Palm Sunday is a Rehearsal

 

In all the readings, festivities, and solemnities, many preachers choose not to preach on Palm/Passion Sunday, which is too bad because then we miss how Palm Sunday points both backwards and forwards.

Palm Sunday points backwards to Advent.  "All Glory, Laud, and Honor" is clearly THE hymn for Palm Sunday. So we probably fail to recall that we actually sang a Palm Sunday hymn during Advent.  "Prepare the Royal Highway" is clearly about Palm Sunday in its second verse: 

God’s people, see him coming:
Your own eternal king!
Palm branches strew before him!
Spread garments! Shout and sing!
God’s promise will not fail you!
No more shall doubt assail you!
Hosanna to the Lord,
For he fulfills God’s Word!

The coming of Jesus at Christmas is only fulfilled by the coming of Jesus on Palm Sunday. The gates of Jerusalem that we longed to be lifted up in Advent (Psalm 24) are lifted up now as Jesus enters on a donkey.

Palm Sunday also points forwards. Afterall, the saints in Heaven worship the Lamb with palm branches in their hands (Revelation 7):

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!" And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen."

Palm Sunday is remembrance yes, but also rehearsal for that great and glorious hymn.

And as if to underline the point, the Hosannas of Palm Sunday are woven into our everyday communion liturgy. When we sing the Sanctus during communion, we are singing a mash-up of two Scriptures:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory. (Isaiah 6, the hymn of the angels in the Temple)
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest. (all the Gospels have the people singing this on Jesus’ entrance to Jerusalem)

Every Sunday, dear people, is a little Palm Sunday. We cry out in praise to the One who has come and who is coming. In one hymn, we cast our memories back to the mighty acts of the Risen One and forward to the coming, unveiled redemption that is yet to come.

 

Image: Hochhalter, Cara B.. Palm Sunday: Even the Stones, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59018 [retrieved March 25, 2024]. Original source: Cara B. Hochhalter.