Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51; Hebrews 5:1-10; John 12:20-33

The Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, said this to his confirmation class: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves … grace without discipleship … Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for … It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” In 1944 he was imprisoned for his anti-Nazi writings, and the next year he was hanged in a concentration camp, a few weeks before it was liberated by the Allies.

The peace activist Mohandas Gandhi once said: “It is not at all impossible that we may have to endure every hardship that we can imagine, and wisdom lies in pledging ourselves on the understanding that we shall have to suffer all that and worse.”  In 1948 he was assassinated by a religious zealot.

The Baptist preacher and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. said in the great march on Washington in 1963: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”  Five years later he was murdered.

The Salvadoran priest and theologian, Archbishop Oscar Romero, once said: “The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God.  As the holy defender of God’s rights and of God’s images, the church must cry out. It takes as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back, as the cross in its passion, all that human beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers. They suffer as God’s images.  There is no dichotomy between humans and God’s image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being abuses God’s image, and the church takes as its own that cross, that martyrdom.”  In 1980 he was assassinated while celebrating the Eucharist.

When Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, King, and Romero uttered their prophetic words to cheering and supportive crowds, it probably felt like a new era was at hand.  A time of peace and freedom and redemption, in lands as distant and different as Germany, India, America, and El Salvador. Those were optimistic times, when few could have foreseen the executions that lay ahead.

And so it was with Jesus, for as He entered Jerusalem to shouts of “Hosanna” – which means, “Save us now, we beseech you” – it was tempting to believe that everything would work out just fine. It’s easy to imagine standing at the gate to the city of Jerusalem on that Sunday afternoon, watching the palm-frond parade, welcoming the man whose looks weren’t all that appealing, riding on some borrowed burrow, and thinking, “This is it.  We’ve finally made it.  Soon everything will be different.”

And soon it was very different, but not in the way that anyone would have imagined that festive day. For in the matter of one short week, the joy of Palm Sunday gave way to the uncertainty of Thursday, the horror of Friday, the emptiness of Saturday, and the wondrous confusion of Easter morning.  And in between, Jesus drove the money changers from the temple, denounced the scribes, predicted His persecution and resurrection, was anointed by an unnamed woman, told several parables, and eventually shared the Passover meal with the disciples before the betrayal.  Quite a week, by any standard.

And what are we to do with it? What are we to do with a service that begins with the Triumphal Entry, but refuses to let us rejoice in it for too long? We are not granted the interlude of joy and hope that the followers of Bonhoeffer and King and Gandhi and Romero were.  For we know what lies ahead, and the Church forces us to look the future square in the eye.

There’s a good reason for that: it’s all part of the divine plan.  To be sure, the disciples and all the other palm-wavers that first Palm Sunday had a much different plan in mind – one that involved political revolution and making Jesus their king in an earthly sense. But the divine plan was different, because Jesus knew even as He rode upon the prophesied donkey that this was a wave of support and optimism that wouldn’t last very long. Most of the cheering horde were fair-weather fans, who turned out to greet Him when He was ahead in the political polls, but were nowhere to be found when He was tossed in jail and executed a week later. If they’d known what the divine plan was, they probably would have stayed home and read the paper on Palm Sunday.

But the purpose of the Triumphal Entry and the trying times that followed wasn’t to weed out the ambivalent would-be disciples. The purpose of the events of Holy Week, which include so many highs and lows that by the end it’s hard to know which way is up and which is down, the purpose of all those events was to do what had to be done. Jesus was the Incarnation of the costly grace of which Bonhoeffer spoke: the grace that costs a man his life, and also gives the only true life.  Jesus endured the hardships that Gandhi had predicted, for the sake of the dream that King described. He took the spittle on his face, the lashes on his back, the nails in his hands and feet, all for the sake of humanity, as Romero exhorted the Church to do.

He did all of that because it had to be done so that you and I and every person who’s ever lived could have life. Real life. Eternal life.  The life that people have risked everything to find, and given their own lives so that others could have it.  The life that the great heroes of the faith, like the ones mentioned this morning, preached about and protested for and ultimately died for. 

And that’s what Jesus asks of every one of us, too.  For if Palm Sunday were just about a big party at the entrance to Jerusalem, when we shouted and sang and walked from here to there and went home feeling quite pleased with ourselves, then it wouldn’t mean much, and it wouldn’t ask much of us. Everybody loves a celebration. Everybody’s on your side when things are looking up, and you’re the favorite.

But Palm Sunday is about much more than that.  It’s about divine expectations not meeting up with human expectations. It’s about God’s ways not being comfortable, because they have a lot more to do with the Way of the Cross than with the Triumphal Entry.  It’s about God saying to us that true faith asks us to risk rejoicing even when we know the celebration is temporary, and asks us to be willing to give up our lives if it comes to that, because it very well might.

And Palm Sunday is also about the future.  Not the bleak future that goes by names like Gethsemane and Golgotha, or the hopeful future that we call the Empty Tomb.  But the future that lies beyond that, so distant that only God can see that far, past the Good Friday darkness, past even the Easter resurrection, to the new life in Christ that awaits all of us, when Jesus returns to this earth, and enters in triumph never to leave, never to be defeated.   But in order to get there, we must go through the present. We must wave our palms and risk raising our hopes in this moment, even as the disciples did so long ago. And we must walk through each of the events of Holy Week, taking them one by one, feeling what there is to be felt, not looking ahead.

And when Easter arrives, then we can sing festival hymns and smell the flowers and say words we haven’t been able to say in a while.  But when we get there, we might be tempted to mute our celebration. To hedge our bets, and play it safe. After all, just a week before we were here, whooping it up at the Triumphal Entry, and look what happened after that.  Look where all that got us.

But we must celebrate when that day comes. Celebrate like there’s no tomorrow, because there might not be.  Or tomorrow might not look all that rosy. Because that’s where faith comes in – that we dare to rejoice even when the future is uncertain, trusting that the divine plan may be hidden from us, but not from God. We don’t need to cast wary glances over our shoulders. We don’t need to worry about the future. It’s in God’s hands, with all of its joys and trials.  All we need to do is have faith.

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