High hopes and deep hope

The procession into Jerusalem is gathering momentum. Palm fronds waving, pilgrim songs filling the air. These are mainly poor people — many of them slaves, women, all of them living under Roman military occupation.

This is a particularly tense time. Each year around Passover, with the religious and political fervour of huge crowds arriving to commemorate the liberation of God's people from their oppression in Egypt, the Romans conspicuously increase their presence. A warning to any aspiring revolutionaries not to try anything.

And yet this crowd is caught up in a reckless and conspicuous joy.

Miracles have reportedly been happening where this prophet from Nazareth has passed. Excitement is building. Perhaps this Jesus is the one — God's chosen and anointed king who will liberate God's people again and usher in at last the kingdom of God.

They quote the prophets and the Psalms. King coming on a donkey — check. Palms waved in triumph — check. It's the dream of a nation coming true right before their eyes. A wild, subversive, glorious scene. Full of defiantly high hopes in the face of oppression and threat.

The momentum is unstoppable. And the only question now is: how is Jesus going to make it happen?

The leap we want to make

If we only pay attention to the two Sundays of Holy Week — if we only come to church on these Sundays — we might never be confronted with the difficult answer to that question.

It's all too easy to leap joyously from the hosannas of Palm Sunday to the hallelujah of Easter Sunday. See, the kingdom really was unstoppable! Without pausing under the shadow of a cross.

That's why the church offers two very different liturgies for today, allowing us to mark it either as Palm Sunday or as Passion Sunday — literally, Suffering Sunday.

We have to choose today whether to celebrate the high hopes of Palm Sunday — Jesus takes his rightful place, shout hosanna! — or to walk on with Jesus through an ever-darkening week that culminates in that most terrible of all shouts: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46, NIV).

If we observed Passion Sunday today instead of Palm Sunday, the crowds wouldn't be waving palms and shouting praises. They'd already be waving fists and shouting "Crucify!" And we wouldn't have heard Israel's triumphant prophecy of God's coming king, but the early church's most solemn realisation of what that would in fact cost: "He emptied himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:7-8, NIV).

What high hopes can do

If we only marked Passion Sunday and not Palm Sunday, we might miss something important that the gospel wants to tell us about high hopes.

Despite foreseeing the suffering and grief to come, Jesus clearly encourages the crowd's triumphant joy as he enters Jerusalem. Why? Because he knows exactly how powerful high hopes can be.

High hopes inspire strength and courage. And when expressed like this — in response to loss and struggle — they are a powerful act of peaceful resistance. Because if the people or systems or circumstances that oppress us cannot steal our joy, our defiant faith in God's best for our lives, then they can never truly win.

If our hearts are faint within us today — with the horrors in the news, or whatever burdens we and our churches and our loved ones may be carrying — high hopes may give us the resilience we need to shout our defiant songs of praise and walk on.

When high hopes come crashing down

But if we only mark Palm Sunday and not Passion Sunday — if we don't walk on with Jesus to where this path of defiant joy leads over the next five days, to violence in the temple, tears in the garden, and a cross on Skull Hill — we may miss something equally important about high hopes.

They often come crashing down.

It turns out that Jesus wasn't inaugurating the kind of kingdom, the kind of liberation, that the Palm Sunday crowd had high hopes for. Disappointment turns to resentment, and all the fear of empire and resistance's consequences come crashing back. Palm Sunday's king will be plotted against, abandoned, denied, arrested, tortured, mocked, and executed. The triumphant songs of the kingdom swallowed up in the defeated silence of a borrowed tomb.

The difference between high hopes and deep hope

And yet. This is the heart of the gospel, right here in the tension between the palms and the passion.

Because there are high hopes, and there is deep hope.

High hopes depend on believing that the very best we hope for will happen. Deep hope absorbs the gut punch of the very worst and still believes that love wins.

High hopes shout: everything will be fine! Deep hope says: it may well not be fine. But that's never the whole story. God in Christ is with us even here — especially here, in our darkest places, in our darkest times. Mending, and joy in the morning.

Walking through, not around

And so we keep on trusting and working for the good. We keep on finding joy and beauty in the world — not because our high hopes waft us past or around the broken places of life, the passion places, but because we choose to believe that Christ has walked before us and with us. Always with us, through those places and beyond.

Unless we confront the passion as well as the palms, there can be no deep hope. No transformative "but." No Easter Sunday.

More can be mended than we fear. More can be mended than we know.

This is the clear-eyed promise of deep hope. May we embrace it together — all of it — this coming Holy Week.