Weekly Reflection – The Messiah We Have

 The taste of hosannas is still on my lips,
the smell of the palms as they patter against
the cloudless blue sky of Jerusalem’s day
when David’s own scion comes riding a colt 

and prophesy seems to arrive as we hoped …

As we prepare for the most solemn week in the Christian calendar, the first section of David Hirt’s poem, Palm Sunday, helps us once again to recall that Holy Week begins with a note of triumph and of hope. Jesus is hailed as the Messiah, God’s anointed one. He is in the line of the great King David (‘David’s own scion’) and is eagerly expected to deliver the Jewish people from foreign bondage, ushering in a new golden age. But it does not take long for matters to take a much darker turn. Less than a week later Jesus is put on trial for his life, condemned, and crucified. He is not the Messiah the crowd had hoped for.

Holy Week is shot through with reversals: an enthusiastic crowd becomes a vengeful mob; one of Jesus’s inner circle of disciples denies any knowledge of him; Jesus, who has been greeted as a king, is condemned just days later to a criminal’s death; a thief who recognises his sinfulness is assured by Jesus of his place in Paradise. And at the heart of all the tumultuous events of Holy Week is the one whose power is made perfect in weakness: the Messiah whose cruel death will bring to birth new life, the Messiah we have – now and for all eternity.

With love and prayers,
Dean Simon