Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Palm Sunday always comes as a surprise. It’s not really, I guess. It’s on the calendar after all. Nonetheless, it always seems like we’re not quite ready.

Mtr Taylor, Ayden, and the Altar Guild ladies, and I were at church yesterday cutting palm branches, getting hangings hung up, and managing decorations. It’s a day on the calendar unlike any other. We prepare for a triumphal, celebratory entrance at the same time we know what it is toward which we process.

We are making our way to the foot of the Cross.

This is the inexorable direction of the Christian year—and the Christian’s year.

We come toward the central action of God’s plan of salvation for humanity and it comes as a surprise whenever we approach it.

Not so long ago, we sang “What Child is This?” on Christmas Eve. We sang it sweetly, lovingly, and full of the tenderness with which one sings to a newborn.

Today, in a custom striking for its incongruity, we will sing it just before the Passion is sung. We will sing it with the tenderness with which one sings of lament and loss.

The hymn marks both the first time this child was laid to rest in Mary’s arms. It also can be read and sung as marking the last time that same child was laid to rest in that same Holy Mother’s arms.

The hymn marks not only that moment of profound tenderness. It also directs our attention toward our own approach to the throne of grace. It calls us to bring our own gifts and offer them to the King of Kings—a King whose crowning comes with the mocking thorns and “Hail, King of the Jews.”

The hymn makes note of that third gift—myrrh, that bitter perfume. It was the gift that pointed toward the end we hear of today.

We will sing “What Child is This?” today. It will come as a surprise and it will jar our sense of the seasons. Yet great grief is always a jarring thing. As great joy shall be, too.

So let us sing today of a King laid to rest knowing all the while that his rest is the moment at which he is most active in the salvation of the world. And it always comes as a surprise.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert