Palm Sunday

In the opening chapters of the Bible, it says we're created in God’s image. What’s disturbing, is how often we act and think the other way around, making God in our image. There are many layers to the Palm Sunday story, the day in which Jesus enters Jerusalem and the crowd welcomes him with shouts of “hosanna” and lays down palm branches to line his way. It was a day laced with meaning and caused a chemical reaction between who he was, and who they wanted him to be.

When we designed the Palm Sunday window in a chapel we were building, we captured this tension by showing Jews looking on as he entered, as well as Roman authorities. They represented those who sought a messiah who would fulfill their religious hopes and dreams and those who hoped he would solve Rome’s political oppression. Everyone standing round had visions of who Jesus was, and hoped he would be the God of their own image.

It would be a cute story if it didn’t point a finger so accurately at those of us looking on two thousand years later. Like them, we have created a messiah in our own image, one who fits in our pocket beside our neatly arranged religious hopes and dreams, and one who also endorses our political views, whatever they may be.

As the story tells us, Jesus did not play to the crowd, and they killed him for it. “He’s not a tame lion,” C. S. Lewis once wrote of Aslan. What he meant was, Christ is not tame and will challenge our religious thoughts and dreams, just as he’ll turn the tables of everyone’s political thinking. If he doesn’t, we’ve put the lion into a cage, made God in our own image, and that’s history we should strive desperately not to repeat.