The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young

“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (Mk. 11)!

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E17

Palm and Passion Sunday (Year B) 11 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 24 March 2024

Mark 11:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Philippians 2:5-11

Mark 14:1—15:47

“[T]here is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion.” We saw this in COVID misinformation and today in political speeches about “white replacement,” the “Deep State” and the “stolen election.” Directly confronting people who hold mistaken beliefs only makes them more defensive and resistant. It only strengthens their self-deception. The eighteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) points out that, “It is not easy to correct a mistake that concerns a person’s entire existence.”

What about the illusions that we hold? Is there hope that we might see the truth? For many years I resisted the impulse behind celebrating Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday in the same worship service. I rebelled against participating in the joyful palm procession, singing Hosanna in the highest on the same day that we walk with Jesus through his abandonment, suffering and death. For me these two moods could not reasonably occupy the same space at the same time. Today I see that the purpose of Palm Sunday is to remove our illusions.

In our Cathedral’s north “Theological Reform Window” we have a delightful image of Kierkegaard sitting in his purple suit reading a book. He was born in 1813 and his biographer suggests that he was perhaps one of the first philosophers to write about “the experience of living in a recognizably modern world of newspapers, trains, [buses] window-shopping, amusement parks, and great stores of knowledge and information.”