The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Palm Sunday
April 2, 2023
In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.
On Friday as I was walking into the church for Stations of the Cross and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, I saw a curious thing. Here in the inner city, right along busy noisy loud Broadway, right beneath the banner for Stations & Benediction, there in the grass alongside the yew bushes, was a rabbit. Not a little rabbit, not a baby—but a good medium sized fully adult New England cottontail. He or she or they was nestled down in the grass, munching away, and completely aware of and also unafraid of any of the urban assaults of the Broadway corridor. A scooter sped by on the sidewalk, and the rabbit just watched and munched. A couple of undergraduates, cheerfully chattering away, crossed by, and the rabbit didn’t even flinch. I stood in the walkway to the Broadway porch doors and stared—even glared—at Peter Cottontail, and they didn’t care one bit.
This urban rabbit was unimpressed by anything New Haven had to dish out. It wanted grass, and there was grass to eat. It had shelter under the yew hedge. And it was making its way through the world as a rabbit should.
I have to confess I found this rabbit both mesmerizing and annoying. Beautiful to behold, delightful to watch. I loved how unafraid it was—how it took its space in time and was, well, exactly what a rabbit is supposed to be, even in the midst of a loud, beautiful, violent, privileged, and also broken down city.
But also I recognized this rabbit. It’s the same one that has grown up in the memorial garden here at Christ Church; the same rabbit that leaves piles of its droppings around—to the consternation and also the delight of my dogs. And, strangely enough, as much as I realize this is crazy, it’s the same rabbit that I found annoyingly out of place. My feeble brain thought, you’re a week early, bunny! Couldn’t you at least wait for Easter to show up? Could you at least come for coffee hour in the garden on Easter Day so we could make jokes about the Easter Bunny showing up? I mean, come on, cottontail—Friday is a fast day. There’s no bunny in the Stations of the Cross. There’s no resurrection station, or furry cuteness, or anything at all this week associated with this flop-eared adorable mammal.
The rabbit, like Cadbury crème eggs and daffodils everything else delightful and secular associated with Easter Day, was early, and to be honest, that was a bit jarring for me.
It’s also a bit jarring today, on Palm Sunday, to go from the joy of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem to the story of his passion and murder.
First we hear the shouts of praise and adulation, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” People are so excited to be near Jesus that they are covering the road he’s following in their coats and in tree branches. Remember the controversy this year at the Oscars—how the carpet was beige instead of red for the first time? No one’s arguing about that! They’re spontaneously covering the road! When Jesus comes near, people are excited, full of joy and hope and love, and they’re expressing this great joy in tangible, audible, tactile ways. Our palms this morning pale in comparison to the chaotic, joyful scene the crowds in Jerusalem display. Hosanna, indeed! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
And from that place of joy we turn to the depths of despair. Jesus is betrayed for cash money. He is taken into custody by the political authorities of the day. He is judged by a representative of an occupying empire, dressed mockingly as a king with even a crown of thorns, cruelly plaited to exact pain and suffering—to draw blood and sweat and tears—and then taunted, nailed to a cross, and hung until he had suffered and bled so much that he could no longer support himself and finally his body collapsed, he could no longer breath, and he suffocated from the trauma of it all.
From hosanna and blessings we have turned to cries of pain, of agony, and despair: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”
If the juxtaposition of the two things is jarring, alarming, disconcerting, friends, that’s exactly right. Palm Sunday is exactly the world in which we live.
The rabbit shows up and is cute but out of place. It shouldn’t live downtown, but here it is, a harbinger of habitat loss, persisting nonetheless. It’s a week early for cultural Easter—and maybe a few decades too late environmentally. It’s out of place.
Jesus comes among us, hailed as a prophet, priest, and king, and then within mere hours is seized, tortured, and lynched as a spectacle.
And that’s the space between the Incarnation and the Resurrection—between the birth of our Lord and the empty tomb. Maybe more precisely, that’s the space between the Creation of the world and the final Judgment, the heavenly banquet, the life everlasting within the sacred heart of God.
We are existing, as Wystan Auden writes, “for the time being,” in this limnal space of “thy kingdom come” but “not yet.” And the pain, the suffering, the jarring brokenness of it all, is real.
When children shoot and kill one another, it’s real, but it’s for the time being. When viruses lay waste to millions of lives, it’s devastating, and it’s for the time being. When poverty and racism oppress so very many of the lives of God’s holy people, it’s traumatizing and death dealing—and for the time being.
This terrible, horrible, beautiful, hope-filled space and time we inhabit is what it is. It is now, it is for the time being, and it is not the final story.
But it is where we find ourselves. With that little cottontail out on Broadway, out of time and place. With our Lord, beaten and bruised and bloody and murdered—but also risen. Also alive. Also beloved.
Friends, we cannot get to Easter without going through Jesus’s days of passion and death. We cannot make it to the heavenly banquet without first understanding the reality of the suffering of sin, of despair, of life that denies God, that spits in the very face of Jesus.
Because that’s the place we are in. The world, the time and space and materiality that God has made and adores, is not the final reality. But it is beloved of God. And here we are, you and I and the little cottontail and all of it, right here and now, with Jesus, at the foot of the cross, at the empty tomb, in the upper room and at the table in Emmaus and on the mountaintop at his ascension.
And we will be there together at his throne in glory, just as we anticipate it this morning in this mass.
But for now, this is where we are.
So come. Let us walk together the way of our Lord this Holy Week.
Let us realize again the reality of the pain and suffering of sin—but be filled up anew with the hope and anticipation and glory of the promise of Jesus’s resurrection.
For these are not merely historical events we remember. They are markers, signposts, promises, of the reality of eternal life with him who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
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