The Rev’d Ivica Gregurec

Year A, Palm Sunday (2026)

Readings: Matt 21:1-11, Isa 50:4-9a, Ps 31:10-18, Phil 2:5-11, Matt 27:11-54

Dear friends,
welcome to this most holy and most strange of days.

We begin today with joy, with palms in our hands, with voices singing Hosanna. And we end today, if we dare to stay, with the sound of a stone rolling shut across a tomb. It is, I think, the most honest day in all the Christian year. Because life is often like this, I think. We begin something with so much hope. And we do not always know how it will end.

But let us start at the beginning.
In the Gospel of Matthew, we hear that Jesus sends two disciples ahead into the village. He tells them they will find a donkey, and a colt – the foal of a donkey. He says to them: untie them and bring them. And if anyone asks you, say only this: the Lord needs them.
I find these words very moving. Not the Lord commands them or the Lord has the power to take them, but: the Lord needs them. There is something very humble and tender in this.

After that, Jesus rides into Jerusalem, not on a great horse, not like the Roman generals who came through the other gate that same day. There is a scholar, a historian named Marcus Borg (1942 – 2015, USA), who writes about this, that on the same day Jesus entered from one side, Pontius Pilate entered from the other side, on a war horse, surrounded by soldiers, banners and weapons and the sound of empire.

And from the other gate – a man on a donkey. A man from Galilee. A man whose followers spread their cloaks on the road, who cut branches from the trees, who shouted: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Two processions. Two visions of what power looks like. Matthew tells us the whole city was in turmoil. The word he uses in Greek – it is the word we use for earthquake. The city shook. People asked: ‘Who is this?’ And the crowd said: ‘This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee’.
He is not yet Messiah or Lord. Just: the prophet from a small town, riding a donkey.

And then we move to the Passion.
I want to say something about how we read this text. In the tradition of the broad church, in the Anglican way as I understand it, we do not read the Passion as a story that belongs only to us, or as a story that gives us the right to judge others. We read it as a story about the human heart. All of us are in this story. We are the disciples who fall asleep in the garden when our friend most needs us. We are Peter, who is so sure he will never deny, right until the rooster crows. We are the crowd, who one day shouts Hosanna, and who a few days later shouts something very different.

And perhaps, if we are very honest, we are even Pilate, who knows that something unjust is happening, who washes his hands and says: I am not responsible.
How many times do we too wash our hands? How many times do we say: this is not my problem?

Matthew tells us that at noon, darkness came over the whole land for three hours. Darkness at noon. I think this is one of the most powerful images in all of scripture. The sun, which rises every day without asking our permission, which shines on the just and the unjust alike, as Jesus himself once said – that same sun hides its face.

Jesus cries out: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
This is a quote from Psalm 22. And in the tradition of our faith, we believe Jesus knew his scripture. He was praying the psalm that begins in abandonment and ends in trust. Nevertheless, these are real words of real anguish. Our tradition does not ask us to explain away this moment and to make it comfortable. The Son of God who is the Word made flesh cries out in the darkness and asks: where are you?

And this is, I believe, the heart of what we call the Good News. Not that suffering does not happen. Not that God takes away all pain. Sometimes God does not do it, but that God in Christ went into that darkness with us, all the way in and stayed until the end.

Another theologian, Jürgen Moltmann (1926 – 2024, Germany), writes about the crucified God. The God who is not safely above the suffering of the world, looking down, but the God who is in the middle of it, who knows what it is to be afraid, who knows what it is to be betrayed. God who knows what it is to die.

We could ask ourselves: what does this Palm Sunday ask from us?
I think it asks us, first, to be honest. To not skip from the palms to the Easter lilies without walking through what comes between. The church gives us this Holy Week as a gift to come and sit with the darkness, to be with the grief, without need to pretend.

Secondly, I think this story asks us to look at the two processions again. Every day, we make choices. Every day, we choose which procession to join: the procession of empire, of power, of fear, of force, of building walls and washing hands, or the procession of the donkey, of vulnerability, of service, of the one who says not I command, but I need.

The world right now, and I do not need to tell you this, you know it, the world right now is full of people crying out. People who are afraid. People who are hungry. People who are told their lives do not matter. And the question this story puts to us is simple and it is hard: which procession are we in?

There is something I love about the Anglican way of walking through Holy Week. We do not pretend we know everything and we hold things in tension. We say: here is mystery, here is suffering, here is love. We do not need to have all the answers. But we come back, again and again, to the table, to the font, to the word, to each other.

So, let us carry our palms today. Let us shout our Hosanna with full hearts. And let us also be willing to stay through the garden, through the trial, through the darkness at noon, because we trust, even when we cannot yet see it, that the story is not finished.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
Amen.
Hosanna in the highest.
Amen.