Palm Sunday 13th April 2025 – Family Service led by John Wainwright
Welcome back John and Sue! (it’s always a 2 for 1 with the Wainwrights). It being Palm Sunday, the palm crosses were distributed upfront by our Elders – but not before we’d wished Frank Palmer a happy birthday.
John’s theme was going to be Holy Week, and he quoted that a week was a long time in politics (tell us about it!) as well as for the events of Holy Week (which to my mind involved quite a bit of politics as well). It was also about martyrdom, and as a starter, Sue Wainwright read us a passage from a hymn by Dietrich Bonhoeffer – who had been put to death for speaking out about the injustice of Nazism.
We turn to God when we are sorely pressed, we pray for help, ask for peace and bread.
We seek release from illness, guilt, and death. All people do, in faith or unbelief.
We turn to God when we are sorely pressed and find him poor, scorned without roof and bread, bowed under weight of weakness, sin, and death. Faith stands by God in his dark hour of grief.
God turns to us when we are sorely pressed, feeds our souls and bodies with His bread.
For one and all Christ gives Himself in death, through his forgiveness sin will find relief.
John wondered whether we should celebrate Jesus coming into Jerusalem and being welcomed by the crowds or reflect sombrely because we knew that Palm Sunday led to Good Friday. He thought on balance that it could be a day for rejoicing because we knew the end of the story. Interestingly, we as Protestants focused on the empty cross at the end of the week, whereas our Catholic brothers and sisters at this point would be focusing on the crucified Christ on the cross. In any event it was going to be a very traumatic week for Jesus, and Easter hadn’t come without the anguish that he suffered during that week.
We saw Jesus riding into Jerusalem on the donkey, and then the cleansing of the Temple where temple insiders were abusing the most impoverished worshippers, some of whom – like the proselytes – were not even Jewish but worshipped the same God (they were called Greeks in the Bible). They weren’t allowed to go into the inner courts. There was an outer court where such Gentiles could worship, the next court where women could worship, and then you had the inner court where the men could worship. All sorts of trading went on in the outer court, and John noted that Isaiah had looked forward to a time when there wouldn’t be trading in the Temple, when there would be justice and peace, a universal welcome, and universal praise of the One True God.
So there had been the cleansing of the temple and then on the Thursday the Last Supper, which Jesus had taken with His disciples after he’d washed their feet, adopting the role of servant. “As I have done for you, do for one another”, he’d said. And “A new commandment I give to you, love one another”.
And then later in the evening we’d come to the anguish of Gethsemane, made worse by the sleeping of the disciples. And then betrayal by one of his disciples. The arrest, trials, and trumped-up charges. The cowardice (or was it realpolitik?) of Pilate, who handed Jesus over to be crucified – an example of martyrdom which had inspired Christians, and indeed other people, down the ages.
We’d thought about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but there had been many others. And John gave us some examples of people who had suffered martyrdom in more recent times. But Jesus’s sacrifice had been much more than that. Yes, it had been a great example of heroism and courage, but in his case we as Christians believed he was unique. Nobody could completely comprehend God, but what we could do was to look at Jesus, which gave us the clearest picture that we could possibly grasp of God. In his uniqueness, Jesus could see the worst of sin and he had taken upon himself the sins of the world by reconciling human beings to a holy God.
But the day was Palm Sunday and John returned to the reading in Luke 19 (and he noted that the Gospels, like our newspapers, each presented the same story in a slightly different way, focusing on the things the writers thought were the most relevant to appeal to their particular readers – for example, Luke didn’t mention the waving of palm branches).
In Luke’s case, he’d written about Jesus setting his face towards Jerusalem and now that journey had reached its culmination. We were told that it had been arranged that Jesus would ride into Jerusalem on a young donkey (Matthew mentioned two donkeys because the colt had never yet been ridden, and it would be a comfort to the young donkey to have its mother). Jesus had said “The Master needs it now”. The Greek word used was Kurios, which means Lord, and this was the first public demonstration of Jesus’s Lordship and the Messiahship that he was claiming. It had been said in private or amongst a small group but now the time had come for people to recognize what true Messiahship was about. So he’d ridden on the donkey. There had been large crowds because it was just a few days before Passover when it had been compulsory for all men living within 20 miles of Jerusalem to come to the Passover festival. Their wives and children would have accompanied them so there would have been thousands of people in the city.
John thought they would be all reacting in different ways. Some people would have been really happy, having been made whole, mentally, physically, or emotionally, by Jesus. But then there would have been others like the Pharisees who wanted the crowds to shut up because they were worried about the reaction of the authorities like Pilate and Herod who might feel things were getting out of hand. And then there would be the enemies of Jesus who resented the fact that he was getting the crowds and they weren’t. Luke had also recorded people saying, “Glory in the highest”, which harked back to Luke’s story of the announcement by the angels about the birth of Jesus.
John concluded that it would be his prayer for this period of Holy Week that we, both as individuals and as congregations working together, would make Jesus the King of our lives and acknowledge his rightful rule in our lives. We were not to worry if we’d messed up because we had a forgiving God, a God totally filled with love. And, after all, that was really what this season of the year was particularly about.
Might we, by His grace, by the power of His Spirit, cast out self-centeredness, our resentments, our inadequacies and our frustrations before our merciful Lord, lost in wonder, love, and praise.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 