Entering Jerusalem (Palm Sunday)
Today is Palm Sunday. Probably most of you have heard of Palm Sunday, but you may not know what, exactly, Palm Sunday is. I am going to tell you the story of Palm Sunday as I learned it as a Unitarian Universalist kid. And you should know that the things I am going to tell you about happened almost 2,000 years ago. It is hard now to know exactly what happened all those years ago, but here's the story I learned it.
You may remember that I have told you stories of the rabbi named Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago. Jesus went from town to town in a land called Judea teaching about religion. Jesus wasn't exactly an official religious leader, as the Pharisees were. But many people listened to his teachings anyway -- probably because he treated everyone with respect, even people who were poor or homeless or sick. And because what he preached made so much sense -- he said religion was simple: love your God with all your heart and all your mind, and treat other people the way you would like to be treated.
Jesus did most of his teaching in the countryside, but at last he and his followers (who were called the disciples) decided they would go to Jerusalem for Passover. Just as it is now, Jerusalem was the most important city for Jews. Since Jesus and his disciples were Jewish, celebrating Passover in Jerusalem was especially meaningful.
They left the town they were in, a town called Jericho, and began to walk to Jerusalem. Remeber, there were no cars or planes or trains in those days, so they had to walk all the way. Jesus was tired. He had been teaching and preaching sermons and he was just plain worn out. As they got close to Jerusalem, he asked his disciples to see if they could find an animal for him to ride. The disciples went to a farm nearby, and borrowed a foal for Jesus.
There were browds and crowds of people on the way in to Jerusalem for Passover. Many them had seen Jesus before, and had heard his teachings about religion, and some of these people thought Jesus was the greatest religious teacher and leader around. They began to point at Jesus, and call out to him.
Meanwhile, all these people were pouring in to Jerusalem for Passover, one of the most sacred days of the year for Jews. People began to sing a hymn that seemed to fit what they were doing. They sang:
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving
And into his courts with praise.
Serve the Lord with gladness,
Come before his presence with singing.
Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord!
People were in a happy, festive mood. They gathered flowers, and picked leaves from palm trees, and carried them along. Someone started singing again:
Hosanna! Hosanna!
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,
And into his courts with praise.
Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.
All these people singing and walking into Jerusalem together! Then some of the people who thought Jesus was the greatest religious teacher and leader around began to give him flowers, and wave the palm leaves over him.
I think at this point Jesus became uncomfortable. He didn't mind that people liked him. He didn't mind that they thought that he was a good religious teacher. But the singing, and the people giving him flowers and waving palm leaves over him,-- those were the kinds of things that people did for new kings of Jerusalem, back in the olden times, hundreds of years before Jesus lived.
But in Jesus' time the Romans were the rulers of Jerusalem. It was dangerous for these people to treat Jesus like one of the kings of old. Could some of the people hope that Jesus would stand up to the Romans, or even rebel against them? Jesus knew that it was dangerous for them to even think about such things.
Jesus rode into Jerusalem with all the people waving palm fronds over him, but he was thinking about what the Romans might do. And if you want to know what Jesus did once he got into Jerusalem, if you want to know how the Romans reacted to him -- well, you'll have to wait until next week when I tell the rest of the story. For now, I've done what I promised and told you about Palm Sunday -- so now it's time to go off to Sunday school.
Licensed 2006 by Daniel Harper under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/). No commercial uses, attribution required, no derivative works.