Palm Sunday and The Sweet Strains of the Spiritual...

Palm Sunday, March 16, 2005
Church of Our Saviour
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

I heard someone recently describing the sound of a spiritual. It is a triumphant sound and a mournful one at the same time. Perhaps that heart-wrenching sound developed because those spirituals came from a population so steeped in pain that it had to aspire to the possibility of grace along with the suffering. Like the possibility of a joyful triumphant entry into a city, followed by an unimaginable loss.

Palm Sunday as we celebrate it today is a mixed up sort of liturgy, which contains thrilling heights and a devastating depth. We inherited a service that encompasses both the story of the passion of Christ and the story of the triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

Before the ancient rites were rediscovered, there was no Holy Week, and the week before Easter was the logical time to delve deeply into the experience of Christ’s passion- that series of events that led to his crucifixion, beginning with the garden of Gethsemane and ending with the sealing of Jesus’ tomb.

But sometime in the late 4th century, a female pilgrim named Egeria took a remarkable pilgrimage and left us a detailed account of what the ancient Holy Week observance was like in Jerusalem.

We have all been experiencing our pilgrimage through Lent, hitting our high points and stumbling into our low points. We have all been journeying toward Jerusalem; so let me tell you a little bit about the pilgrimage of Egeria.

Lucky for us, Egeria recorded her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and also lucky for us, she was a keen observer and fastidious recorder of her remarkable surroundings on this trip to the Holy Land. She was clearly learned and is thought to have been a nun or an Abbess from Northern Spain.

In the first part of her journal she describes the sites of biblical events, where people apparently were certain they took place: The very brook where Moses was found, the exact place where the golden calf was made, and even the very same burning bush that Moses saw, which she describes as “still green and still producing live shoots”.

But the latter part of her amazing journal is what impacts us more, and brought us the treasure of the ancient observance of Holy Week, one that the Eastern Church never forsook. Even today, the Orthodox churches, which have a different day for Easter, only celebrate the midnight Easter vigil, on Easter Eve. Easter itself is just another Sunday!

But Egeria’s journal began to bring the rest of the church back to the ancient ways. Her journal describes the observance of the feast of the Epiphany including a Night Station in Bethlehem, and all of Holy Week and Easter. Palm Sunday was described in detail with its formal procession with palms to the Mount of Olives and a veneration of the cross. It also described the celebration of Whitsunday, or Pentecost. Egeria apparently participated in all these ancient festivals with great concentration and joy, and a great retention of detail.

Her tones are filled with awe as she describes the Palm Sunday procession in Jerusalem about 1600 years ago:

"On the same day, at the ninth hour, they go forth to the Mount of Olives with palm branches; and there they pray and sing psalms until the tenth hour. And after that they go down to Eleona, and the bishop with them, to the church, where hymns and antiphons suitable to the day and to the place are said, and lessons in like manner. And when the ninth hour approaches they go up with hymns to the Imbomon, that is, to the place whence the Lord ascended into heaven, and there they sit down, for all the people are always bidden to sit when the bishop is present; the deacons alone always stand. And as the eleventh hour approaches, the passage from the Gospel is read, where the children, carrying branches and palms, met the Lord, saying; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord,

And the bishop immediately rises, and all the people with him, and they all go on foot from the top of the Mount of Olives, all the people going before him (with hymns and antiphons,) answering one to another: Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord. And all the children in the neighborhood, even those who are too young to walk, are carried by their parents on their shoulders, all of them bearing branches, some of palms and some of olives, and thus the bishop is escorted in the same manner as the Lord was of old. For all, even those of rank, both matrons and men, accompany the bishop all the way on foot.

Egeria’s excitement is apparent from her description of this beautiful re-enactment of the triumphant march into Jerusalem. And once these ancient rites were communicated to the faithful in Rome, you can see why they began to replicate it in their liturgy, as we have continued to do.

But there is a message in our hybrid of services today. We are observing the triumphant march into Jerusalem and the passion of Jesus, two things apparently at opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience. But this is life- this is what we find in our lives at so many junctures, as we attempt to negotiate our way through great suffering and great joy as human beings and as Christians. We find the necessity to hold the cross and the triumphant resurrection at once. The necessity to hold the very best in life along with the very worst- and to recognize that this reality is not irreconcilable- this reality is life.

Perhaps it was only Jesus who knew, in that triumphant but still humble entry, that what followed would be the cross, and the ultimate end would be resurrection. This is what we face in our lives all the time. And the only thing that gets us through is faith. Faith that the cross is not the end of the story. Faith that there is a reason to be triumphant. And faith that like the sweet strains of a spiritual, our hearts can hold these great contradictions without breaking.