I don’t know if you remember, but back on the first Sunday of Lent about six weeks ago, we said a very long series of prayers at the beginning of the service called the Great Litany – or as my younger daughter calls them, “That time where you talked [sang] a really long time.”  Though I heard a few groans that morning when folks realized we would be praying for a long time, what I love about that Great Litany is that the litany somehow manages to encapsulate every single flaw in the human condition and the way those flaws pull us out of right relationship with God:  pride, hypocrisy, hatred, and envy; hardness of heart and sinful affections; oppression, violence, and war; and maybe the worst – dying suddenly and unprepared.

The list goes on and on, but what really gets me is how everything we started praying about in the beginning of Lent comes to the fore today in our liturgies.  I have always thought what the people do in the palm procession is where the people get things right and everything after in the Passion Narrative is where the people mess up.  But even in the Palm Narrative we mess up:  from pride in what feels like the Messiah coming to take down the powers that be, to a murderous desire to put down the oppressors that they assume Jesus will do when they shout, “Hosanna,” or “Save us,” as “Hosanna” is translated.[i]  And then we hear how the rest goes:  betrayal by loyal followers, to disciples too sleepy to keep vigil and pray, to abandoning Jesus, to mockery and violence, to conflict avoidance, hatred, and definitely a lot of hardness of heart. 

At the end of the Palm Narrative today, we are told that after the procession, Jesus goes into the temple in Jerusalem, and Jesus looks around at everything.  This may seem like a throwaway comment or a passing glance, but scholar Matt Skinner argues this is not a casual looking around at Jerusalem.  He says, “There is power in that glare.”  Jesus is setting his eyes and his heart to the work of provoking that he is about to do and he knows will lead to his death.[ii]  He is preparing for the holy, sacred work of resistance that will lead to both his demise, and ultimately to our redemption – our actual saving.  Maybe not the kind of saving we want, but the saving we need.

And that’s what brings me back to that long Great Litany from six weeks ago.  We did indeed confess a whole bunch of sins.  But you know what we also did?  We asked God to right things.  We prayed for grace to hear and receive God’s word, that God might empower us to go out in the world and share the Good News, that we might – in our several callings – serve the common good, that God might heal the brokenness in all of us and in the world.  This journey of Holy Week is not just about the despair and awfulness of our condition and the condition of the world.  This week, shockingly enough, is also about hope.  Frederick Buechner said of this day, “Despair and hope.  They travel the road to Jerusalem together, as together they travel every road we take — despair at what in our madness we are bringing down on our own heads and hope in him who travels the road with us and for us and who is the only one of us all who is not mad.”[iii] 

That is the messiness of us and of this most sacred week we now enter.  As scholar Debie Thomas writes, “I am known and held by a God who is too big for thin, one-dimensional truths — even my own, most cherished, one-dimensional truths.  I am held by a God who sticks with me even when I won’t stick with God.  A God who accepts my worship even when it is mingy, half-baked, and selfish.  A God who knows all the reasons my heart cries, ‘Save now!’ and carries those broken, strangled cries to the cross on my behalf. 

“Welcome to Holy Week.  Here we are, and here is our God.  Here are our hosannas, broken and earnest, hopeful and hungry.  Here is all that is unbearable, and all that promises to end in light brighter than we can imagine.  Blessed is the One who comes to die so that we will live.”[iv]  That journey starts today.  Your invitation is to join us everyday until we can shout our Easter praises.  Amen.       

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[i]  John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark:  Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, MN:  Liturgical Press, 2002), 322.

[ii]  Matt Skinner, as discussed in the podcast, “Sermon Brainwave:  #954: Palm/Passion Sunday – Mar. 24, 2024,” March 17, 2024, as found at https://www.workingpreacher.org/podcasts/954-palm-passion-sunday-mar-24-2024 on March 20, 2024.

[iii] As quoted by Debie Thomas, “Save Us, We Pray,” March 21, 2021, as found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2958-save-us-we-pray on March 22, 2024.

[iv] Thomas.