There are two main sections in “Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion.” Palms and Passion.
But these make a jarring contrast to each other, and most of us never notice it! Time to get things straight.
The First Main Section consists of the blessing of palms and the procession with them into church. An extra Gospel is read.
In it, Jesus enters the city Jerusalem as a king would. He rides on a colt—an animal used for the entrance of royalty into a city.* His disciples spread their cloaks over the colt’s back as they would for a sovereign. Crowds along the way smooth their robes onto the roadway and strew out palm branches, cut from the fields. Symbolically, these are to soften the pathway. They cry out, “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” even as we do in the Sanctus at every Mass. This is surely a king come among us.
At Mass a ritual procession of palms commemorates this entrance. The priest and ministers make their way to the altar.
Then begins the Second Section, the Mass itself. For its Gospel we hear the Passion Reading from Mark. We stand in silence as the soldiers ridicule Jesus’ so-called kingship, shouting in their rough voices, “here is the King of the Jews”!
They are not praising him. They are ridiculing this poor, ridiculous captive. They jam a mocking “kingly” crown on his head, and they say in effect what the condemned monarch in Shakespeare’s Richard II said: “Farewell King!” They wrap a fake purple robe around his wounds—again, the color reserved for kings. They cackle like clowns and spit on him.
What a “kingdom of God” this had turned out to be. The two contrasting sections of Sunday’s mass show the great irony to us.
Why would the King of Kings allow all this to happen?
Look to the First Reading.
I have not rebelled, have not turned back; I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who tore out my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting. (Is 50:5)
These words, actually written many centuries before Jesus, represent a passive surrender. Is it a kingly action, this passive surrender? You or I would have shouted, “my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” The Responsorial Psalm says exactly these words, and Jesus too will say them from the cross.
Are they the words of a king?
The Second Reading answers this question with the famous passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, Chapter 2, stating that Jesus did not regard being in the form of God as something to cling to—for safety or honor or whatever other reason. As the greatest king of all, he was able to empty himself out, to become like a slave, obedient even to death on the cross.
Isn’t this the complete opposite of kingliness as we think of it. Isn’t it a mockery of kingship?
No. It is the true basis of leadership, even though we do not see it very often in today’s world. Serve the people, no matter what. Pull a kingdom together, making it safe, a place of abundance. Jesus, the true leader, lets go of everything in allegiance to God and in service of the people.
Let us be still this Sunday and listen.
