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In addition to the standard cast of characters – soldiers, priests, frightened disciples – are hundreds of others just milling about: merchants, people shopping, men on horseback riding by, dogs and children.
It's the artist’s way of indicating that the whole world was there. This was not an isolated event, a solitary man in artful pose. This happened in public, because of the public, for the public. This is religion of the street, of the people, of you and of me. It occurs where we “live and move and have our being.”
Like the great artist he was, Tintoretto captures the very essence of Christian faith; it’s both personal and public, individual and corporate; sacred and worldly, and it calls for us to engage personal belief in the public square, just as Jesus did on Palm Sunday.
Clarence Jordan, Greek scholar, founder of Koinonia Farm, and inspiration for the founding of Habitat for Humanity, never tired of saying that “God is not so much interested in our talk as in our walk.” How we live is of far greater importance than the high-sounding rhetoric of our religious piety. In fact, just a few months before his death in 1969, someone asked Jordan what he would say if the Lord came down and said, "Clarence, in five minutes tell me everything you've ever done for me." Clarence responded, "I'd tell the Lord to come back when he had more time."
Palm Sunday is complex specifically because it’s intensely personal and definitively public. It’s the strongest “both/and” day of the Christian year, and it invites vigorous engagement. You can prepare by reading two passages selected for this week and connecting them to your own story.
Like so many Sundays, we’ll enjoy outstanding music at all services. Mary Kate Sykes, our Pastoral Resident for Education, will be preaching in the Chapel, and I will be in the Sanctuary.
Come, and bring a friend,
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