If anyone asks…

Jesus was used to questions by now. If anyone asks… He sounds like a parent here – assuming that there is going to be a question and trying to solve it before trouble rears its head. The story ends with him responding to the Pharisees, as if their demand was a question, though it palpably wasn’t. But he answers clearly and with authority.

“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

Christ’s careful way with words. Palm Sunday is ahead of us now with all its words and noise. The churches will be loud with kids and the rattle of branches, and we’ll all be singing hosannas. I am visiting Ottawa this week and on Sunday, I will be with the good people at St Andrews Church downtown. There are a lot of Sunday School kids there, so the parade there will be fun. And their choir is mighty so the praise will be moving. As with Palm Sundays everywhere, there will also be a complicated note in the air – at least for the adults. As we watch the kids troop in and hear our own voices raised in praise, we’ll find ourselves wondering about the Good Friday crowds and the cries to crucify. As we wonder how we might participate in the praise of the palm parade, we’ll also wonder about our role in the mob. These are all the words of the week to come.

But this morning, I want to think about the visuals. Let the words come – the questions and answers and impossible silence. Let’s start our week with pictures.

Here in Luke, there is no image of palms branches. The road before Jesus is covered with cloaks, just like the back of the donkey he rides on. Perhaps this omission is just the familiar scarcity of Scripture. Perhaps, for Luke, it’s an unimportant detail. But it doesn’t matter. I see those palms anyway. They are there. Just as the branches are there earlier in the chapter when Zacchaeus climbs the sycamore tree. It is down through the branches that he looks to see Jesus, and down through the branches that he climbs to reach him.

What are the branches in our own story? Those things that get in our way and block our view like leaves? That lift us up and give us a vista like branches? That proclaim our praise? That mark our place in the crowd?

I’ve been reading Anne Michaels’ book The Winter Vault, which tells the story of the Aswan dam in Egypt. The Nile was dammed to create Lake Nasser, flooding Numbian villages and their date groves. She layers this story with images and memories of the flooding of the St Lawrence Seaway. My sister lives in Long Sault, so the towns and the geography were familiar to me. The impossibly-far-away Egyptian sunshine was brought home for me with images of Ontario fields and floods. But the image that stays with me from Michaels’ book is that of the Numbian evacuation. The people in the villages, leaving date groves which had sustained their families forever, cut branches from the trees. They waved them as they walked away, and they decked the trains with them before leaving the villages to the flood. New towns were built for these people, new and crowded ways of life. The future – an uncertain future – was ahead of them as they walked with their branches, and the past forever left behind.

And seeing all this, I also see the road to Jerusalem. The disciples walking with Jesus would have be imagined the days behind them. The stories by the lake, the quiet days of asking questions and wondering together on the hillsides and under the stars. The days ahead of them were city days, crowded and unknown days. Around them were signs of lush life waving, the lines between past and future, the green leaves.

I see Luke’s image of the way strewn with cloaks, and I wonder about our own cloaks. All that we wrap around ourselves in protection. All that we use as a shelter, a refuge, a barrier between us and others, a sign of status. All that we can remove and lay before Christ. All that Christ can redeem with a touch, a footfall among us.

I see and I don’t see. I wonder and imagine. I describe for my kids, and we wonder together. I would like to ask.