Lama's log

Palm Sunday is always a weird one for me. Looking for an angle that doesn't set people up to party on both Sundays of Easter thus allowing congregations to forget the journey to the cross and just arrive at the resurrection.

We looked at Luke's account yesterday in the evening service and I enjoyed it. It connected me with an exhibition I saw at the photography museum in Bradford a couple of years ago on death (a topic I have some fascination with). There were lots of photographs of murder victims before their death. Pictures of weddings, parties, holidays etc. The photos were really powerful because as you stared at them knowing what was to become of the people in the pictures you wanted somehow to reach out, warn them or speak to them of what was to come. You wanted to get to know what they were like as individuals not just victims. The photographs became much more than an image of an event but a point of wished for conversation.

I felt that Luke did a bit of that in his account of Palm Sunday. The snap shot of the celebration, of cloaks going down on the ground and colts being exactly where they should be in the divine order, then the stones provide us with clues as to what has been and from the picture's point of view what will be. The weeping over the city that Jesus sees as the before shot and his yearning to connect with the people and tell them what is to come and that it needn't be this way if they could recognise God amongst them.

This whole account connects with me with what Dallas Willard calls non-discipleship. He speaks in very individual terms about this and very briefly. The absence of discipleship he says, speaks volumes, it means a gracelessness, a lack of salvation, an inability to know God.

In the absence of God there is then a witness to God because something is tangibly missing. Where Christ is not violence will be and violence leave marks. Stones will absorb spilt blood and it will testify to a lack of Christ powerfully. So Jesus can say to the pharisees with certainty that even if the disciples are silent the stones will cry out. There will be the marks of conflict, gracelessness and horror which speak of the need of God.

This compels us to intentional discipleship. Living and speaking of Christ can change realities, transform suffering and alter what is and what could be. There is an imperative to mission so that we are not the before picture of the horror to come.

The setting of this story straight after an account of Archelaus (most of the church disagree with me about that one) sets Jesus up as the kind of King which brings about a new order and a fresh hope for those struggling and marginalized.

The party scene in Luke is very tempered but it calls us into being. A pretty good way to begin Holy Week I think.