Palm Sunday - 2025

Sermon for Palm Sunday, Year C
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
The Rev. Andrew McLarty

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is no Sunday quite like this one.

We began this morning with palms in our hands, children (young and older) waving branches, a chorus of Hosannas echoing the cries of a crowd welcoming a king. And before we’ve even had a chance to enjoy it all—we are walking with Jesus toward Golgotha. The same lips that shouted “Hosanna!” now scream “Crucify!”

Palm Sunday contains a dissonance. It’s a liturgy that lifts us up and then drops us into the valley. We’re used to stories with clear emotional arcs. But this one, this one unsettles. It’s triumph and betrayal, glory and agony, palms and passion.

And maybe that’s the point.

Because our lives of faith are never just one thing. They're never only joy or only sorrow, never only certainty or only doubt. They are, more often than not, a mix of contradictions: jubilation followed by disillusionment, faith shaken and restored, love given and sometimes betrayed.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem not on a horse, but on a colt. The crowds rejoice, expecting a military hero, a political savior, someone to liberate them from Rome. But Jesus doesn’t meet their expectations. He doesn’t draw a sword. He draws near to suffering. He doesn’t rally troops. He sits at tables with outcasts and washes dirty feet. He doesn’t overthrow Caesar. He surrenders to the will of God.

And when Jesus doesn’t meet the world’s expectations, the world turns on him.

The crowd’s betrayal is dramatic, but it’s not unfamiliar. We know what it’s like to cheer for something we don’t fully understand. We know what it’s like to love someone when they’re useful to us, and desert them when they disappoint us. We know what it’s like to want a savior who fixes everything without changing us.

But the Jesus we follow doesn't come to fix things for us—he comes to transform us. Not with force, but with fierce, unrelenting love. Love that walks the long, slow road of Holy Week. Love that shares a final meal, love that forgives even as it’s being betrayed, love that carries a cross without turning away.

We must not skip past this week too quickly.

The temptation is always to rush to Easter—to bypass the betrayal, the trial, the whip, the nails. But we can't experience resurrection fully if we don’t first make space for the pain. Jesus didn’t come just to win—he came to suffer with us, to bear the full weight of human heartbreak, and in so doing, to redeem it.

So today, we enter the story.

We hold our palms. We shout our hosannas. And then we walk beside Jesus into the shadow of the cross. Not as spectators, but as disciples.

We walk knowing that his story is our story.
That our triumphs and our failures, our fidelity and our faltering, are all caught up in the drama of this week.
And that God's love holds us through it all.

So let us be brave enough to walk with Jesus this week.
To break bread at the table.
To keep watch in the garden.
To stand at the foot of the cross.
And to wait for Christ to rise again.

Amen.