The Triumph of the Triumphal Entry
Palm Sunday is our entrance into Holy Week. As we celebrate Christ’s Triumphal Entry with the citizens of Jerusalem, we process with them into the city where He will die. We sing songs and wave palm fronds on a morning that feels festive, hopeful, if a bit mundane – and perhaps we don’t think too far past the celebratory tone of the service, and the hymns, and the bright spring sunshine. It is Palm Sunday! Christ must be celebrated as He enters Jerusalem.
Indeed, His entry into Jerusalem must be celebrated. But Christ has one thing on His mind as He enters Jerusalem, and this challenges us to consider more closely the nature of our celebration. What, after all, is the triumph of the Triumphal Entry? What are we celebrating? For the thing Jesus is about to do is die.
Immediately following the Triumphal Entry, Jesus has a strange conversation with Philip and Andrew. A group of Greeks approach Philip and tell him they wish to see Jesus. All we know about them is that they are “among those who came up to worship at the feast.” Then, as St. John’s Gospel explains, “Philip came and told Andrew, and in turn Andrew and Philip told Jesus,” and Jesus gives them an answer that seems rather odd: “The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified.” I like to imagine Philip and Andrew falling a little quiet here, maybe looking at each other and thinking, Okay, cool . . . so, what should we say to these Greeks?
Jesus elaborates on His somewhat bewildering response:
“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also. If anyone serves Me, him My Father will honor.”
Even for those of us who know what is about to happen in Jerusalem, what Jesus says here might seem a bit strange. I imagine it would have been particularly baffling for Philip and Andrew, who could not see the future and did not understand Jesus’s prophecies of His own death. And it would take a bit of work to figure out why this, of all responses, is the response Jesus chooses for the Greeks who wish to see Him.
Regardless, this response stops us in our tracks and makes us pay attention to Jesus, perhaps especially to the vivid image of the seed that must fall into the ground and die before it can bear fruit. By likening Himself to a seed, Jesus communicates something about the nature of the triumph we celebrate on Palm Sunday – namely, that Christ must be buried in order to be raised. Death must be faced and defeated before life can grow without measure for eternity.
In many ways, the Triumphal Entry is a lot like the Nativity, and the celebration we are called to in both cases is similar in tone. They are parallel entrances. Both have Christ’s death on the horizon of their hope. In both cases, Christ willingly enters a place that will reject Him so that He can be near to those who will do the rejecting. Both of these entrances astonish and confound those who behold them. They don’t make sense. Both entrances are absolutely, even exquisitely humble; are almost ugly in their apparent poverty and plainness. Both are also glorious triumphs of Love, in which Christ – Love Himself – draws near to the brokenness of humanity with a patience, presence, and gentleness we can hardly bear when we finally humble ourselves to see it.
Christ’s glory consists at least in part in the fact that, fully anticipating its agony, He chooses to go up to Good Friday and effect its victory, a victory we can hardly comprehend. He is the first person to do this – the only one, in fact, who can do this. And in doing this He makes it possible for us to join him.
Put another way, the triumph we celebrate on Palm Sunday is the triumph of Christ’s choice to submit Himself to death for the sake of love. It is the triumph of His coming victory over death, a victory that is assured because he is Life Himself, but which will be unimaginably painful in the winning. It is the triumph of the fact that He sees and anticipates this pain for exactly what it is and chooses it anyway. As He talks with Philip and Andrew, Jesus expresses deep distress over what is to come. “Now my soul is troubled,” He cries, “and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.”
We cannot help Jesus through the suffering He will accept for us this week. No amount of pity or compassion we can muster can ever alleviate the pain He chooses on our behalf, or absolve us of the fact that we are among those who will nail Him to the cross on Good Friday. Like the inhabitants of Jerusalem who celebrated His entry into the city, we will watch, and we will find ourselves among their number, transformed almost without realizing it from Christ’s cheerleaders into His killers. The glory of Christ’s suffering is His glory, and only His. We cannot diminish it or remove the necessity of it with our good wishes or apologies.
But Christ’s glory, as revealed in Holy Week, is not a glory that isolates and sets itself apart. He does not hoard it. Instead, He offers it freely, to all of us. His glory is a glory that comes among us, that opens doors and invites us in, that does not just establish life triumphant, but establishes us in that life forever. As Jesus says later in St. John 12, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself.”
All we can do now is follow Him up to Jerusalem, do our best to be humble witnesses of such a Love, and once again practice our participation in His death, which – in the glory and beauty of who He is – can only lead to life.
On Palm Sunday, we are called to anticipate, contemplate, and celebrate this glory that we do not understand, a glory that consists in the humility of chosen suffering and a love that submits itself to death.
After Jesus asks the Father to glorify the Father’s name, the Father replies. St. John tells us that the people standing nearby thought they heard thunder after, “a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.’”
May it be so.