Palm Sunday without Crowds

With this most unusual Palm Sunday approaching, I am remembering a Palm Sunday when I was in high school. I don’t know what the connection was, but I had been asked to play timpani for the Holy Week concert of the Mission Covenant Church on 5^th Avenue in Oakland, California. The Swedish (now Evangelical) Covenant folk and the Swedish Baptist (General Conference) folk considered themselves to be kin as non-conformists from the Lutheran state church of Sweden. I grew up with Lakeside (originally First Swedish) Baptist Church in Oakland, so I’m sure my name got passed along in some comparing Holy Week plans conversation. I don’t remember the music, but I do remember the bright sunny day, the packed church, and the rousing spirit of the music. I felt honored to shine in that moment.

Now neither of those churches are what they were in the early 60s, and neither am I. This Palm Sunday will have nothing of the jostling of people that accompanied Jesus into Jerusalem. Reflecting on the lectionary readings is prompting me to probe more deeply into familiar territory that I am prone to gloss over.

By quoting Zechariah 9:9, Matthew 21:5 makes the point that the symbolism of Jesus riding on a donkey was humility. We tend to write off humble leaders as weak, but at the core of Palm Sunday is the image of the essential humility of the king. Then the lectionary Epistle reading takes us to Philippians 2:5-11. While I can’t prove it, I feel a congruence with the scholars who suggest that Paul did not write this but was quoting a hymn that his readers already knew to call them to have “the same mind … that was in Christ Jesus.” That hymn not only celebrates Jesus humility (v. 8) but invokes humility as a central trait of all who would follow him.

As I prayed through Psalms (3, 33, 63, 93, 123) this morning, the very last line (123:4) crashed right up against all of the noise surrounding contradictory responses to COVID-19, with a stark contrast with the humility of Jesus on Palm Sunday. “Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt of the proud.”