In the week leading to Jesus’ self-sacrifice in Jerusalem, two symbols stand out: the waving of the palm branches and the cross.
The first represented the acclaim of the shouting crowds, greeting a Messiah coming to his own people. The cross, of course, represented the tragic end to his life.
Why did not Christianity take the palm branches as its symbol – a joyful token with its recollections of hosannas to the conquering Christ?
Students of Christian history know well that the Christian church would not have survived the centuries with only a palm branch on its altar. The cross goes deeper than that.
It’s deeper than anything else into the heart of man’s experience, need and deliverance.
It stands for a rescue story between sin and saviourhood.
Let us remind ourselves this Palm Sunday (April 13) as we see the Master entering Jerusalem amid the crowd’s hosannas that saviourhood is still present in the world.
Lowly and riding on a donkey’s foal, Jesus came to the great city and there he faced sin, as all saviours do.
He faced the sin of the priests who did not wish their orthodox establishments disturbed. Or of businessmen, wanting no money changers’ tables overturned to their profit’s hurt.
Or of politicians like Caiaphas, playing their clever selfish games. Or of cowards like Pilate, washing their hands of their responsibilities.
Of Roman soldiers doing whatever cruelty they were commanded of the crowd, persuaded by skilful propaganda to cry out “Crucify him!”
As always, saviourhood has faced sin. But, today, over 2,000 years later, it’s not the sin we are celebrating, but saviourhood.
The Holy Week celebrates the exciting truth at the heart of the Christian gospel: that there is saviourhood in this world and in it is a quality which lays hold on us as nothing else ever does.
In a way, there’s a “have to” sense that took Saviour Jesus trudging the rough and cobbled streets of Jerusalem to Calvary.
Christ was full of it, and every decent and lovely thing we have hoped for has come from it.
Florence Nightingale need not have gone to nurse the wounded in the Crimean War. No outward pressure urged her on.
All the circumstances were against her going – the military authorities, either dubious or antagonistic.
Even her own family called her crazy for just thinking of it. But there was that “have to” inside of her.
We had better be grateful when we think of it, for all the background of our lives is full of it and every decent and lovely thing we have or hoped for has come from it.
It was in the people who need not have done what they did, but who were compelled by a “have to” inside of them.
Christ had it ingrained in him. That is what took him to the cross.
“I lay down my life…no man takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself,” he said. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
What a “have to” inside of him! Human life is a struggle between sin – whatever debases and debauches life – and the great successions of the saviours with the “have to” inside them.
On which side of this great divide are we? Let no one spend this Holy Week without facing that question.
In one of Rembrandt’s paintings of the crucifixion, one’s eyes naturally rest at first upon the central figures in the scene.
But, by and by in the shadows, one sees another figure – Rembrandt himself – helping to crucify Christ.
This struggle between sin and saviourhood is going on inside every one of us, and we cannot thrust off this dual struggle as though it’s only a public battle.
It is also private, the central issue of each person’s life.
As someone has put it, “No possible rearrangement of bad eggs can ever make a good omelette.”
Narayan Mitra is the pastor of Merritt Baptist Church.
