Palm Sunday Scripture Readings Holy Week begins with Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. It ends in defeat and death. What happened there in the middle? Remember the advertising jingle from the once-popular chain of clothing stores? “Fall into the Gap”? That’s exactly what’s happening to us right here and now. We’ve fallen into the gap, and it’s not fun to fall into it. On the surface, it might look like a gap between what we’ve asked for and what we receive, but it’s not as simple as all that. It’s the gap between our expectations and the answers to our prayers. Some people say that God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is no. I don’t agree. Jesus never said that… in fact, he said the opposite. However, he also never said that God would answer our prayer according to our expectations. In fact, I would dare to say that God’s answer to prayer is never what we expect it to be. Chew on that a moment because that’s the gap, and that’s the key to understanding not only today’s liturgy, but the whole of God’s relationship with humankind. Consider the gospel reading we just heard. Every element speaks to us. Jesus and his disciples approached Jerusalem. This was Jesus’s third entry into Jerusalem since his mission began. It was a visit fraught with anxiety. Their enemies were openly hunting them. The disciples even spoke about going to Jerusalem to die with him. [John 11:16] They arrived at Passover time, when the city was crowded with tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of visitors. The air was thick with anticipation—not only among the disciples, but among the populace as well. Even Pontius Pilate had come up to the Praetorium from his headquarters at Caesarea to head off any possibility of trouble. Jesus’s notoriety was at an all-time high, and many were expecting that, if he were to show up in Jerusalem, it would be as Messiah, inaugurating his kingdom in the city of David, his ancestor. As we are well aware, that was precisely what was happening, except the reality had little to do with their expectations. The expectation was that the Messiah who would wrest control of Jerusalem and Judea from the Romans would arrive as Roman conquerors did: on a white war horse at the head of his troops. What they got was, to say the least, disappointing. The crowds were shouting, “Hosanna! Hosanna to the Son of David,” which was a desperate petition: “Save us, we pray, son of David!” They were not the exclamations of victory and rejoicing they sounded like. We see more of the whole picture than those people did, but just imagine what they thought when they saw Jesus coming into town on a donkey. The whole concept of triumph and victory gets turned on its head. Not only are their messianic expectations disappointed, but they’re called into question. What’s going on here, anyway? Only later did the disciples realize that this was foretold by Zechariah, “Behold your king comes to you riding on an ass.” And so, at that point, many of the people fell into the gap. The people of Jerusalem have no corner on that market. On the contrary, all of us, from time to time, fall into the gap. It’s the gap that exists between our expectations of what God’s answer to our prayers will be and what God actually delivers. What happens to us in that gap? What are our reactions to discovering God’s apparent silence and neglect? Don’t we become discouraged? have our trust in God shaken? feel abandoned? even despair? Yes, like petulant children, we pout and stomp our feet. We snarl, “I hate you.” We turn against the one we’d trusted to take care of things for us. Nelson Mandela prayed for freedom. What he got was twenty-seven years in a prison cell on Robben Island. From inside that gap—that unimaginable distance between the prayer and its answer—he became the only person capable of leading a nation out of apartheid without vengeance, without bitterness, without burning everything down. The gap wasn’t the detour. It was the preparation. You’re about to hear several readings that could help us find our way through the gap. The first reading is from the second of the four Servant Songs from Isaiah. It carries a shockingly powerful message: victory and salvation look and feel a whole lot different from what we thought they’d be. Winning masquerades as loss, strength looks like weakness, and prestige looks like contempt. Then we hear our psalm and echoes of our plaintive cry when we experience the depth and breadth of that gap: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The temptation—the knee-jerk reaction when descending into the gap is despair. It’s only later, as we move through life and sing the psalm all the way through, that we realize and recognize that our victory over the forces of destruction was there all along. And, in fact, despair was and is the prerequisite for our recognizing the victory. Yet, Jesus did not, in fact, despair. He challenged those who were tempted to follow the psalm through to the end… to victory and triumph. Then, finally, the reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, quoting an even more ancient Christian hymn, we call the Kenotic Hymn, The Hymn of Emptying. Lest we think that we’ve been singled out to descend into the gap, the hymn tells us that God is in the gap. Equality with God is not something to be held on to. It requires emptying—giving up everything, even life itself. In Greek, the word is ἐκένωσεν (ekenōsen). Oddly enough, when Saint John in his gospel wrote about the Incarnation, he used a very similar word to describe it: in Greek, ἐσκένωσεν (eskenosen), which means to pitch a tent [among us]. To be fully incarnated (eskenōsen), God had to empty himself (ekenōsen), giving up everything—even life itself. The gospels are […]
