Palm Sunday 2011 Notes
As a kid, I did not appreciate parades. My best guess is that TV exposure ruined them for me. Our biggest procession is moving people to sporting events with tailgate parties.  Maybe three parades or processions entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. One was the one for Jesus; it picks up on a declaration of peace with the donkey; one was a grand religious procession to ascend the steps of the the massive project of enlarging the temple precincts to about 35 acres, and one was a military parade of Roman soldiers and horses coming in to buttress troops in the garrison to get it up to maybe 6,000 troops. Passover had obvious political message, so trouble was always at hand.

Matthew wants to get clear on the reference to Zechariah 9, so he ignores the poetic doubling and has 2 animals. At the same time, he feels the freedom to omit the lines about triumphant and victorious in Zechariah to underscore his point about the peaceful leadership of Jesus,(see Gen. 49:11) but we are getting some royal trappings for the Prince of Peace. Already the gospels are struggling to rework some of the expectations of the messiah as a political power with the reality of Jesus and the early church as under oppression. Even at this moment of triumph, some serious misunderstandings of the mission of Jesus persist, and they may play a hand in his execution by means of disappointed expectations. (I find the colt sequence funny. Why does it sound like a stewardship campaign to me?)

Hosanna means save us in a sense of acclamation but also its root meaning persists. It may have been included in prayers at festivals, including Passover.  In this instance the crowd doe not know the import of what they are saying. the cheers of the crowd will be replaced by the jeers of another crowd within the week. We are told that the city was shaken. This is a similar reaction to the news of the Magi, but the word is related to seismic, more than stirring up but really shaken as by an earthquake.

I can think of few stories that show how a life can go from triumph to tragedy so quickly as this one. Some elements of the church have it quite right when they burn the palms to form the ashes for Ash Wednesday to open the next season of Lent. This is not only a prelude to Easter, but it intensifies the pain of the garden and Good Friday coming so close to this scene of acclamation.In its way, it's like watching scenes of a happy wedding video right before being served with divorce papers.

Palm Sunday moments do not last. We cannot expect life to have only the peak experiences of acclamation. In America, Updike's Rabbit series, or the play A Championship Season, being revived on Broadway, captured the pain of peaking too soon as a high school athlete and spending the rest of one's life disappointed that nothing comes close.
At the same time, we are fickle, unstable,  and prone to shift sides, just as crowds are. We are much quicker to let cheers decay into crucify, but rarely are we quick to reverse the process. We nurture keeping someone down more than we encourage building back up.

Cry hosanna for good things:the signs of spring, for improving economy, for rebuilding efforts,for a child's first steps, medicines that save lives daily, for Christ the Lord, for communion
Cry Hosanna for all the intractable, big issues that afflict us: climate change and intractable partisan strife, cancer and memory loss, for the need for the cross
Imagine a parade of heaven, greeting you every day with encouragement, cheering you when you succeed.