I am thinking of starting
a campaign to bring back Palm Sunday, without the additional observance of
Passion Sunday. Palm Sunday was always one of my favorites growing up as a
preacher's kid, and it was all about the palms--and a lot of them. It was
celebratory, festive, when as child I got a chance for a hands-on worship
experience and a glimpse of what royalty could look like.
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, 'Who is this?' The crowds were saying, 'This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.'"
Lately I've been thinking about Jesus' raising of Lazarus as
the impetus for the authorities' wanting Jesus dead. It might not be that Jesus
raising someone from the dead itself causes the Jewish officials to say,
"That's it. Enough is enough," so much as that Jesus is exactly who he says he
is: the resurrection and the life.
As a John scholar, I have always been fascinated with the scribal confusion about Jesus' "I AM" statement: "I am the resurrection and the life." Some of the ancient manuscripts for the Gospel of John omit "and the life," with the assumption that this is a redundancy and that no self-respecting Jesus would repeat himself. This is Martha's misunderstanding, isn't it?
