Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim

and the war horse from Jerusalem;

and the battle bow shall be cut off,

and he shall command peace to the nations;

his dominion shall be from sea to sea,

and from the River to the ends of the earth.

As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;

today I declare that I will restore to you double.”

Zechariah 9, Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, the Reading, Morning Prayer, the Daily Office Book, Year One

Peace. Peace of heart. Peace of mind. Peace as our way into the world. Peace as our way through the world. Rejoice in this! Live in this! Compassion is the way of our God, which makes us prisoners of hope. Our hearts return again and again into our stronghold, the heart of God, in silence and in peace, and we are restored and even more.

We enter this Holy Week at once in the joy of our Messiah’s hope, and the promise of his peace, and then again we will face the tribulation of Jesus’ Passion, the tribulation God came to share with us in Jesus, not in supernatural terms beyond us as the mysterious Spirit beyond the veil of our world, but in Jesus who came to suffer death, our death, not even the quiet death of old age, but to suffer all human abuse and to die a senseless violent death, cut from the prime of his life. Yet as he lives and dies to the terms of human mortality, in his being tortured, in his being nailed to a cross, he does so in his terms, in peace, love and the compassion which promises paradise to a repentant killer by his side, and declares forgiveness to the humanity whose cruelty hung him and murdered him on the tree. In this peace of Jesus, in this compassion of Jesus, is the power of his Resurrection, God’s answer to the injustice, tyranny and death which marks the human life on earth; love does overcome and life is victorious over death. Are we willing to be prisoners of hope, to be vulnerable, to be compassionate, and to lovingly and peacefully take up our own fragile cross towards the promise of new life and new peace in the Resurrected Christ? It is my hope that we are able, in the peace of confidence, to again surrender and die to those things which restrain us from the fullness of our realization in God, the fullness of our humanity exemplified through Jesus, all to the joy of our resurrection, in new life and our new creation, fostered in God's ever-present offering of compassion. This week take to the place where life and death embrace each other as one in the mysterious dance of recreation, join in the dance, feel its rhythmic sway and pulse, to the eternal song of joy.

Have a blessed Holy Week to the joy of our Lord and Creator!

Loving God, grant us this Holy Week the wisdom and courage to see the truth of ourselves and our fears, that we may offer them up to you as a sacrifice,  so that we also may take up our crosses as prisoners of hope, as Christ peacefully bore his cross as a prisoner of human cruelty: Grant us strength in the hope, that as Christ died on the cross, so too may our fears die on the cross of our bearing, by knowing the assurance of his forgiveness, in his last life’s blood and breath, we too may again joyfully share in the Resurrection of our risen Jesus,  and in the fullness of his new peace. Amen.