As our text for this week opens, the crowds have been trying to make Jesus their king for a long while now.  Bishop Craig Setterlee of the ELCA’s   North West Lower Michigan Synod, says, in his commentary on these verses,  that this movement began at least when that crowd saw the sign that Jesus had done feeding five thousand people with five barley loaves and two fish‑‑ they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”

It continued as the crowd’s enthusiasm for Jesus grew. They decided to coronate him on the spot, and Jesus knew it. “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king in their understanding, he “…withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (John 6:14‑15). The crowd wanted to make Jesus their kind of king, and Jesus wanted no part of it.

On the occasion in our text,  the crowd has armed themselves with palm branches and goes out to meet Jesus, singing his praises with an adaptation of Psalm 118:25‑26:   Once again, the crowd wants to make Jesus their kind of king ‑‑ their expected, national, political messiah. And once again, Jesus will have no part of it.

Bishop Setterlee  issues the following caution at this point in the story: “…before we move on to what Jesus does, we do well to pause and reflect on how we seek to make Jesus our kind of king. If we take this narrative seriously, that’s what we are doing when we wave palms on this Sunday.”.   He then muses, “As Jesus passed by, seated on a donkey, did the palm waving stop and the crowd go silent as they breathed in the sight? Or did the crowd wave even more furiously and cheer even louder in an attempt to convince‑‑ even will‑‑ Jesus to be their kind of king?”

And what of us, as we wave our palms,  what is our expectation— we need to be clear that with the palms and hosannas, we  are joined to that first century crowd .

So, the next question is might we dare cease our waving and allow our palms to fall to the ground, as a way of releasing our expectations of the kind of king Jesus should be?   The Bishop closes his comments with:  “Perhaps the best thing we can give up for Holy Week is our expectations.”  At least those which cast Jesus in a much lesser role as king in our lives than he wants to be.

Texts for the week:  Psalm 24; John 12:12-17