The Rev Malcolm Foy of All Saints Parish Church writes
This Sunday is Palm Sunday. It is the time when the church remembers Jesus's arrival in Jerusalem, with his disciples, to take part in the Passover festival, a great celebration remembering how God had led his people to freedom from captivity by a foreign power over 1,000 years earlier. The Gospel story is to overlay this with another kind of freedom.
As I read the story about Jesus's entry to Jerusalem and the events that followed, leading up to his arrest and crucifixion at the end of the week, I am struck by how quickly the crowds in Jerusalem changed sides. On Palm Sunday the crowds welcomed him with frenzied shouts of praise. At the end of the week, the crowds were baying for his blood.
How quickly circumstances can change. After a general election only a few hours passes between the departure of the defeated Prime Minister from Downing Street and the arrival of the successful candidate. Over the last couple of years many home owners have waited anxiously for news about the bank rate. What in other circumstances would be seen as a small percentage rise has the potential to tip a family over the economic edge.
When we stop to think about how quickly circumstances can change we may react in one of two ways. On the one hand the speed and drastic nature of the change may paralyse us from doing anything at all. On the other hand the same awareness may encourage us to savour the present moment before it is lost. The film, "Dead Poets Society", is set in an American boarding school which oozes tradition for the sake of tradition. The pupils are boys from affluent homes whose parents have mapped out their career path.
A free-thinking teacher is appointed to the staff who sets about ploughing a lonely furrow to transform the learning of his pupils. Rather than simply learning and regurgitating what established authorities have written about literature, he instructs the boys to rip the pages out of their text books.
Then he encourages them to identify and stay with their own feelings and insights about the literature they read. An exhortation from the film is to seize the day! Tomorrow things will have changed and it will all be different.
I suppose, like all things, if taken to extreme, the exhortation to seize the day could lead us to becoming selfish and neglecting the needs of others.
However, I can't get away from the fact that after Palm Sunday and Good Friday, the Gospel story tells us how God seized the day on Easter morning in a way that changed the history of the world.
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