Palm Sunday, year ‘B’: Into the Thick of the Palms
Featured Contributor: Bill Wylie-Kellermann
The primary Gospel lection for this Palm Sunday observance, like all of the synoptics, fails to make any mention of palm branches in the march from the Mount of Olives to the Jerusalem Temple. They are referenced only in John 12, the alternative reading for Palm Sunday each year. In Mark we behold only leafy branches cut from the fields. It is those to which we will attend, but only after an excursus into the thick of the Palms.
Commentary
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It is disputed, if, or to what extent, Palm trees even grew in Jerusalem. John’s account therefore suggests a certain level of organization and planning for this street demonstration, with this element being brought from afar, most likely up from Jericho. For the feast of Sukkot (Tabernacles/Booths), palms were part of the bundled branches used in the liturgy, but much like ordinary current practice for Palm Sunday, these were shipped in and purchased.
The Palm was a national symbol for Israel. It was minted following the Maccabean revolt as an image on the half-shekel. (Even today the Israeli ten-shekel coin reclaims the image). After the destruction of the Temple, Rome celebrated by its own coin, with Judah lamenting captive beneath a palm. Was Jewish nationalism conspicuously at play in the march? It’s certainly true that nationalism can serve as a form of resistance and source of struggle with empire. Or was it the emblem of a discipleship confusion, one which lingers even past resurrection into the Book of Acts: “Now will you restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) Or even both.
One wonders whether the day will come when, like the demeaning appropriation of Indigenous tribes for sports team logos, we regard the association of certain trees with nations as a similar appropriation. Another way the powers lay claim to the plant community? What do the palms think of their nationalistic deployment? Even the olives, so massively uprooted, with the Palestinian nation? Or are they simply such kin, so beloved of a people, that they’d willingly lend themselves to joint struggle and resistance?
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Organizing and the Spirit’s Spontaneity. The gospel of Mark also suggests an extensive and explicit organizing. There is first the shrewd and discerning choice of using the Passover liberation festival as backdrop for “messaging,” as it were. The time and the hour to go up. But think of prearrangement: the coded questions for securing the donkey which would serve Jesus as a kind of relationship, supporting his nonviolent discipline. Then the primary gospel reading for today identifies the crowd cutting field branches and bringing them ready to town. Either the word is being pushed out for preparations. Or the word is in the air and people are responding with a creative anarchism, spontaneously grabbing the gifts to participate.
Though massively different in scale, these makes me think of Bayard Rustin, brilliant chief organizer for the 1963 March on Washington. Oh, the details. Everything from paper cups to bus parking spaces, lunches and porta johns, signage and trash collection, sound stage and trained marshals. Twenty-one chartered trains pulled into town, a hundred busses per hour though the Baltimore tunnel. He negotiated the internal crisis over the John Lewis SNCC address and enforced the clock on speeches. And still there was uncontrollable room for the Spirit of the people’s gifts and imagination. (See Taylor Branch, Parting The Waters)
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This entrance Psalm of thanksgiving had a liturgical role in the Passover Celebration (and so is rightly reflected in these gospel entry passages), but is even more prominent in Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles/Booths. The shout, Hosanna! Save us! – was sung each morning by the Temple choir. It was here that the liturgical bundles, included the palm branches as named (v.27) were lifted. In the liturgy they were audibly shaken at the thanksgiving acclamation (v. 1) and again at “Save us, we beseech you.” (v.25)
Also announced, and reflected subsequently in Mark, is the cryptic and explosive line, “The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” (v. 22) With ‘stone’ we are introduced to another creature and kin. I write this from Kirkridge Retreat Center in Pennsylvania, where my wife Denise and I, for part of the year, are members of a residential community. The Appalachian Trail runs through the Center lands. It’s rocky rutted path prompt hikers to dub this stretch, “the ankle breaker.” Through the woods run a network of overgrown rills of piled stone – remnants of livestock fences? Down the mountain, adjacent, is Columcille – a Celtic megalith park with standing stone circles, gates and tables, silent stone chapels, all connected by the rock rutted paths.
When Lydia, Kirkridge director, welcomes retreatants to the space she says, “Rocks hold memory. Listening for thousands of years, there is no grief, no pain or sorrow, no joy or celebration which they cannot hold. Trust them. Release to them.” We do.
Local Plants and Public Procession
The people bringing leafy branches they had cut in the fields, calls out to our own “liturgy of the ‘palms.’” For a number of years now, congregations (especially among those of this wild circle) have been experimenting with local leafiness. St. Phillips in Coastal Salish lands, lifts sword ferns; Circle of Hope in Philly uses local juniper; New Life Lutheran Church grabs Poverty Weed, which is native to Dripping Springs, TX. Such like. Think box elder, pine, Queen Anne’s Lace. For the Kirkridge Community in Pennsylvania, I’m thinking pussy willows from by the tarn. With what would you praise locally?
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I do know the right branch for a Detroit procession: one from the ailanthus. As it happens, this was Dorothy Day’s favorite tree. She knew it as the Tree of Heaven, though in Detroit it goes by other names, Ghetto Palm (no less), Weed Tree, and others unprintable. It grows up though urban cracks and rubble – a regular annoyance to householders. Hard to root out, we have two in our backyard I can “harvest” from. Dorothy saw them between tenements or clinging to apartment walls. So, she connected it with poor communities. Fastest growing tree in North America, it readily breaks and falls, but its stems are slender stalks with leaves lining each side. I lift one high.
A word about public procession. The day requires it. In most congregations, if there is bodily liturgical movement today, it is limited to the circling the sanctuary and down the aisle. Yet public is the order of the day. The congregation is best filing out the door. Into the street. Down the alley. Around the neighborhood. Along the path. Plants and branches can even be gathered in motion, along the way. All of Holy Week is public in the most political fashion, and this day not least of all.
It’s worth being mindful that in Anglican tradition, a “parish” was defined by how far a liturgical procession could walk to bless the fields on “Rogation Sunday.” Notice this combination of elements: a human unit of scale encompassing community (based on walkable distance) a connection to earth (the rootedness in planting and harvest), and the accountabilities of earth-based prayer. It’s a geography of prayer. This is not a call to walk the entire neighborhood, but merely to be deeply present in the moment. To join this liturgy with parish responsibility for a bit of earth and her creatures.
Preaching and teaching ideas
Blood as Seed
John’s account of the Passover procession follows the raising of Lazarus and so the plan by the chief priests and Pharisees to put Jesus to death. In the synoptics, the endpoint of march is the action at the currency exchange (though Mark breaks it up with a brief retreat to Bethany). There, it is that action which is the immediate cause of plotting a price on his head.
Palm Sunday falls on the Feast of Oscar Romero, Salvadorean bishop who understood the poor as central to the gospel. He made of his broadcast homilies a decried litany of state violence. He was shot down 44 years ago today while saying mass at the altar. He was buried on Palm Sunday, March 30, 1980. Two weeks prior he said,
I have frequently been threatened with death. I must say as a Christian, I do not believe in death but in resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the Salvadorean people…If God accepts the sacrifice of my life then may my blood be the seed of liberty, and a sign of hope…
The Walking Palm
There is a tree native to Central and South American rainforests scientifically called Socratea exorrhiza, but popularly known as the walking palm, whose multiple roots are like stilts on which it stands. If a larger tree falls upon it, pinning the tree to the ground, it is possible for it to grow a new set of roots out of the side which is free, while the old roots and trunk portion die away. As the new ones grow, they can right the tree, now able to stand once again. Moreover, it is claimed that by a similar fashion it can move toward lighter, sunnier ground, with new roots growing toward, and old ones dying away behind – hence “walking.” Very. Slowly. I delight to imagine the walking palms leading a liturgical procession, after the fashion of Treebeard and the Ents. Slowness become a nonviolent discipline.
I can’t not add that whole forests are walking these days as well. Climate change means that North American maples in their wisdom, are moving north. Seedlings lead the way and old growth elders dies off behind. Much akin to the way of the walking palm.
The Resurrected Date Palm
When the Roman empire invaded what they called Syria Palestina, they met a forest of date palms seven miles wide along the entire Jordon River valley, with trees eighty feet tall. During the siege of Jerusalem leading to the destruction of the Second Temple, Roman military cut down all the trees in Jerusalem and the surrounding area according to the historian Josephus. “Biblical” Date Palms became extinct by the Middle Ages, most likely from destruction of the forests, and a climate change drought of some sixty years. Nevertheless, excavating Herod the Great’s palace at Masada in the 1960’s, archeologists uncovered a well-preserved jar of date pits. Carbon dating placed them from between 155 B.C.E to 64 C.E. The 2000-year-old seeds were kept in careful storage for 40 years. Till at the urging of a colleague, Dr. Elaine Solowey of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the Arava Institute for Environmental studies, set out successfully to germinate several of the seeds. At this point a number of plants have been grown and individually named: Methuselah, Adam, Jonah, Uriel, Boaz, Judith, and Hannah among them. Flowers and now first fruits have been produced.
I had a seminary professor, Rubem Alves, who use to quote an Arab proverb, “The one who plants dates, does not eat dates.” The tree takes a generation.
I think about this gardener in Herod’s court so carefully stashing pits for the future. Seed saving is a kind of holy work. Here, we have an account of a two-millennia effort across generations. They say the new dates are sweet.
Sources and Resources
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1988)
Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time, (NY: Crossroads Publishing Company, 1997)
Arie S. Issar, Climate Changes during the Holocene and their Impact on Hydrological Systems (Cambridge University Press)
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, Seasons of Faith and Conscience: Explorations in Liturgical Direct Action, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008)
Ched Myers, Palm Sunday as Subversive Street Theatre
Judy Steers, Wild Liturgy: Coats and Branches https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2019/04/02/wild-liturgy-coats-and-branches/
Carmen Retzlaff, Leafy Branches https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2018/03/22/wild-lectionary-leafy-branches-sunday-domingo-de-ramos/
Sash Adkins, Plastics as a Spiritual Crisis https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2017/04/06/wild-lectionary-plastics-as-a-spiritual-crisis/
Contributor Bio
Bill Wylie-Kellermann lives where Anishinaabe peoples call Waawiyatanong (where the waters go round) and also on land in Pennsylvania where Lenape people are the perennial spiritual stewards. He is a non-violent community activist and United Methodist pastor retired from St. Peter’s Episcopal, Detroit. He teaches and writes. His most recent book is Celebrant’s Flame: Daniel Berrigan in Memory and Reflection (Cascade Press, 2021).