The Palms

April 2, 2007, 9:51 am; posted by
Filed under Articles, Mike J  | No Comments

I was talking with our church’s associate pastor yesterday. Steve and his wife Francesca served as missionaries for eleven years — four in the Dominican Republic and seven in Bolivia. We were talking about the palms, as yesterday was Palm Sunday. I’m not sure if the churches of other Bweinh!tributors hand out palms, but our church does.

As Steve and I broke apart the palms to hand out after the service, he told me that in Bolivian Catholicism, the tradition is that the palms are woven into crosses and then kept all year. The following Ash Wednesday (forty-six and a half weeks later), the palms are brought back to the church and burned to make the ashes for Ash Wednesday. I knew that in some Catholic traditions, the palms were burned for their ashes, but I figured the palms were kept at church. I didn’t know that individuals took them home and kept them on their own.

Palm Sunday is one of those holidays I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with. I love it, but all the same, it leaves me uneasy. All it does, really, is remind me how fickle people can be. One minute we’re waving palms and singing, “Hosanna!” The next minute we’re just itching for an execution.

Watching a palm desiccate and crumble throughout the year might just remind me of that. In our church, kids use palms as swords and then leave them, forgotten, on the playground or the floor of the fellowship hall. But keeping it and watching it lose its green, watching it become brittle and guarding that it doesn’t completely fall apart — that might just remind me of how fleeting emotions are. You can shout “Hosanna!,” but if that’s all you have, then before long, your spirit will look much like this dry palm, and maybe crumble just as easily.

To employ a phrase one scholar uses (about something completely different), Palm Sunday is a holiday that “carries the seeds of its own destruction.” The minute we make worship solely an emotional event, we ensure that there will be a time when worship is impossible. Like a palm, our emotions too will wither and come to life in cycles, through the seasons of our lives, and worship will mean something different in each of those seasons.

This is not to say that emotions are unimportant in worship. I have had deep emotional encounters in worship with the living God, some ecstatic, some devastating. But we must realize that the reality of worship does not depend on emotion–it depends on whether or not we have met with God. How will we know if we have met with God? A simple test is whether or not we have changed as a result. When people meet God in the Bible, lots of different things happen, but everyone changes. When you encounter the Almighty, the Unchangeable One, you change.

In the end, the message of the palms is deeply prophetic. When we rely simply on emotion or intentions, our efforts fail — sometimes slowly, sometimes spectacularly. Eventually, our good intentions borne of emotion burn up, and then they mark us as human, as fallen, as made of dust and returning to dust. Perhaps this is when the real change starts, when we see God and our first impetus is to repent in ashes, rather than to wave the palms.


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