Palm. Sunday. Spring.

It is early spring and the wild flowers are in bloom.
It is also Palm Sunday with a sense of portending gloom.

Palms. Raised and waved in adulation and admiration.
Hailing a king who will drive away the oppressors.
Shouting out to the Messiah whom they remembered
Feeding them with a few loaves and fishes.

Palms of hands. Now raised in praise and acclamation.
The same palms will hit the sacred face in condemnation.
Then raised in angry cries for his crucifixion.
And then palms will lovingly apply the spices and oils at his burial.

Branches. Cut to acclaim and praise.
Now with thorns and wound into a crown.
Placed on the head of the man who has let them down.
He saved others but himself he could not save.

Spring. Nature is coming back to life after a wintry death.
The meadows are carpeted with flowers.
The trees and the plants are alive with blooms.
The same colors augur death in Autumn.

How thin the line between acclaim and condemnation.
How the same colors enliven the coming of life in Spring
And its coming death in Winter when the leaves fall.
How we ever straddle between a thin line between life and death.

Between the colors of spring and autumn
Are the heat of summer and the desolation of winter.
Between the triumphal entry to Jerusalem and the resurrection
are the passion, crucifixion and the death on the cross.

My life is a tapestry of rich and vibrant colors,
Framed by wood from the branches I have grown.
Even as I approach the autumn of my life and the coming winter,
I know that spring will come again, this time in eternity forever.

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
~ Psalm 22

When the great crowd that had come to the feast heard
that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem,
they took palm branches and went out to meet him, and cried out:
“Hosanna!
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,
the king of Israel.”
Jesus found an ass and sat upon it, as is written:
Fear no more, O daughter Zion;
see, your king comes, seated upon an ass’s colt.
His disciples did not understand this at first,
but when Jesus had been glorified
they remembered that these things were written about him
and that they had done this for him.
John 12:12-16