Scripture Reflections for Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion
Year A, Lectionary 38
We are always journeying with Jesus but we are either the crowd praising Christ as he enters Jerusalem or the crowd chanting to crucify God. We're moving with Christ to Calvary either as bystanders from afar or helping carry his cross, like Simon the Cyrenian. Every day we're playing out the Passion story from Palm Sunday but we decide if we're with Christ or not.
Hate feeling lost on Sundays at church? Searching for a better explanation of the Bible than what you hear from your pastor's sermon? Check out the following collection of audio, video, and text commentaries from various Christian experts for a better understanding of today's scripture that deal with: Accompany • Barabbas • Bethphage • Blame • Borrow • Care • Choice • Community • Covenant • Cross • Crowd • Death • Disciple • Disturb • Division • Donkey • Eucharist • Exodus • Exultation • Fear • Follow • Forsaken • Gethsemane • Grace • Happiness • Holy • Humility • Identity • Isaiah • Joseph • Journey • Judas • Kingdom • Liberation • Love • Matthew • Palm • Passion • Passover • Peace • Peter • Praise • Prayer • Prophecy • Recognize • Relationship • Restoration • Resurrection • Sin • Suffering • Todah • Trial • Trinity • Wait •
“What a paradox. He is the Lord, he is the master, he is the King of kings, he is God yet he has to borrow a donkey to ride on. This is a rare combination of divinity and dependence, of possession and poverty. He has nothing of his own yet he owns all.”
“This is the most important thing about the donkey: I am the donkey. In the story you are the donkey. I am the donkey. I'm the one called to carry Christ into the city.”
“So Paul's writing to this church at Philippi and what does he do? In one breath he both upholds Jewish monotheism, right, by quoting Isaiah 45 and at the same time makes clear that, implicitly, he doesn't say it, that Jesus is Lord and, who's not lord? Caesar.”
“Jesus's name literally means in Hebrew 'the Lord saves.' So the name of Jesus is very powerful, it tells you both who he is and what he's come to do, it reveals his identity and it reveals his mission”
“Humility means to be grounded, to be grounded. God is certainly humbling us at this time and we're called to keep our eyes fixed on that humble Jesus who takes up that cross and embraces it and walks these days that we know lead to victory”
“The cross looks like defeat but it is salvation unfolding. Silence feels like absence but it is God acting in the deepest way...God is already working behind the scenes in ways you cannot yet see.”
“Are we going with him all the way? Will you follow Jesus into a tomb?”
“in certain manuscripts of Matthew it says that Barabbas first name was Jesus...and which one does the crowds pick? They pick the false 'son of the father,' they pick Jesus Barabbas instead of Jesus the Son of God.”
“Just as Joseph was exalted to the right hand of Pharaoh to save the whole known world through the gift of wheat, so Christ, the new Joseph, is betrayed by Judas but it's precisely by means of that betrayal that he's going to save...the whole world through the gift of the Eucharist”
“sometimes God saves us from troubles, other times God saves us through the troubles. Sometimes God calms the storm, other times God allows the storm to continue while he calms down his child”
“This image then, a crucified dying God, unsettles us and disturbs us...for if our God so suffers, is so exposed to the brutality and power of this world, what shall become of us?”
“Judas in this version of the gospel tried to give the money back. Tried to erase a wrong that he knew he could not erase. But the sad thing is he went running back to...those who could do nothing to restore but only continue to destroy.”
“Our penchant for happy endings and our inattention to the sorrows of history can lead us to believe that Christ's resurrection softens the blow of the tragedies that preceded it, as if knowing how the story ends now somehow retroactively makes the unsettling suspense and the unraveled lives of Jesus's followers any less real”
“the cross always meets us at the intersection of the Father's mercy and the Father's justice”
“What Matthew makes clear is that true recognition of who Jesus is comes only at the cross...It comes when Jesus is stripped of power, mocked, and executed.”
“I love Palm Sunday. I love the waving of palms. It is easy to wave palms, it is harder to carry a cross.”
“So I think Christian peace is less about the absence of violence and more about taking the prophetic stance to say violence and oppression is not of God”
“if you've ever felt like God has forsaken you, always remember that Jesus knows what that's like. He experiences that in his human nature on the cross but he also cries out to God with Psalm 22 which is the psalm that tells us God doesn't abandon his righteous ones”
“he's also the new Joseph. He is the innocent son who's righteous blood is going to be poured out, who's going to be betrayed unto death so that all of his brothers, in this case the disciples, so that they and the whole world might be saved, right. Not from famine and starvation like at the time of Joseph in Egypt but from sin and death itself.”
“when the crowds welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem he too is a king coming into the city of Jerusalem and he too is going to go up to the altar to offer sacrifice but it's not the altar of sacrifice in the temple, it's the altar of the cross”
“When I judge people, when I gossip, when I get so angry I become spiteful and disparaging, when I have seen injustice and I turn the other way, I am not just there seeing my Lord being crucified, I am doing some of the crucifying myself”
“Jesus's mission was and is about deep restoration, a restoration of the human spirit, on the human race that digs deeper than any political theory or practice”
“We all fail to recognize that the call and cost of discipleship includes staying awake, being present, and keeping watch to the suffering and agony of Christ in our midst”