When it comes to being based in Scripture, Palm Sunday may be second only to Christmas in the Christian calendar.

Both holidays remember moments that were long-anticipated— moments that need to be correctly recognized as acts of God, and actually, acts of God that were long-promised – with both of them part of a decisive intervention to fix what was broken in the world. 

Both holidays point beyond the specific biography of Jesus to the figure of the Messiah, and what it would look like when the Messiah finally arrived. 

Connecting Jesus’ biography to long-cherished prophecy is a major task of the gospels. 

Much of the Christmas story: Bethlehem, a virgin who has conceived, no room at the inn, the magi and their specific gifts, those details were all part of how Ancient Israel imagined the signs that would accompany the mysterious liberator God would send. 

Palm Sunday imagines the Messiah’s arrival in Jerusalem, from the donkey to the palms to the shouting of “hosanna,” which means something like “God will save.” Its various elements would have been familiar to those who witnessed it live, especially for those whose concern for the way things were in a dark time had sent them back to Scripture to refresh their hopes. 

By contrast, Easter, as we’ll see next week, mostly breaks new ground – what it describes is God acting in ways that are so unexpected that at first, they don’t even seem understandable, much less wonderful, even for those most desperate to understand them. 

But as I said, more on that next week. 

When the movies depict Palm Sunday, Jesus is often portrayed as the still point in the activity, the eye of the storm, riding the donkey up to Jerusalem with a face that seems lost in thought, while all around him there is all this jubilant tossing of cloaks and palms and branches on the road, an ancient version of rolling out the red carpet for a VIP. 

The contrast is meant to remind us that there is a difference between what the people hope Jesus’ arrival means and what Jesus knows it means—as well as what it will require of him. 

Jerusalem was not that big a city. 

Many of those who are standing along the road cheering his arrival on Sunday would be standing around before happy hour on Friday, cheering his death before happy. 

That irony almost makes Palm Sunday weird to celebrate—a kind of false armistice, a momentous beginning that checks all the boxes, but nevertheless collapses, and does it in spectacular fashion. 

Yet since at least the 4^th century, the church has celebrated the day, and not with sadness or repentance, but with joy. 

Some of it may be that the ancients were less surprised by fickle humanity than we are and understood the day as a sign of God’s great faithfulness, particularly in the face of how undependable our love can be. 

God sticks with us even when we don’t stick with him, and that loyalty is all the more striking when we admit that, after the first flush of enthusiasm, many of us don’t seem to stick with much of anything—even God. 

God is not like that.

His ways are not our ways—and so, all the more reason to rejoice on Palm Sunday, grateful for its vivid illustration of what God’s ways are. 

May they teach us a better way as we remake our lives into better reflections of God’s life. 

But this is about a lot more than loyalty. 

And this is where it can be helpful to look beyond the gospel accounts of Palm Sunday and pause over John of Patmos’ vision of God’s ultimate marriage of heaven and earth. 

Most importantly, John reminds us that God’s love for us and for all creation is most beyond human description, and surely beyond all calculation. 

Let’s say what he says again:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The first heaven and the first earth had disappeared, and there was no sea anymore. ² And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem,^[a] coming down out of heaven from God. It was prepared like a bride dressed for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Now God’s presence is with people, and he will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them and will be their God.^[b] 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death, sadness, crying, or pain, because all the old ways are gone.” (Revelation 21: 1-4)

It’s a description of what Palm Sunday might have been and of what it was supposed to be, as imagined backward from the day when the dream will be realized, at last.  

Like Jesus entering Jerusalem, God arrives in the heart of the world. 

Relationships and possibilities for human life that have been separated by sin and selfishness and injustice (which are, mostly, three ways of saying the same thing) will come back together.

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death, sadness, crying, or pain, because the old ways are gone.” (v. 4)

We could say a lot about it, and over the years, many have. 

John’s words about this later moment of arrival give us a way to understand what was happening on Palm Sunday that none of its first witnesses could quite have known.

But the central ideas are, first, that God will come to be with us so that we can live unseparated from Him. 

Second, a world torn up by turmoil and bearing the scars to prove it will give way to a world of almost unimaginable beauty—a world where the most precious things we know will be worked with skills we do not now possess into dazzling new forms.

Including us.

Including our hearts and our very lives. 

Faith is what urges us to turn toward that promise. 

“Look! I am making everything new!” says The One who sits on the throne (v.5).

It’s a newness that the world glimpsed on Palm Sunday, but did not embrace. 

As a result, for a while, it will seem like the old ways are the only ways.

As we wait, it will seem as if our dream of new ways, our hope for reunion in all its expressions, and our hunger for love in all its dimensions, are all foolish and naïve. 

We’ve been waiting a long time. 

But make no mistake: it’s coming. 

In fact, make no mistake: it’s already appearing. 

Jesus is already in the city, whether we mean the cities of the world or the well-defended cities of our selves. 

The new life has begun. 

And so this has always been a joyful day for the church.

It’s not so much about what it remembers, but about its dreams.

It’s about the God whose Son arrives to enter every trembling heart, and the world that will be possible when, at last, all hearts are one in Him. 

Amen.