I’m feeling like a displaced person, ripped from the familiar home where I have lived for years and set down in a strange, alien place. Since I was ordained a Presbyterian Minister of Word and Sacrament in June, 1963, and before that even as a student minister from 1960-63, time has been marked for me by the high Christian festivals or holidays: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and, of course, Easter. After I retired, I still marked time by these days, always visiting a church wherever I was, including settling into a comfortable pattern of worship at Fourth Presbyterian Church – until this year.

It is two days before Palm Sunday and this year I am feeling lost. Not only am I not where I want to be, in my church, any church, the churches this year closed. And I am not even in my home, instead sheltering from the Coronavirus in our rural home in Three Oaks, Michigan.

For the working clergyperson, Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter are the heart of the matter. Not only are there a lot of things to do, extra services to plan, sermons to prepare, but spiritually, emotionally, for the minister it is the crux of the matter. Theologically for me Palm Sunday has always been when the rubber hits the road: the small band of friends walking all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem, the capital city. Jesus himself going out of his way to make a statement, to be provocative. He chooses to ride a donkey, not the entire way, but just to enter the city, a city filled with religious pilgrims and political zealots, in a way that perfectly reflects his occupied, oppressed nation’s highest, holiest hope. Zechariah had written centuries before…..

Rejoice greatly, O Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you

Triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

What happens next has always mesmerized, compelled me. It is also so very human. The crowd goes wild. The long- promised king has come! It’s only a matter of time until he leads a revolt and drives the hated Romans into the sea and establishes, once again, the ancient throne of David. By now, the powers that be have taken notice and are more than a little alarmed. As for Jesus, the donkey rider, he goes to the temple, causes a ruckus by driving out the money changers and then quietly leaves the city for the night.

But now forces have been loosed. Paranoia has been provoked. Entrenched political power and self-interest have been threatened. The status quo has been upended. In a matter of days, a plan has emerged to get rid of him. He has a last meal with his friends, is arrested later that night, tried and convicted the next morning and by late afternoon Friday he is gone, dead, efficiently executed by the Roman authorities.

For as long as I can remember I have been pondering it. What was he thinking? Did he not see what was happening? Why did he not run away? Why did he persist to the end? I have never been comfortable with the idea that he was merely following a script that God had written for him, that God was orchestrating the entire drama. Perhaps inspired by Dag Hammarskjold’s description of An Adamant Young Man, his face set to Jerusalem, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s decision to leave the safety of America to return to Germany and face martyrdom, I have never been able to let go of the idea that he, Jesus, is the one in charge, that he decides what he is called to do, what his convictions and the situation, his own love, demand that he do what he did, that he voluntarily lay his life on the line because of his deep conviction, deep love.

And so Palm Sunday has always been profound – from the beautiful children processing down the long central aisle, waving palm branches as we sing, “All glory, laud and honor, to thee Redeemer, King, to whom the lips of children, made sweet hosannas ring,” all the way through the week that ends in silence as we remember, and relive, his death on the cross. In a real sense, it has been at the center, in my heart through the many years.