Save Us Now

Mark 11:1-11
Gospel Reading for Palm Sunday (Year B)

“Save us now!”

That is a cry that starts in the heart of peasants in 1st Century Palestine and it hangs in the air circling and reverberating around the globe some twenty centuries later. We still want to be saved; from Rome, from heartbreak, from hunger, from war, from pandemic, from violence, from hatred, from ourselves. And we still cry out.

Often that for which we cry out is not going to save us. In Jerusalem, they wanted a conquering king to overthrow the Empire that oppressed them. They wanted and we want a blow in the cycle of conquering and vengeance that keeps on turning. We still often want an earthly kingdom that will establish rule for people like us. A kingdom that will rule by power, by sword, by gun. We want a leader on a war horse and the eradication of our enemies.

We receive a humble man on a donkey who preached love, mercy, and self-sacrifice. In Palm Sunday we see that salvation does not arrive with the glint of steel and the cry of conquest. Rather it was going to enter our lives with the grieving cry of an innocent man upon a cross and the shocked cry of his followers at an empty tomb. The donkey was a tell, a foreshadowing that this was not going to end the way that the crowd thought it would. Even with all of this hindsight, it doesn’t end the way we think that it will.

Jesus does save us but it is not in a way that we expect. There are times when that unexpected route is like a breath of fresh air. Seeing the absolute mess that the way of the world is, I am glad that the means of divine salvation look different. Yet sometimes these saving ways can seem frustrating. It doesn’t seem efficient. The things from which we need saving linger so much that I confess that I wonder sometimes if we are, in fact, being saved.

The way of salvation was a call to a way of life. And perhaps the reminder of Palm Sunday is that we still don’t quite get it. Many in the crowd crying “Hosanna” didn’t get it. Most of the disciples didn’t get it. The Christian faith is littered with people who claimed to follow Jesus whom didn’t get it. I am among those who sometimes doesn’t quite grasp the salvation that is right in front of my face.

The good news? Well, it’s still Jesus. Calling us to seek God, to seek the good of our neighbor. Calling us to brave compassion. Calling us to neglect power and violence and domination. Calling us out of ourselves. He’s there each and every day ready to save. Even when we don’t get it, he’s there and calling us to this better way. May we see him and believe in him with our heart and our actions. May God save us now.