Worship Notes Palm/Passion Sunday April 13

Worship Notes

Sunday of the Passion/Palm Sunday, Year A

April 13, 2014

The Season

We now enter the week that the Church sets aside as “holy.” Our forty-day Lenten journey culminates in the events of this week. Today we gather in the Narthex to receive our festive palm branches. We hear the Processional Gospel, the story of Jesus’ triumphal entrance in to Jerusalem to shouts of, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matthew 21:9). We join the ancient procession, entering the sanctuary singing, “All Glory, Laud, and Honor,” waving our palm branches high above our heads.

In Word

The festive mood of celebration turns quickly to Passion—the story of Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion, death, and burial. As if foreshadowing, we hear from the prophet Isaiah: “I gave my back to those who stuck me . . . I did not hide my face from insult and spitting” (Isaiah 50:6). Is he speaking of himself, someone else, or the nation of Israel? Reading through the lens of the crucifixion a half-millennium after our prophet, Christians appropriate this text to Jesus.

With our psalmist, we sing the lament, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble . . .” (Psalm 31:9). The prayer comes from deep distress. Adversaries lie in wait (vss. 4 & 8), our bodies are worn from sickness and sorrow (9-10), even friends avoid us (11-13). Despite all this, we sing our trust in God: “But as for me, I have trusted in you, O Lord. I have said, ‘You are my God’” (14).

The Apostle Paul in our Second Lesson invites us to embrace with our very lives an ancient hymn of the church, and to form and inform ourselves into the mind of Christ: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus . . . ,” who “emptied himself” and “humbled himself,” to “the point of death, even death on a cross.” A high calling, indeed!

Our Gospel reading today is the long Passion Narrative, this year from Matthew, beginning with the plot between Judas Iscariot and the religious leaders to betray Jesus into their hands. Our narrative takes us to the “Last Supper,” with the institution of the Lord’s Supper, the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s three-fold denial, Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, and burial.

In the span of five days—from Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Sunday to his crucifixion on Friday—Jesus goes from being hailed as the long-anticipated “Son of David,” the longed-for Messiah, to the rejected one, hanging on a cross between two criminals. All of this we experience in one hour this morning.

In Song

“Love to the loveless shown / that they might lovely be.” So sings our Hymn of the Day, “My Song Is Love Unknown,” the beautiful and compelling words of Samuel Crossman (c. 1624-1683), who lived through England’s tumultuous and ongoing years of political and religious upheavals. The lyrics sing of the contradiction and paradox of what Christ has done for us through his suffering and death, in order that we “might lovely be.” We sing the well-known and beloved tune Rhosemedre, with which this text was paired at least as far back as the red Service Book and Hymnal (SBH) from 1958.