'The Parade unlike any other'

Two weeks ago the St. Patrick’s parade rolled down the street in front of our church. One hundred and sixteen floats. Cabbages flying through the air. Beads, cups, carrots, potatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, lemons — everything you need for an Irish stew, caught by parade goers lining the street. We sold parking spaces, food, drinks, and restroom passes. Turned the whole thing into a few thousand dollars for NOLA Mission.

Every person standing on that curb had positioned themselves for something. They staked out their spot early, set up their tents, and waited for what they came to catch. That is the way New Orleans parades work. You position yourself. You cheer for what you want. You go home with what you caught.

Palm Sunday was a parade. And the crowd worked it exactly the same way.

Jerusalem was swollen with pilgrims. Passover was days away. The population had swelled from 50,000 to 200,000 people packed into a city already humming with political tension. Many had seen the resurrection of Lazarus not many days before. They went back to Jerusalem telling their friends and family what they had witnessed. Word was spreading fast. A man four days dead, wrapped in burial cloths and four days dead had walked out of a tomb. He was called back to life by a rabbi from Galilee. If Jesus could unwind death itself, then surely he was the one.

The crowd knew another story filling them with expectation of Jesus’ entrance. Two hundred years earlier, Judas Maccabeus had driven the Seleucids out of Jerusalem, reclaimed the desecrated Temple, and lit the menorah that had gone dark under foreign hands. Israel had been free for a hundred years. Grandparents had told their children and grandchildren firsthand accounts of independence brought to an end by Rome. Rome had done to Jerusalem what Antiochus Epiphanes had done to the Temple — occupied the sacred, profaned the holy, and made God’s own city into a monument to empire. The people lining the road knew that story by heart. They had flooded the streets with palm branches for Maccabeus then. They were ready to do it again. They knew which float was coming. They were ready to catch something magnificent.

So they spread their cloaks on the road. They cut branches from the fields. They shouted the words of Psalm 118 — blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord — and in their mouths those ancient words carried a very specific meaning. They were not simply praising God. They were placing an order. They were telling Jesus exactly what kind of king they needed him to be. They had come to catch a revolution.

The problem was not their enthusiasm. The problem was their parade.

They brought their real needs, their real hopes, their real hunger to a real king — and asked him to be what they wanted rather than who he was. They positioned themselves for a king who would fix their circumstances, and they cheered with everything they had to make sure he knew it.

We do the same thing. We come to Jesus with genuine need and real faith, and we stake out our spot for what we came to catch. We cheer loudest when He seems to be moving in the direction of our agenda. And when He doesn’t throw what we came for, we quietly step back from the curb.

This Holy Week, consider what you have positioned yourself to catch from Jesus. Is it what He came to give? Sit with that question before you wave another branch.

Blessings,

Jonathan