Pathetic Little Procession

Frederick Buechner On Palm Sunday:

"I looked back at the account in Luke of Palm Sunday. It's only there you find it where Jesus, as he approaches the city, looks at it and weeps. Except for the weeping over Lazarus, I don't know anyplace else in the New Testament where he is shown as weeping. And he weeps because he says, "Jerusalem, if only you knew the things that make for peace." And he says, "The time is not far off when your enemies will set an encampment against you, and they will dash you against the rocks and your little ones with you and leave not one stone upon the other, because you did not know the time of God's coming to you."

"Would that you knew the things that make for peace." He could be saying that just as easily today -- would that the world knew the things that make for peace. In a way they do, but they don't somehow live out of those things; they live out of other things, antagonisms and fears and aggressiveness and things of that kind. I thought a lot about Jesus' tears for Jerusalem, how he would be weeping still, again, today for the same reason: "Would that they knew the things that make for peace."

It was a pathetic little procession. I think if you had been there, it wouldn't have amounted to much -- somebody from nowhere riding on a donkey into a city. No television cameras, no hoopla, no band. But nonetheless, as his life went, it was his moment of triumph, and people hailed him as the Son of David and [said], "Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord." Yet people are so fickle, as has often been pointed out. Within a week or less than a week of that, they were saying, "Crucify him."

I can't help thinking of the stories one hears out of Iraq about the Iraqis running out and embracing soldiers and giving them flowers. But three weeks from yesterday, who knows what they'll be doing -- shooting at them from windows as we will be shooting at them. Because the world is mad. It's always been mad -- never known the things that make for peace, never acted out of them ... or rarely."