Our story


Palm Sunday

A brief guide to meditating on the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ According to Matthew

The liturgies and the passion narrative that make up this week are a part of the whole.  Each moment interacts with what has come before, and each moment helps to guide us toward what comes next.  In that way, these next seven days are like a sort of living poem.  Every aspect is carefully crafted.  Every nuance is specifically chosen to help tell this old, old story.

Usually, my approach to Holy Week and to Palm Sunday in particular is to invite you to look for yourself in the story.  Because this isn’t just the story of what the Jewish people did to Jesus.  More accurately, it is the story of religious power joining forces with political power to wield the only true weapon that they both can use to hang on to their power: mobs of believers and citizen rabblery.  So this story very often is, and easily could be again, our story.

With that in mind, the guiding question that I’m taking on for my own prayer and discernment this week is this: you can change where you’re going.  But you can’t change where you’ve come from.  As Christians, this story that we tell again this week is a big part of where we’ve come from.  How will it change where we’re going?

Listen to that again: This is where we’ve come from.  How will this story – this memory – change where we’re going?

I’ll ask that in a few different ways this week.  I invite you to think about it with me.  How will this story of ours change where we’re going?  As individuals?  As a church?  As members of a wider community?

You are being called into this story – to engage with it and to own it.  How might it change where you’re going?

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