Allow me to do a bit of projecting this morning, always a risky business from the pulpit. The other morning, at about 6:55, the windows in our house began shaking. Now I would like to say that I had been awake for several hours in reflection and study, but that would not be quite accurate. 

Fortunately, we knew what the problem was – or at least the cause of the shaking. For several weeks or more, construction workers had been working on the street where we live. We learned that the work will continue through the summer – news that delighted us! – sending dirt flying, windows shaking yet even more and creating all sorts of traffic flow problems. One day last week a large piece of construction equipment was parked in our front yard – had the keys been in it, one of us might have driven away with it. 

And since this construction reality will be such an integral part of our lives for a while, I have been searching for the right homiletical and metaphorical moment to share this all with you. And here it is – Palm Sunday, and the road, and the journey. 

The road from Bethphage to Jerusalem is about two miles. But the distance is so much greater than that – for us, for those who would follow Jesus then and now, for Jesus himself. 

All along, Matthew’s gospel has been predicting this moment. All along, Jesus has been doing things and saying things particularly contrary to religious convention. He has been associating with the wrong people. He has been healing. He has been teaching quite radical things, radical, for the most part, because they call the people back to the foundations of their own faith – compassion and justice and righteousness. 

This has most certainly caught the attention of the religious authorities, those charged with maintenance of the proper religiosity. All along Jesus has been dropping hints of his fate, his destiny, and all along the disciples have been missing the point, serving as surrogates for all of us who do not always get it. 

So while the road is only about two miles, it is so much longer than that, filled with potholes and prophecies, filled with detours and disappointments, filled with joyful moments of acclamation and the most earth-shaking moments of despair and rejection and abandonment.

It is not as if that metaphor for road and journey is a new one. We remarked this week that we in our household were best qualified to judge the animated movies under consideration at tonight’s Oscars. Having seen “Monsters, Inc.” once and “Shrek” several thousand times, certainly the theme of journey and trial and new discovery is present. And I dare say that movies like “Lord of the Rings” and “Gosford Park” and  “A Beautiful Mind” and, somehow, even, “Moulin Rouge,” have something of that sense of journey, of traveling to something new and different and better. 

We have things like the road to recovery and the road to the Final Four and “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” ingrained in our cultural consciousness, do we not. And yet the dynamic is somehow different on this Palm Sunday, which makes the road on this day, and the journey it embraces, at once so much different and so much more. 

Jesus knows what is coming. The rest of us do not. He sends his disciples ahead to find an animal, a beast of burden, upon which he will ride into the city to fulfill Old Testament prophecy. The certain inevitability of all this begins to play itself out ever more clearly and profoundly. The animal, or in Matthew’s case, the animals, plural, are found. And Jesus enters the city, amidst waving palm branches and cries of “Hosanna,” which means many things, including “save us.” Save us. 

Part of the crowd is absolutely jubilant, we are told. And another part is less so, we are also told. They are, rather, in turmoil, a sign of things to come.

Harvard preacher Peter Gomes writes: “You may be aware that that this Sunday has two titles, those of Palm Sunday and the Sunday of the Passion. There is that festive frenzy of the palms, that marvelous chaos which we organize every year…the mood with which many of us were brought up: a festive dress rehearsal for an Easter triumph. There is a second mood as well…the solemn side of the day, and it is almost unbearable in its anguish and pathos.” (Sermons, page 69)

And so we really do embrace two roads this day. Actually, the story would tell us that we reside at the curbsides of each road. We wave our palms, caught up in that festive frenzy, shouting hosanna and singing those most excellent Palm Sunday hymns. And but hours later, we will be singing different hymns. We will be part of that same crowd, to be sure, but our mood will change – “crucify him!” It all leaves us rather breathless. Matthew tells us that the whole city was in turmoil, and we can well understand that. 

The dynamic of this road, and the journey it embraces, is somehow different. Jesus knows. Though it plays havoc with church planning, and offers the possibility of a snowy Easter in Rochester, I am grateful somehow that Lent and Holy Week follow so closely on the heels of Christmas this time around. It serves as a clear reminder that the same Isaiah who prophesied that “to us a child is born, to us a son is given” also said that the servant will be “despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity.” 

How can this be? Yet Jesus knows. He knows more clearly than any of us where he is going and what it will take to get there. He knows that the journey is much longer than the two miles into the city. He knows that the momentary adulation will fade away. He knows that even as he gathers his closest followers around him for prayer in the garden that they will fall asleep. He knows that Peter, the rock, the one upon whom the church will be built, will betray him, three times, even, in the face of questioning. He even knows that one of them will hand him over for blood money. He knows all this. 

And we do as well, we who live on this side of the story. That does not mean we should not enjoy the high moments of this day – we should. They are every bit as much of the story as what is to come. But we should wave our palms and sing those excellent hymns with an awareness in the corners of our psyches and spirits that this road, somehow, leads to a different journey. 

And that awareness should include the recognition that we are part of the crowd at all of the places where Jesus shows up. We are with him when he teaches and heals. We are with him when he preaches sermons that inflame the religious authorities. We are with him – yes, we are the ones waving palms and putting down our cloaks when he enters the city in triumph. 

And we are the ones in turmoil. We are residents of that city which is deeply shaken by all that he has to say and all that he has to offer. And we will wander with him even farther, to that meal, to that arrest, to that mockery of a trial, to the foot of the cross. We will shrink away with the disciples do. And we will overhear the accounts that that faithful little band of women hears. 

As much as it is his road and his journey, we share it, we are his followers. And though we know its full and final destination, we pause with him, at the side of the road, to see what lies ahead. 

We know, because we have been privileged to hear the story, to have it read to us as children and now to live it out again in these days. We know the story; in some ways we are too familiar with it. We know that his destiny, and therefore our destiny, lies beyond passion and beyond tragedy. But we know, unlike those who assemble Hollywood movies for us, that the destiny is not an easy one, or one realized without great loss. And we know, somehow, that the triumph that redeems is much different, much greater, than the athletic triumph of cutting down the nets after a big win. 

A backdrop to this whole story is in full play this morning – the people wanted a messiah, a king, who would take on the political establishment and religious establishment and transform the practices of temple and government. Rather, this messiah, this king, transforms so much more. 

It is but a two-mile road, and the journey is made easier on the back of a donkey. And yet the road goes on, and on, and the journey to transformation and resurrection, which we will celebrate in one short week, leads us past an upper room meal and a garden arrest, a sham of a trial and death on a rocky hill. 

For the moment, the city, and we, are in turmoil. For the moment, we wave our palms, not in denial of what is to come, but in glad embrace of it. It is our story as well, and it invites us to share in that high, human drama. That is what we shall do this day, in the fullness of the story – singing and waving palms and throwing down whatever we can find to call this one our king. 

It is but a two-mile road, to be sure. But the journey is forever longer and forever more – the journey from this day to Thursday to Friday to Sunday, the journey whose first tentative steps we take here, now, and the journey that leads us to startling discoveries we could never imagine. Hosanna indeed. Blessed is the one that comes in the name of the Lord. Amen.