Palm Sunday may be the closest that the Christian year ever comes to engaging irony, and I love it for that. 

If you scratch the surface, there are a lot of levels to the gospel you’ve just heard.  

The tone is celebratory.  The Eagle has landed. Jesus is finally coming to the capital.

His followers are anticipating…what?

We don’t quite know.  Maybe even they don’t quite know. 

But it stands to reason that all those snarky back-and-forths between Jesus and the Pharisees all along the way – you remember those, right? – would have set the disciples’ expectations sky-high.  

Think for a moment about those confrontations – those moments when some local guy from somewhere encounters Jesus and doesn’t like what he thinks he’s hearing.  

The guy asks, in so many words, who in God’s name Jesus thinks he is. 

He doesn’t mean it as an actual question, of course.  

He means it as a put down.  

As a way to bring the crowd back down to earth. 

Whenever someone takes that approach, Jesus always comes right back at him, loaded for bear, right?  

If you traveled with Jesus, you would have known it was coming.  You would have looked forward to it.  

It must have been a heck of show—one that got them imagining even bigger stages.  

You could hardly have blamed the disciples for watching those moments, hearing those moments, and wondering: what if? 

What if this conversation Jesus was having wasn’t with some schmo whose name they never quite got? 

What if this moment wasn’t just happening in some one horse town whose name they can scarcely remember? 

What if he ever went theologically mano-a-mano with the biggest of their big-wigs? One of the Jerusalem guys?  Maybe even the High Priest himself?  On Passover? With the Roman Governor standing right there?  

I actually think our guy would win. 

They must have thought it. 

For them, that’s where Palm Sunday was pointing. 

And yet, as we know, in a way the disciples did not, that this is not what would come next—that this is not how the story would end.  

Instead, Jesus will be dead on by dinnertime on Friday. 

That’s the first irony.  

The second irony is more subtle.  

Because the story will not end on Friday, either. 

The Gospel will not come to rest in Jerusalem. 

It will keep on moving. 

On its way—actually quite early on in its travels—the Gospel will even pass through Rome. 

Rome will prove powerless to stop it, just as Pontius Pilate and the leaders who arrest and convict Jesus will prove powerless to stop it.  

You can’t kill the truth.  

You can’t stop goodness from preaching—from convincing and transforming.  

And so when that first Palm Sunday group walked up toward Jerusalem in the name of a different kind of world, under the leadership of a different kind of king, even they had no idea of just how right they actually were.  

How’s that for irony? 

Every now and again, we see something in the world that reminds us of the power of truth.

Lately, I’m thinking of the recent death of the prominent Putin critic, Alexei Navalny.  

In the evening after the world first learned that he had died, Liz watched the recent documentary about him and was especially moved by a moment that I’ve since seen mentioned elsewhere, too.  

Navalny, who had already survived poisoning, said, “If they decide to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong.  We need to utilize this power not to give up…to remember.” 

Along those lines, for us as Christians, Palm Sunday is part of how we remember—how we are urged to find our strength and not give up when we’re faced with challenges of our own. 

Every now and again, we see something in the world that reminds us of the power of goodness.  

This isn’t something visible only in the martyrdom of a moral leader.  

In a quieter way, we see it in the kindness we show for one another as life unfolds.  

Whatever might be on our minds or bending us back into our own situation, we remember one another.  

I was reading yesterday that ever since the UCONN Women’s basketball team won its first national title, they have made a point of leaving time after the game for kids to come forward and get autographs. 

This seems like a small thing.  

Actually, this began with Rebecca Lobo in 1995, which is when the attention and the autograph seeking really first began to take off…to require actual time.  

Her parents would take her out to dinner after every game, and there was a lot of pressure on her and a lot to process, but her mother insisted that Lobo sign every autograph and greet anyone who was waiting to see her. 

In fact, on one occasion, her mom pulled her aside because she was signing autographs but not really paying attention. 

“You look everyone in the eye when you sign,” her mother said,  “especially a little kid, because they’ve waited in line to see you.” 

As things go, of course, a moment’s attention is a small gesture.

But not to the person who’s been waiting on that line.

Not to the person who is quietly carrying whatever life has put on their shoulders lately, and who receives a moment from you or me that helps them make it through the day.  

On the other hand, we remember that in the Gospel, it’s Pilate…it’s Herod…it’s Caiaphas…it’s the villains of this story who have neither time nor patience for the people they can’t use.  

As a result, in their eyes, this dumb parade of palms and cloaks and a guy riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is something between a hassle and a brush fire—it’s an event they don’t have time for led by people of no consequence moved by visions about which they could not care less.  

They’re no longer able to imagine this parade could represent anything more than that.   

They don’t get what it means to be standing on that line, to be hoping for a brief moment of connection, and to recognize how holy, inspiring, and strengthening our connections can be.  

They don’t get it.  

Certainly, they don’t see God in it.  

The gods they recognize surely wouldn’t stoop so low.  

But we get it.  

Palm Sunday is teaching us to remember a very different picture of who God is, what God values, and just how low God would be willing to go out of love for us.  

Remembering that will save the world. 

So it is a day full of irony, a day of triumph, looming tragedy, and triumph once again.  

Its joy points us steady onward, moving faithfully toward the day when the saints come marching in, and everyone will know once and for all which of us are in that number. 

What if we were? 

Amen.