Monthly Message | March

“The crowds that went ahead of [Jesus] and that followed were shouting, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!’ ” — Matthew 21:9 (NRSVUE)

When I was a child growing up in the church, the week before Easter was always Palm Sunday. There was no Palm/Passion Sunday, as many churches now have where the worship begins with remembering and reflecting on Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday) and then, toward the middle of the service, a version of Jesus’s passion is read.

Many think the reason churches added the Passion to Palm Sunday was because few people attended the worship services on Maundy Thursday (remembering Jesus’s arrest and his Last Supper) and Good Friday (Jesus’s death on the cross). People had a celebratory service on Palm Sunday with shouts of “Hosanna!” and a celebratory service on Easter Sunday with shouts of “He is risen!” without hearing and reflecting on what happened in between. In actuality, there are some historical traditions for reading the Passion of Jesus on Palm Sunday.

Since I have been at St. Mark, we have had several different services on Palm Sunday. We had a service that was just Palm Sunday. We have had a few Palm/Passion Sundays. We had one where we heard and reflected on Jesus’s actions from Palm Sunday to Wednesday evening of Holy Week, taking us to Maundy Thursday, where things would pick up at that worship service.

For this year’s Palm Sunday service, on March 29, the Worship and Music Committee decided to have a Palm Sunday service. While we won’t do a reading of Jesus’s Passion, the service, I pray, will still help you and anyone prepare to reflect on the events that are to happen to Jesus during that Holy Week.

While attendance may not be the reason churches do Palm/Passion Sunday, I would like to use this space to invite and highly encourage you to attend the Maundy Thursday service on April 2 and Good Friday service on April 3, each start at 7pm. I know for me, before I became a pastor, those services were the most emotional and “beautiful” services I attended. Not “beautiful” as most may think, but “beautiful” because amid all the anguish and horrors that we are called to remember — Jesus’s arrest and torture, his being put to death by being nailed to a cross — there is the beauty of Jesus’s using the cross to show his unending love for us. There is beauty in sharing in the Lord’s Supper on the night we remember when it happened. There is beauty in how Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, including Judas. There is beauty in hearing Jesus give the new commandment to his disciples to love one another. There is so much beauty and indescribable love in a time of ugliness, chaos, and fear. I wonder if that is needed now.

So if you are able, come to the worships on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and have them be a time for you to just open your heart to hearing, again, how God so loves you, loves the world — and, more than 2,000 years ago, this is the way God showed that unending love.

Pastor David