Make Some Noise

I think I’ve always felt a little conflicted about Palm Sunday.

Holy Week, the one time in the story of Jesus when you can actually follow him day-to-day for seven days, begins with Palm Sunday, a celebration of his arrival in Jerusalem. Things turn darker pretty quickly before the celebration of the resurrection the following Sunday. And if you don’t follow the story through the week, it can easily feel just like that, celebration to celebration. Read the story.

But, back to Palm Sunday.

That story’s covered in all four gospels, with some varying details, but basically I think we tend to tell it in a similar fashion to the Christmas story: we conflate the four stories into one basic narrative. Jesus’ disciples get him a colt, the foal of a donkey, from town. He rides it into Jerusalem from the direction of the Mount of Olives. That fulfils an ancient prophecy from Zechariah that the Messiah will arrive this way. The crowd cheers for Jesus, shouting hosanna and waiving branches from palm trees, which they also throw on the ground in front of him along with their cloaks to form a “red carpet” suitable for a king. The story is often titled “Jesus’ Triumphal Entry Into Jerusalem.”

When I was a kid, growing up in a “high church” anglican setting, it was a solemn and serious occasion. We processed around the cathedral singing hymns and carrying our huge palm branches on our shoulders. As I got older and worked as a musician in churches, I remember how often the procession became a parade, an opportunity to connect the story to children by giving them palms to wave and songs to sing and hosannas to shout. It was busy and noisy, a great party. Jesus arrives in triumph, after all.

Later, I began looking at the stories more closely. And one of these is not like the others.

The way the Gospel of Luke tells it may surprise you. It’ll certainly disappoint you if you’re looking for palm branches and hosannas, the mainstays of the event, because there aren’t any.

The way Luke tells it, Jesus sends disciples for the donkey and he rides it in from the Mount of Olives, but it’s all very much planned that way. It’s not coincidental that it fulfills the prophecy, Jesus sets it up to be seen that way. And yes, “the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen,” but there are no hosannas. There’s plenty of cloaks to make a carpet, but no palm branches and, most important of all, the Temple authorities, the Pharisees, are on hand and demand that Jesus tell his follows to cut it out. But Jesus says that “if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

The stones would shout out. 

I wonder if Luke sees this less as a celebration, a triumph, and more a pointed reminder of what Jesus has really been about: healing and restoring the lost and broken, shouting down injustice and speaking up for the marginalized who’ve lost their voice, crying out for the grieving and challenging the status quo, challenging what the pharisees and oppressive rulers have - and haven’t - done. These are “the deeds of power” the crowd is shouting about.

Voices raised against oppression, injustice, hate, cruelty and indifference will not be silenced. These voices make change happen. Follow Jesus lead and use your voice. Don’t leave it to the stones.