Sermon for Palm Sunday 5th April 2020: Matthew 21, 1-9. (also read Isaiah 50, 4-9 and Zechariah 9, 9-12).

Fr Leonard Doolan  Kolonaki, Athens

 

Some people like to keep a diary. I understand that Queen Elizabeth II keeps a daily diary. How interesting would that be to read, if it is ever published in the future. Keeping a diary is such a brilliant idea in marking all the significant events or people in your life. It is such a brilliant idea, I wish that I had done it!

 

Keeping a diary, or in its more contemporary form nowadays, a journal, has become a common feature in the life of those exploring the possibility of being ordained or being licensed to an authorized ministry like Reader ministry.

 

It is a solid base for recording events, people, reactions, reflections, and emotions. Journalling is an effective tool for any serious personal development. It records information, contributes to formation, and hopefully, by God’s grace, results in some form of transformation. Any Christian could do this very fruitfully.

 

Thankfully, ‘journal keeping’ also gives us insights into the past, especially when the journal holds valuable information that connects with events years, decades, even centuries later. Such a journal is illuminatory.

Such is the case with the travel journal of Spanish woman called Egeria. During an eastern pilgrimage Egeria spent Lent, Holy Week and Easter in Jerusalem in the year 384AD in the latter years of the episcopate of the great St. Cyril of Jerusalem. Mercifully for us, she keeps a journal of the practices in that city, and even more mercifully for us we still have access to the text, so we have a journal type insight into how all of this looked almost 1700 years ago. Through the prism of Egeria’s journal in 384 in the city of Jerusalem we can connect with the Jerusalem into which Jesus entered on this day we call Palm Sunday, the first day of the Great or Holy Week, and equally connect with our liturgical practices in our own age.

 

In her Palm Sunday entry, Egeria informs us that before the Christians of Jerusalem process with palm branches, the faithful gather at the church of the Eleona. This word is rooted in the Greek word for an olive, and of course is the origin of the ancient words of the Liturgy ‘Kyrie, eleison’. A literal translation of this phrase might be something like, ‘Lord pour your olive oil over us’ – oil being the ancient element for healing wounds. It has come to mean spiritual healing or reconciliation.

 

So they meet at the ancient church of the Eleona built under the building programme of Empress St. Helena some 40 years previous, before processing down through the Mount of Olives to enter the city. As they process they shout or sing ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’.

 

At this point I want to leave the journal of Egeria temporarily, and turn to the events in St. Matthew’s gospel. Jesus is entering this same city that Egeria entered over 300 years later, and the people who greet him shout out ‘Hosanna!’

 

What do we think of this? ‘Three cheers for Jesus! Hip hip…hooray’. Well no in fact. Quite the opposite. The people shout out hoshi-anna in Hebrew, which means ‘Save us, we pray’. We might say, ‘have pity on us’, ‘have mercy on us and reconcile us’. In other words it is more a word of repentance and cry for forgiveness than a shout of joy. As a Hebrew word it has strong connections with the Feast of Tabernacles or the ‘Days of Forgiveness’.

 

Back in the journal of Egeria we read that the people move from the Eleona (the Church of Forgiveness) to the gateway into Jerusalem with the shout of Hosanna – ‘save us’. This translation offers a different nuance to what is happening in the event recorded by St. Matthew, and which we focus on today, Palm Sunday.

 

How does Jesus respond to the urgent appeal of the people? Where are they to find the mercy? How can they be saved? What will Jesus do? The expectations must have been high among those who knew Jesus. Many had already acknowledged him as Messiah, and the scriptures were full of descriptions of how things would be in a messianic age. God’s people would be free; justice, mercy and peace would prevail. God would be with his people and the people would be one with God. What did they expect, and what would he do.

 

The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke supply the same detail. In saving the people I suppose we could say Jesus could have made one of two choices as he entered this gate. He could have turned right and marched with his supporters towards the Antonia fortress, a symbol of the earthly power of an invasive imperialist force, the Romans; instead he turns left and proceeds towards the temple where he drives out all those that pollute the holy presence of God.

 

Many would have been disappointed by his choice but ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’. The focus is on the divine mission of Christ and the catharsis of the holy which had been contaminated by the infection of wickedness, human avarice and the distortion of true religion. Jesus goes to the very heart of the human problem – the problem of human pride and arrogance. We are immediately taken into the sphere of the Garden of Eden and human choice; to the Tower of Babel and mankind’s temptation to think that he is superior to God; the Creator made subject to the Creature! This cannot be the right way, and humanity is reminded of its own errors time after time, and annually each Palm Sunday is a sharp reminder to put things in the right perspective and order.

 

We are obsessed with power, possession, global trade, macro-economics, power mad politicians, even mad politicians, who bully others and disregard human dignity and the sacredness of our very existence together. The real power though, lies elsewhere, and we must in this Holy Week re-learn where that power resides. Christ who weeps for his friend Lazarus is also the Christ who raises him from the dead. Christ is fully man, and Christ is fully God – this is how we have formulated this truth – and so it is to Christ that we look during these holy days.

 

I was struck by a phrase I heard on a religious programme on the radio the other day. The phrase is this, ‘the power of power not exercised’. Is not this a summation of God in Christ as he journeys through the gates of the city of Jerusalem; journeys to ‘sanitize’ the temple; journeys ultimately to the cross, that place where man is reconciled to God in this supreme paradigm of ‘the power of power not exercised’.

 

We are rightly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, and some are even obsessed and neurotic about it. It is tragic and hopefully we will learn much during and the other side of it. But this week we must not let the virus distract us from journeying with Christ, who is God-with-us, observing the diary entries of this Holy Week, and being renewed with faith, and hope, and love, for the world needs these three things more than ever before.