2021.03.21 | The Play's the Thing
“The Play’s the Thing”
Rev. Pepper Swanson
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, California
Palm Sunday
March 28, 2021
One of the delightful elements of coming to Christianity later in life is that many very old church traditions are new and different and a bit surprising.
For example, the waving of palms on Palm Sunday. That was new to me when I joined the church in 2007. On one hand, having heard today’s scripture, I thought I understood what a palm was and what waving one would look like. On the other hand, I was very surprised that the palms were bought from a catalogue, arrived in a box that needed immediate refrigeration, and looked, when unpacked, nothing like a palm tree. When I was handed one, I held the small, sword-like stem in my hand and pondered it. Surely not, I thought.
Later, having observed the children and others waving it around as they marched through the sanctuary and across the courtyard, I decided it must be a palm, after all. I noticed many of the palms were dropped on the courtyard walkway to Oliver Hall and a few were folded into crosses for the children by someone who remembered how to do this, and several were tucked into purses and bags as if they were going to be taken home.
Until last year, I had observed the annual ritual of reading the Palm Sunday Bible story and waving palms on Palm Sunday at one or church or another. My enduring legacy to Eden Church will probably be the cardboard donkey which I bought for a Christmas pageant but took on the major role of playing the donkey, posed under a paper palm tree, that waited to carry Jesus into Jerusalem.
Our processions and rituals at Eden around this holiday got me curious about the history of Palm Sunday processions and why we Christians re-enact this story each year and what is it that we learn from these mini pageants and processions?
Looking into these traditions, I discovered that Palm Sunday celebrations go back hundreds of years, if not longer, and are found all over the world. Traditions vary by country and church. For example, in those countries where palms are not available, other plants such as willow, olive, box, and yew, are substituted. In those countries, the holiday is called Yew Sunday or more generally, Branch Sunday.1 And, in researching the history of processions, there were some notable examples, two of which grabbed my attention.
The first example, called the donkey walk, was practiced in Moscow and other cities in Russia for about 135 year from 1558 to 1693. For the first 100 years or so, it began at the Kremlin and ended at St. Basil’s Cathedral with its ornate onion style towers. The part of Jesus was played by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church and his donkey was led by the Emperor (also known as Grand Prince, and later, the Tsar), who was followed by many of the Russian noblemen. The annual ritual changed from time to time during the 135 years, and by 1636, the direction had been reversed so the final destination was inside the Kremlin rather than the Cathedral. In 1694, the Tsar Peter I or Peter the Great, who had already forced the Orthodox Church into submission to government, abolished the ritual and some say replaced it with a mock drunk orgy of his own statesmen and minstrels.2
The second example is much more recent. According to Linda Mowat, a museum ethnographer, the country of Colombia in South America had a observable cultural tradition around Palm Sunday of buying native ramos (the Spanish word for palms) and plaiting them into what she called weird and wonderful creations, having them blessed by the local priest, and then taking them home where they could be hung up for good fortune, burned on a windy day to protect the crops, or attached to the front of trucks and busses for protection. However, in 1995, the government banned the use of ramos and asked the people, via television broadcast, to celebrate domingo de ramos sin ramos, Palm Sunday without palms. The reason given was that the native ramos were nearing extinction. Instead, people were invited to bring saplings to Church for blessing. Later that same year, the government also banned the use of pesebre or moss in Christmas displays. Within a year or two, however, ramos re-appeared in the Palm Sunday ritual and Mowat observed that she found it odd that in a country that had been environmentally impacted by corporate development of all kinds that the government would choose to focus on and ban the practices involved in religious cultural rituals.3
I think both examples are notable because they illustrate how real conflicts between religion and government often play out symbolically. Today’s scripture reading is rich with the same type of symbolism. The donkey Jesus rides suggests that Jesus and his followers who recorded this account, which appears in every Gospel, was well aware of Zechariah 9:9, which claims the new king will come to the people riding a colt, the foal of a donkey. Likewise, the palm branch was a symbol of triumph and victory and to lay them on the ground for someone to ride over was to pay the person royal tribute and respect. We don’t have to intuit that some were offended and made afraid by this pageantry — today’s passage is preceded by verses in which the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin plan to kill Jesus because if they don’t the Romans will come and destroy both the temple and their nation.
The past year, particularly those events in which Christian nationalists have attempted to disrupt US Constitutional proceedings, have made us keenly aware of the conflicts that exist between religion and government. Now more than ever, Christian of all stripes need to remind themselves that Jesus did not come to be a secular king, a point he underscored repeatedly by choosing the title Son of Man over Messiah so frequently. Re-enacting Palm Sunday and moving through Holy Week to Easter underscores that message: we worship not an earthly king, but One devoted to social justice, healing, and love.
As to why we at Eden say hallelujah, wave the palms, and have our children march around the sanctuary, I think it’s a lot more than awareness of conflicts between Church and State.
One of my favorite Christian ethicists Samuel Wells argues that when Christians re-enact scripture together, they practice how to be Christians in the real world and that practice becomes our virtues, the values that guide us. Of the long list of things we learn from worship generally, Wells says that acting out scripture together teaches us how to listen for God’s word, how to tell God’s story, and how to find one’s own story in God’s story, as well as the importance of prophetic hope, communal discernment, and the value of history and tradition.4
To me, re-enacting the Palm Sunday story reminds us that as humans, we are always looking for that special someone to save us. The ancient people of Jerusalem wanted Jesus to be the new king that would liberate them just as we often hope that the new President will be able to resolve all of our economic and political woes.
The story also reminds us that we are easily disappointed. The crowds who hailed his entry early in the week, chose a bandit named Barabbas over Jesus at the end of the week, sealing his death sentence. But most of all, by waving the palms each year just days before Good Friday, we remember that Jesus came to teach us a new way of being with one another that is characterized not by power but by love and devotion to God.
At the end of today’s chapter, Jesus says, “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in the one who sent me. And whoever sees me see the one who sent me.” The king we clamoured for, points to God — and not to government — and to love — not to hate and judgment — as having the capacity to save us. That’s a message to which we can all say: “Hallelujah and Amen.”
Wikipedia, Palm Sunday, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Sunday, accessed Mar 25, 2021
Wikipedia, Donkey Walk, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_walk, accessed Mar 25, 2021
Linda Mowat, “Palm Sunday Without Palms,” Journal of Museum Ethnography, No. 9 (May 1997), 131-133
Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004), 82-84.