Palm Sunday extremes: The dangers of shrinking God...

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, a time to reflect on the extremes within us.

The same crowd who greet Jesus as King and Lord and sing “Hosanna!” shout “Crucify Him!” barely a week later. It is a reminder to us all of the potential for both good and evil present within our hearts… just because we are crying out hosanna in this moment does not mean that we may not fall and find ourselves crucifying Him in the next… Palm Sunday in its two Gospel passages sobers us… and gives us a vision of human reality, our reality. Beginning in joy and ending in sorrow it reminds us what happens when we try and shrink God, try and manipulate Him into what we want Him to be, or even worse into what we want Him to want us to be. The crowds shouting Hosanna do exactly this. They are good people, God fearing people even, and that may be their problem; they fear but they do not love. Love expands our understanding, fear shrinks it. In their fear and anger their understanding is limited and so they want God to submit to them, to follow their plan. They want Jesus to be their conquering Messiah, a warlord who raises an army and frees the chosen people from their Roman overlords. They don’t want what God wants to give; not a warlord Messiah but a suffering servant who frees, not just a city or a people from physical domination and slavery, but the whole cosmos from the slavery of sin and evil; They do not want it, but they receive not a king upon a throne, but a lamb upon a cross. 

Yes, “Hosanna!” can turn to “Crucify!” so easily, so quickly. It can do that in my heart, in your heart too. Anytime we try and shrink or constrain God to our plans, our way of thinking, or our agendas, no matter how worthy or good they seem to be, this is what happens… 

So what is our way out of this mess? Jesus shows us… In all of the chaos of palms and processions He is simply Himself, silent, still, present. He submits to the Will of the Father and empties Himself so that we may be filled… In the house of the High Priest, before Pilate and even on the Cross He is simply following the will of the Father and so is serene, secure, still. He is the still-point of pure love around which the world, the cosmos turns and in His stillness He opens for us an ever expanding vision of God, an ever expanding vision of Love. 

Let our Holy Week begin and be blessed by uniting ourselves with the Stillness of the Saviour and allow Him to call us to the simple acceptance of the will of the Father for us whatever it may be, the divine vision for us that never shrinks us to shout “Crucify!” but always gives us an ever-expanding vision of Love that causes us to sing “Hosanna!” We may not even know what it is for us in our lives as yet, but we can be certain that as long as we allow Christ to be the still centre of our being we will pass into the flow of the Divine Will, into the flow of Love.

(Pic is by James Tissot)