PARADES AND LONG WALKS

GOSPEL — MATTHEW 26:14—27:66
Palm / Passion Sunday

​The stories we hear for Sunday of the Passion/Palm Sunday are marked by a series of parades. The crowd shouts “Hosanna” as Jesus processes into Jerusalem. After his arrest, he is paraded to the home of Caiaphas to be confronted by the scribes and elders. They bind him and parade him to Pilate. The soldiers lead him to the governor’s headquarters before he is paraded to Golgotha to be crucified.

These were not celebratory parades. For Jesus, each of these journeys was another step on his long walk toward death. We may not know what it is to be paraded about before crowds of people as Jesus was, but we can understand the long walk toward death.

Perhaps you have taken the long walk from a hospital parking lot to the information desk, from the desk around the corner to the visitors’ elevators, and from the elevator through the maze of hallways to the bedside of a loved one to sit vigil as they breathe their last. Maybe you have made the long walk between cubicles to your boss’s office during a time of layoffs, knowing what news is coming. The walk from a classroom to the principal’s office is long and scary, for both the student and the parent who was called in to school from work.

Life has plenty of long and painful walks we would just as soon avoid. Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane tells us he did not want to take his walk either. And yet he did take that walk. In so doing, he joins us in all of our long and weary wanderings that end in the things of death. Jesus is with us in our deepest pain. But the story does not end there. The journey continues as the women walk to the empty tomb, as Jesus walks with disciples to Emmaus, and as he continues to walk us to places of new life.


From sundaysandseasons.com.
Copyright © 2023 Augsburg Fortress. All rights reserved.