Lorenzo Ghiberti: Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. One of twenty panels depicting scenes from Christ's life on the North doors of the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence.
Palm Sunday, I can never quite explain what it means to me. There is the story I grew up with, the triumphant entry into Jerusalem with the cheering crowds and the palm fronds. And yet, all that revelry turns to darkness, death, despair, and eventually new life. We don't necessarily like to think about that, but it is always there, and always a part of our lives, not solely in our religious observances. For does not religion also provide us with a path through which we attempt to understand our own lives?
Here we are. Another Palm Sunday. Another winter becoming spring. Here in Knoxville the trees are bursting into bloom, but it is a tenuous celebration, a fragile flowering. A sudden chill and glorious blossoms become limp reminders that sometimes we celebrate too much too soon. And the service that I remember as celebratory when I was a child takes on its darker meaning. How easily our loyalties and our emotions shift.
I've written before how this period of lent, of winter becoming spring has always been a period of reflection and growth for me and it has never been particularly easy. Each year I ask questions and hope for answers. But the harder I look for those answers the more slowly they seem to be forthcoming.
But of course the answers are all always already there, waiting. It is not that the answers don't come. It is that we don't look in the right places. The answers are there before we even ask the questions. God gives us the answers before we even know what we are looking for. We are not waiting for God to respond; we are waiting for ourselves to be ready to listen.
