Who Comes In the Name of the Lord…?

Palm Sunday is one of those irregular services which in recent years has been somewhat usurped by including the Passion Story within it. The premise is that few Believers will attend services on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, and so the lessons about Jesus’ crucifixion are read the week before. This is too bad, since Palm Sunday is quite important: here we learn about Jesus as the Alternative King, the One who comes In the Name of the Lord (as opposed to many who’d like to come in the name of Microsoft or General Electric…)

The central scriptures of the day are but two: the Gospel account of the Triumphal (?) Entry–and this section of the Psalms, Psalm 118:19ff. This psalm seems to teach us that our whole lives are set in the context of HESED, God’s Faithfulness. Was the psalmist prophesying about the Messiah, from almost a thousand years before? Certainly this passage was familiar to the Jews of Jesus’ time, since they readily sang, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” From our preaching standpoint, we might say that the author is speaking about the Righteous Community as opposed to “the nations” or business as usual. Palm Sunday then is opportunity to celebrate the uniqueness of What God Does with the stones that were considered by some to be an ill-fit.

The Gospel this year is that of Mark, who is amazed that Jesus knew about the waiting “colt”! Then he describes the motley parade, a parody of that which a military hero would stage, in which the rabble themselves were the song: ”
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” The authorities were uncomfortable, knowing somehow that they were being tweaked. A Palm Sunday sermon/study needs to include this sense of the holy deflating the puffed-up. The arrogant persecution of Good Friday is thus set up as the battle lines were drawn. Charles L. Campbell says, “In his ‘triumphal entry’ Jesus lampoons the ‘powers-that-be’ and their pretentions to glory and dominion, and he enacts an alternative to their way of domination.

The One who comes in the name of the Lord comes to the navel of th spiritual world to confront the idolatry of pomp and circumstance. Participants in this liturgy need look beyond the merely historical to appreciate the radical difference being announced–and to become immersed in a difficult yet enduring arrangement of the Holy Life.

God Bless Us, Every One        Horace Brown King