Palm Sunday: The Crowd and the Cross
-
March 26, 2026Palm Sunday is the day the Church refuses to let us be
comfortable. We begin with palms in our hands and hosannas on our lips, and before the liturgy is over, we have cried out for crucifixion. The readings do not let us sit safely in the crowd. They ask us which crowd we belong to — and whether we know the difference.
In Matthew's account of the entry into Jerusalem, Jesus rides in on a borrowed donkey, fulfilling the prophecy of a king who comes in humility. The whole city is "quaking," Matthew tells us — the same word he will use later for the earthquake at the Resurrection. Something is being shaken loose. The crowds spread cloaks and branches, shouting "Hosanna to the Son of David!" But notice: when the people of Jerusalem ask, "Who is this?" the crowd can only answer, "This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth." They know his name. They do not yet know what his kingship will cost.
Isaiah's Suffering Servant knows. "I have set my face like flint," the servant says — not in defiance, but in trust. The servant does not hide from insult or spitting. He offers his back to those who beat him, his cheeks to those who pluck his beard. This is not passivity. This is the most radical kind of courage: the willingness to absorb violence without returning it, trusting that God's vindication is nearer than the world's approval.
Psalm 22 takes us deeper still. Here the mockery becomes specific, almost unbearable: "All who see me scoff at me; they mock me with parted lips, they wag their heads." The sufferer's hands and feet are pierced; his garments divided by lot. And yet the psalm does not end in despair. It pivots — astonishingly — toward praise: "I will proclaim your name to my brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you." Suffering is not the last word. But it is a real word, and the psalmist does not skip over it to get to the praise.
Paul's hymn in Philippians holds all of this together. Christ Jesus, "though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped." He emptied himself. He took the form of a slave. He was obedient to death — death on a cross. The downward movement is total. And it is precisely this descent that God exalts, giving him the name above every name. The logic of the Gospel is not the logic of the world: glory comes through self-emptying, not self-promotion; victory comes through surrender, not domination.
Palm Sunday asks us to hold two things at once: the palm branch and the cross. We are the crowd that shouts "Hosanna" and the crowd that shouts "Crucify." The distance between those two cries is shorter than we want to believe. What changes us is not choosing the right crowd but following the
One who walked through both crowds without grasping at power — who set his face like flint toward Jerusalem, and loved us all the way to the end.
Fr. Matthew Hawkins