As we approach our celebration of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem i could not help but be reminded of the conflict within Jerusalem herself, even the recent news of more Israeli settlements in West Jerusalem, and the conflict and pain around that, and what Jerusalem symbolizes in terms of our own sinfulness and internal division.
This time last year i had just left Israel and felt very connected to the region and its pain. It is important to be reminded of this maybe especially at Easter.
I found this refection helpful.
"... We are the crowd along the streets of Jerusalem shouting, “Hosanna! Hosanna!” and we are the same mob on Good Friday screaming, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” As Fleming Rutledge has noted, “the liturgy of Palm Sunday is set up to show you how you can say one thing one minute and its opposite the next. This is the nature of the sinful human being.”
In looking at the cruxifixion, Rutledge also says this: “What we see and hear in Jesus’ death is not just his solidarity with the victims of this world. It is that, but it is not only that. What we see and hear in the Cry of Dereliction is Jesus’ identification in his Cross not only with the innocent victims of this world but also with their torturers . . . What Jesus assumes on the Cross is not only the suffering of innocents but also the wickedness of those who inflict suffering.”
And when Jesus says, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34), “he makes himself one, not only with my pain but with my sin–because I myself, and you yourselves, and all of us ourselves, are sometimes victims of others and sometimes torturers of others and sometimes both, and when we recognize this we are, as Jesus says to the scribe, ‘not far from the kingdom.’”
To know this deeply is to do the “work” of Holy Week. Romantic readings of Jesus’ passion–like the ones mentioned in the opening paragraph above–keep us at a safe, neutral distance. The liturgy of the palms and the liturgy of the passion put us in the thick of things where we play many parts. And they are clarifying roles: we see our duplicity and our honest striving; we know ourselves culpable and forgiven.
The journey is the thing. Easter breaks forth. But not yet."
To read the entire reflection see the article at
http://debradeanmurphy.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/palms-and-passion-the-work-of-holy-week/h
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