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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 4, 2004
Palm Sunday
We enter Holy Week on a beautiful false dawn of victory -- our Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem humble, and mounted on an ass acclaimed by the people who throw garments and palm branches into the street before him shouting "Hosanna!" and "Blessed be he!" He enters the Temple precinct overturning the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons -- where the blind and lame come to him to be cured and the children cry out "in perfect praise". And the priests were indignant. The machinations begin towards the events of Good Friday and the true dawn of the Resurrection. "Peace I leave with you; my own peace I give -- not as the world gives said he. The peace which passeth all understanding." Through twenty more centuries we have taken our fill of the kind of peace the world gives in ceasefires and remissions from plague and war. Through the last thirteen centuries Jerusalem itself has alternatively slept and seethed below the platform of her ancient Temple mount marked at the peak of the concealed mount Moriah by the dazzling Dome of the Rock with its inscriptions in Arabic proclaiming: "Know ye that God has no Son." The monks and priests of several rival Christian denominations jealously contest among themselves to celebrate the mysteries of our faith in the grim interior of the Holy Sepulchre which marks the peak of Golgotha; while Jews and Muslims dispute control of the streets around them. There in the saddle of Jerusalem between the hill that carries the Temple and the hill that carries the Cross is the reality of a world that goes about its business never more innocently employed than in making money nor more guiltily than in abortions murders theft robbery false witness rape and rapine. Not that Jerusalem is worse than any other earthly city or that its Christians are any better than the adepts of other faiths for I am writing about the symbolic Jerusalem that breathes in the body of the fleshly one. What I have described is simply how things are in a world that contains few saints and a consensus of sinners; the earthly Jerusalem below the heavenly one of Scripture. We have heard each of us in moments from the crowd the still small voice of God speaking to us. Then we have gone off to make our own arrangements in the din of the world. Nothing better displays our insolence than the anger in the faces at any "peace demonstration" or in our hearts as we review our grievances against the various "others" who afflict our lives. And we have to deal with the world daily even if we have fled to some remote retreat. It is still there so long as we are breathing and we take it with us wherever we have gone. The best we can ever do under our own limited powers is to make enough distance to clear our heads for prayer. Sufficient unto the day: for in the original the "ur-prayer" taught by Christ to his disciples we beg only for what will get us through the day. It is useful to think very deeply on each line of this Lord's Prayer: on its appeal for bread for forgiveness of our sins for the ability to forgive for relief from temptation and delivery from evil; prefaced by an invocation of God in his glory and a submission to his will. Or in the words of a Psalm expecta Dominum viriliter age / et confortetur cor tuum et sustine Dominum . In the English of King James Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, / and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord. (This is a fine translation but misses the "be a man!" aspect of "viriliter".) The point is lost on most contemporary Christians to say nothing of the rest. But it is something that comes to many through grace: the mysterious relation between "being a man" and "waiting on the Lord". Hope is towards a victory which we know cannot be achieved by our own efforts but nevertheless requires us to act our part. And our peace which is not the world's peace is hidden inside our hope. Not in an easy victory but in the final triumph of salvation is the peace that this world can never give. On Palm Sunday we are again reminded that the road to victory lies through and not around the Cross. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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