You can see it in your mind. The aftermath of a parade. Everything that gets tossed to the ground and forgotten after the excitement and hoopla is over. Everyone has scattered.
In my mind, I envision a woman, we don’t know her, or maybe we do, but she’s slowly walking the parade path, picking up the palm branches that were just yesterday waved in excitement and anticipation as the guest of honor came into town. The literal dust has settled. It’s quiet. Eerily quiet. Lonely almost. The energy has shifted. There’s something heavy in the air, but she doesn’t know what it is.
No one knew what was ahead.
Holy Week. It’s what Christians call the week before Easter. Palm Sunday through Saturday. We often hear this phrase, “Enter in to Holy Week”. What does this mean? What are we supposed to do? You leave church on Palm Sunday, come home and have lunch, then start planning for Easter dinner, making sure Easter baskets are ready, and…it is a normal week after all for work, school, etc. We still have sports, and practice and I have to go to the store to get all the things and…….woah, woah, woah……stop.
Breathe. Do it, actually take a deep breath. Maybe 2.
Take yourself back to the woman cleaning up palm branches after the parade. Imagine you are her. By yourself. Not knowing. Smiling to yourself as you think about how exciting it was to watch Jesus ride past you down the narrow path.
But here’s the thing. We DO KNOW. We know where this story goes. That the calm right after the parade would last for a moment, and the storm was coming…fast.
So when we think about “entering into” Holy Week. It means that we slow down, we ponder, we read the Word, we get still, maybe we talk to Jesus a little more, knowing we haven’t been doing that great of a job of it lately. We make a priority of all of these things to bring this unimaginable series of events into our hearts, to feel the weight of it, to allow it to get into our soul and change us. Draw us into the wonder and tragedy and beauty of our salvation story.
As I thought about the words, enter in, I knew there was somewhere I remembered this phrase…from a song. A Christmas song.
“O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin and enter in;
be born in us today.”
This is it. This week is the promise. And it’s hard to watch, isn’t it? It’s hard to enter in. It would be a whole lot easier to hop from Palm Sunday and turn on the blinders until Easter, it would….it really would. But, not allowing this time, this in-between time, the darkness and heaviness, the betrayal, the shame, the anguish, these days leading up to the resurrection, they are part of us, part of the plan to save our undeserving souls.
Enter in. Sunday’s coming.
