The Kingdom
Palm Sunday is tomorrow. I know we now call it Passion Sunday, or The Sunday of the Passion, or Palm/Passion Sunday. (No doubt there are other variants as well.) And I understand the reasons for the change. When attendance at Holy Week services dropped off, the folks who guard our worship feared that most Christians would move from the triumph of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem to the joy of Easter with no experience of the cross.
So it all makes sense to me. But it will still always be Palm Sunday to me. And I will never forget the excitement I experienced as a child as the palms were distributed and we prepared to march around the sanctuary waving our palms accompanied by hymns and song.
I wonder if that’s what it was like for the first crowds who welcomed Jesus. Actually, I’m fairly certain it was far more exciting, as many had probably heard Jesus teach or watched him heal or feed or comfort. Those who had no first hand experience of Jesus had probably heard the stories of others and came with excitement. What did they look for on that day so long ago? A prophet? Yes, but more than a prophet. A king? Perhaps, though they had no idea what kind of king.
I think they wanted a taste of heaven, a palpable feeling of the kingdom of God they’d heard him talk about. A break from the dismal routine, a sense that life mattered and that there was something beyond what they could see and hear, a relief to misery, healing for what was broken, hope to replace discouragement…and more.
The poem below is by Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. Named “The Kingdom,” it catches something, I think, of what those crowds longer for so long ago…and we still crave today.
The Kingdom
It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
R. S. Thomas, “The Kingdom,” from Collected Poems, 1945-1990.
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