Prayer: God of the covenant, in the glory of the cross your Son embraced death and broke its hold over your people.  In this time of prayer and reflection, draw all people to yourself, that we who confess Jesus as Lord may put aside the deeds of death and accept the life of your kingdom.
Amen

For many, if not most of us who grew up in the church, Palm Sunday was full of exciting pageantry.  We waved our palm branches while we march around the building, singing triumphal hymns.  It was, it appeared, a day of excitement, endorsement and celebration.  Jesus was coming to town, and the excitement was beyond belief.  How it all went wrong was a bit complicated, but Palm Sunday felt good, almost as good as Easter.  Then the shift came and the focus of the day liturgically became the crucifixion (an assumption that people wouldn’t flock to church on Good Friday, I suspect).  The Liturgy of the Palms evolved into the warm-up for the Passion Narrative.  That is terribly unfortunate, since the Passion cannot really be understood as a stand-alone event.  The entry into Jerusalem and the events that followed are integral to an understanding of why Jesus died in the manner he did.

Thinking it Over:
* What might God be calling us, asking us to be about as followers of “The Way”?  What action is our text calling us to enter into?