In my office, there’s a small cross made of palms. It’s been with me for several years. I can’t bear to burn it with the other palms when I make ashes for Ash Wednesday because there’s a story behind it.
Some years ago, on Palm Sunday, a young child approached me after the service and, without so much as a word, handed me the palm cross he had woven from the palms distributed that day. The palms that he had used to create the cross over the course of the Mass had, just an hour before, been raised in triumph as the congregation sang “All glory laud and honor.” We were participating in Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem that had happened thousands of years before, when crowds of zealous people waved palms and welcomed him into the holy city. He rode in rather awkwardly on a donkey, not in typical kingly style. If the people had been perceptive enough, they would have realized that this king was not the king they had been expecting.
In the gift of the small palm cross created by that child, strands of affirmation had been twisted into the sign of our betrayal of Christ. Fronds of ostensible love had been woven into a clear sign of rejection by his little hands. As the Palm Sunday liturgy shows, our quick shouts of approval can so quickly turn into bitter cries of denunciation. This complex mingling of fickle emotions that we relive on Palm Sunday was all represented in the tiny cross that I held in my hands.
But there was something else in that cross, something that the maker and giver of it didn’t know and would probably never know. Just minutes before that child handed me the cross, a close relative of the child had lashed out at me in response to that day’s sermon. The words stung. They hurt because I was in a vulnerable place as we began that Holy Week, and the bitter words caught me off guard. And so, when the child handed me his little gift, I was deeply moved. It was as if God had quietly and powerfully turned sorrow into joy, or perhaps more accurately, woven them together. The palm cross, a tiny sign of the execution of the world’s Savior, became a sign of hope that in the kingdom of God, pain doesn’t have the final word. From God’s end of things, the unwoven palm leaves were the sign of betrayal. They had been disingenuously waved in the air to welcome Christ shortly before his betrayal. But the woven leaves were a sign of God’s eternal love for the whole world. On the cross, pain is mixed with joy, betrayal is forgiven, and division is healed by reconciliation.
There’s a striking reversal of motion in Luke’s account of the Passion of our Lord. Jesus’s disciples have followed him to the Mount of Olives, just as they’ve followed him since Jesus first called them as his own. But as things get darker in this story, the distance between those disciples and Jesus expands. It’s as if the closer we get to the cross, the farther we seem from Jesus. This is the day on which we can’t help but remember our own sinfulness and weakness and our fallible attempts to be faithful disciples. Peter’s hasty acclamation of Jesus as the Messiah disintegrates into three hasty denials of Jesus. We, too, must surely be reminded of our own facile betrayals of Christ.
We must recall the times in which we, like Peter, sat outside in the courtyard before a fire and were identified with Jesus but quickly betrayed our relationship with him. “I do not know him.” Was it embarrassment over being a Christian? Was it something else that caused us to momentarily renounce our adoption as children of God? And when we look at Jesus hanging on the cross in misery, can we see his look of love despite our betrayal, just as he looked on Peter with love as the cock crowed?
Or when we look at Judas, before we judge him too quickly, do we remember our own kisses of peace that morphed into kisses of betrayal? How easily this gesture of affection can be distorted into evil! Or are we with those who followed Jesus from Galilee to the cross, who at the very end, stood at a distance, watching these things, perhaps anonymously, perhaps unwilling to get too close to him for fear of their own lives? We stand willingly here in this church, in this safe place, at the foot of the cross with Jesus. But it’s much harder when we leave this place, in a world where Christianity is judged harshly by its own worst behavior. Maybe there, we’d prefer to stand at a distance, ashamed to be seen too close to the cross, ashamed to acknowledge our fealty to Christ.
All these memories of betrayal must come flooding back on Palm Sunday, where our shouts of “Hosanna” become shouts of “Crucify him!” We can’t run from this bitter reality of our mortal nature. But despite this, there are yet signs of hope. If we keep our eyes on Jesus, hanging on the cross, we see no cold anger at our betrayal. Instead, we behold him hanging between two criminals, both undeniably guilty as charged, unlike the Christ. We see one offender who seems unrepentant, but there’s that other criminal, who shows us something else. With all his guilt and sinfulness, he points to the meaning of the cross. When we’re at our greatest distance from Christ in those moments of sinful betrayal, our Lord is still closer than we can imagine.
There, as the criminal openly acknowledges his sin, he asks for mercy. Nothing more, nothing less. And Jesus forgives. At the apex of human cruelty and evil, Jesus returns not evil for evil but offers forgiveness, love, and mercy. The treacherous palms that were waved to welcome him as king have been woven, by God’s infinite love, into a cross that transforms our spirit of vindictiveness into a response of unbounded love. An instrument of torture becomes the means to eternal life.
Each Palm Sunday, we must also know that no sooner than we leave this building and move on with our lives, our old behavior will return. We’ll unravel the palm cross again. We’ll divide and scatter what God has united. We’ll separate the fronds of love into insidious strands that we’ll wave hypocritically in the air to greet Christ in one breath and deny him in the next.
And yet, God continues to draw us closer. When we’ve taken a cue from that criminal on the cross, when we acknowledge our sin and refuse to cancel the memories of wrong done, then we find ourselves nearer than ever before, at the foot of the cross, where Christ looks down on us in love. In the depths of our sin, we’re no longer at a distance. We’re closer than we’ve ever been, drawn into the arms of the One who came not to call the righteous and healthy, but the broken and sinful. He has turned the strands of our betrayal into the sign of perfect love that can never be undone.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
April 13, 2025