A Reflection for Palm Sunday
Whenever I read the Palm Sunday narrative about the entry of Jesus to Jerusalem, amidst the palm-waving, hosanna-shouting crowd, I am dropped into the middle of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and the song that captures this moment. I hear the Pharisees singing ‘Tell the rabble to be quiet, we anticipate a riot, this common crowd is much too loud!’ Which occasions the response from Jesus, ‘Why waste your breath moaning at the crowd? Nothing can be done to stop the shouting. If every tongue was still the noise would still continue: the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing!’
What I love about this exchange is what I interpret as Jesus’ defiant optimism that, despite any and all signs to the contrary, this story is going to turn out OK.
I well know the traditional interpretation of this story as a parody of Empire, contrasting authoritarianism with humility, power with servanthood. But whenever I read it, and no matter which of the four gospel versions of the story I read, it’s not the contrast of ‘empires’ I notice most, but the subversive sense of inevitability that the story evokes. The writer of the Fourth Gospel captures this when he reports the Pharisees saying to each other, ‘You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!’ [John 12:19]
We’ve been journeying with Jesus toward Jerusalem for some weeks now, and if we have been alert to the signs we may have felt the foreboding sense of cataclysm that is building, the awareness that Jerusalem is not going to be all beer and skittles for Jesus! Indeed, we modern-day readers already know how this next week is going to pan out – it’s going to be a very tough week for Jesus! But on this final Sunday of Lent, this prelude to the torturous week ahead, we arrive at our destination amidst a celebration, a festival march, or at least a strange parody of one, as if to suggest that there is something deeper emerging here, some inevitability of light and hope underlying the doom and gloom.
Is this not the essence of the gospel? The hope – more than that, the assurance and confidence – that, ultimately, light and love will triumph. It is sometimes difficult to hold to that hope: faced with personal trauma, illness, cost-of-living challenges, and more; confronted with a world of conflict, climate stress, economic uncertainty; and sensing the darkness that looms beyond the small circle of light within which we might live. But then along comes Jesus, in this almost comical parade, asserting the essential inevitability of love over hate, light over darkness, compassion over cruelty, hope over despair, and we are reminded that somehow, and despite any and all signs to the contrary, this grand narrative really is going to turn out OK! May we hold to that hope, and choose live out of that hope, modelling love not hate, light not darkness, compassion not cruelty, inclusion not exclusion, generosity not greed, gentleness not arrogance, perseverance not despair, because in doing so we enable the inevitability to become reality!
I hope you’ll enjoy Leonard Cohen’s You Got Me Singing as you reflect on this from your own perspective (link to song on Spotify below).
David Brooker (28th March 2026)
Listen to You Got Me Singing (Leonard Cohen) HERE
OldSoul.blog 
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