support from him and suddenly he is no longer the hottest thing in town anymore. Just five days after his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, they will be clamoring for his blood. From being their incoming King he is now reduced to being their Friday-afternoon entertainment, a would-be Messiah who has been exposed for the manipulative trickster he was. This is surely a lesson to us in how badly we can be misled by our expectations of what our lives should be like. When we expect to receive Jesus into our lives and fulfil our own expectations, we are setting ourselves up for deep disappointment. It is our own expectations that also cause us to miss the hour of our own visitation by God. We might take some time today to ponder on our own unfulfilled expectations and ask ourselves if these expectations are not causing us to miss the many ways God is already present to us and saving us.

I think that today’s gospel invites us to do two things. First, we are invited to recognize the ways that we are similar to this crowd, so fickle in our commitment towards God and the practice of our faith. When things are going our way, we are all too happy to pray and praise God’s name. However, when things suddenly stop going our way, we start moaning and telling the Lord that this is not what we signed up for. What we are invited to realize is that we don’t get to define what discipleship is. We have to be prepared to admit that perhaps when we signed on the dotted line and committed our lives to Christ, we didn’t read the small-print. In fact – perhaps there is no small print. Discipleship is quite simple: discipleship means going where Jesus goes – following our master, and letting him call the shots.

In order to do this, we need to temporarily bracket the question of relevance. Our modern society is obsessed with the question of relevance – what has it got to do with me? Many young people leave the church because they claim that it is not “relevant” to their lives. It is good to ask ourselves the question of relevance, to apply the gospel message to our lives so that our faith is not divorced from our praxis. However, we should not want the gospel or Jesus’ life to yield up its relevance to our lives too quickly. We cannot force the process. We need to allow this to emerge in its own time. God is of course merciful with us, and takes us from where we are. At the beginning of our spiritual journey, God feeds us with milk – in other words with immediately relevant truths to our lives. But the more we progress and mature in our Christian lives, we must be prepared to bracket the question of relevance, and be interested in Jesus’ life for its own sake, and not because it immediately has something to say to our own experience. The paradox is that by entering more fully into Jesus’ life, we actually enter more fully into the meaning of our own lives. Following Jesus into his Passion helps us better understand the meaning of our own suffering.

Questions for reflection

1. When I read the Bible, do I read it looking only for what is relevant to my life?
2. When things don’t go the way I planned or expected, am I able to take it in my stride and look towards Jesus carrying his cross and forge ahead with carrying my own?
3. How do I respond to the waves of popularity and notoriety that animate my own life?