The Palm Sunday Message I’ve Never Heard…
As part of my journey through Lent this year, I’ve been reading 40 Days of Decrease by Alicia Britt Chole, and in chapter 16, she highlights a moment of guttural sorrow in the triumphal entry. Although I had read it before, it struck me deeply this year, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
As Jesus rode into Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday, amid praises and palm branches, Luke’s Gospel tells us that Jesus wailed over the city (Luke 19:41-44). The Greek word used is klaiō. This word is not used to describe a quiet tear or restrained cry. It’s the deep, guttural, and loud lament. The kind of wailing you’d expect from a father who has just lost a child.
I'm simultaneously drawn to and repulsed this image of Jesus grieving in such a raw way. It makes me uncomfortable. I know it’s because there’s still deeper sorrow in me that feels foreign, wrong, or lacking belief to engage. I still often feel a great resistance to engage my own sorrow in such an unrestrained way.
In a recent story work session I was asked this surprising question,
"Tori, do you know the sound of your wail?"
I almost laughed. What do you mean? I thought. I don’t wail. I swallow my tears. I make my crying as quiet as possible. And if I ever have wailed, it’s only when I was confident no one could hear me.
My storywork facilitator leaned in, gently pressing against my resistance:
“Tori, you cannot only connect to the parts of you that are joyful, confident, and secure. If you want to live fully alive, you must also learn to hear and honor the sound of your wail. To learn to love your cry face. To grieve is to name value thats been lost. Both of these elements of your humanity must be honored and embraced.”
See, good parents know the sound of their babies various cries. Cries of pain sound different than cries of hunger. Good parents also know the sound of their child’s laughter and delight. What would it tell us if a child never cried before their Father? It would prod some curiosity regarding the emotional safety of that relationship right?
I was being challenged to agree with the truth that God delights to respond to my desperate cries for help just as much as my confident shouts of worship and praise. My tears minister to His heart, and invite His comfort as a response.
Yet, somewhere along the journey of my story, I cursed my tears and the sound of my cry. With that cursing, I limit the connection God longs to have with me.
What does Jesus’s wailing say about His security with His father?
No silent cry for Jesus here— he screams his sorrow surrounded by a crowd. He wails over the peace that Jerusalem refuses. “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.” (Luke 19: 42-44)
There is love in this lament. Desperation for His chosen ones to have ears that hear. Many warnings and signs were given, all were refused, destruction was coming for Jerusalem and Jesus weeps over their choice to refuse Him. As Jesus begins his final ascent of obedience toward the cross, He holds confident hope and future joy within His gaze, while feeling the reality of grief in His present.
Jesus’s grief is not regarding His own shortcoming. It’s not a repentant sorrow like we experience in the midst of our failure. This sorrow names the brutal truth of the failures of others and consequences that followed.
Grief As A Protective Strategy?
In my time with God the last few weeks, I’ve been drawling close to the picture of Jesus’s weeping and wailing face on the road to Jerusalem. The spiritual directors in my life often encourage this kind of meditative and imaginative prayer. It’s new to me, but stunning in its effect and depth to change me.
This form of prayer is different than asking God for things or using our words to describe God. That is a good prayer practice. But this form of prayer is more presence oriented. What would it be like to come up next to the donkey on the road to Jerusalem, behold the tear stained face of Jesus, and listen to his cry of lament?
2 Corinthians 3:18 tells us that the process of transformation in us happens when we behold God’s glory with an unveiled face.
Because of Jesus, we have direct access to God’s presence. We have been brought back to the garden in the beginning where we can walk, talk, and commune with God in loving and intimate relationship with Him. No longer separated by sin, we can behold God’s glory face to face.
We always become what we behold.
Because what we behold shapes what we believe. What we believe shapes how we behave, and how we behave determines who we become.
So, if we want to become like Jesus, do we only behold His victorious and joyful faces? Do we only behold his miraculous healings or kind gestures? Or do we also behold his anger, sorrow, pain, heartache, and suffering too?
There is no room for choosiness when it comes to transformation.
Alongside this picture, I’ve been meditating on this well known verse:
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)
I called a friend last week who is navigating a long infertility journey. She’s endured multiple miscarriages, prayed relentlessly for life in her womb, and has faced disappointment after disappointment. She is bearing death in her body every month while hoping for life to come. Everything in me wants to rage and wail toward God with all my questions. Why, God? Why is she still suffering? Why haven’t you fulfilled her good request?
My friend told me she feels as if joy is unreachable and that the enemy is attempting to steal it completely. It’s a dangling carrot leading her on, but her present reality is pervasive grief that feels unbearable. She doesn’t want to feel it anymore. Yet, she still moves forward trusting that God is writing and perfecting a story that includes the joyful hope of a child in her future.
Maybe my friend is right. Maybe the enemy is stealing her joy. Or, maybe the joy is set before her. It’s not her current reality now, grief is. Jesus didn’t belittle the weight of His grief on His way to the cross and He isn’t asking her to either.
It got me thinking about the role grief plays in the process of protecting our integrity, hope, and obedience.
I would argue that Jesus’s engagement of grief and his willingness to invite those closest to Him into His grief hold it with Him, was part of what protected Him from the temptation of self-protection. This vulnerable intimacy kept his eyes focused on the goal, and His feet moving toward the cross.
Jesus endured the cross because of the joy set before Him. But we see in the details of Jesus’s last days that the coming joy was pursued through a process of grief. To grieve is to hope for a joy that is coming while honoring the pain you are presently enduring.
In his final days we witness…
Jesus wailing over Jerusalem.
Jesus communing with deserters and betrayers around the communion table.
Jesus’s warning to Peter and Judas.
Jesus’s dark night of the soul in the Gethsemane amidst sleepy friends.
Jesus being sentenced while Barabbas is released.
Jesus standing silent before Pilot.
Jesus’s beating, mockery, and torture.
Jesus’s heavy cross.
Jesus’s cry to His father in heaven, “Why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus surrendering His final breath.
Jesus was not only willing to engage His sorrow, he kept inviting others into it with Him, then He made sure it was recorded so we could be invited into too.
There’s no sugar coating in his final days. No turning this devastation into inspirational speeches. Jesus sheds tears, he wails, he sweats blood, he gives warning, he stays silent, and - in doing so - he protects His resolve to submit to the will of His father.
Present grief, future joy, and relentless obedience.
Teach Us To Grieve
When I guard against grief, I isolate. But my isolation doesn't always look like being physically alone. For me, isolation looks more like fixing people's problems, micromanaging and busyness. I may be around people. I could even be teaching people, helping people, but I do it in a way that keeps me in control and positions me as the expert — internally protecting myself from vulnerability through behavior modification.
Here's a real life example.
After a disagreement with a client during one of our three-day trainings last year, I felt myself arming up with defensiveness and becoming hyper aware of the potential threats of more frustrating drama in my workplace.
So, I stepped outside my role and began micromanaging in areas that were not my responsibility. Having conversations, voicing criticism, and doing “damage control.” Truth was, I was making things much worse.
Instead of working together as a team, I moved back toward a familiar traps in my story that proclaim the message, “If it’s going to be it’s up to me!”
A friend I work with took me aside and asked me more about why I was responding the way that I was. I was a embarrassed, guarded, and frustrated at first. But, I eventually softened to receive this kind and challenging love from my friend.
When I did I realized what was happening and through tears said, “Oh man, I'm grieving…. or rather, I’m resisting my grief.”
In the moment that followed I named truthfully what was happening beneath the surface of my behavior…
I'm grieving the loss that comes with failing and disappointing someone.
I’m grieving the peace this individual is refusing through their blaming and cynicism.
I’m grieving that my impulse to fix people is still being burned out of me.
I’m grieving the story that shaped my belief that if everyone else around me is happy and secure, I can feel safe.
This moment of curios and kind exposure from my friend opened my eyes to see the grief I was avoiding and how quickly I turned back to the familiar self-protecting behaviors that lead me to work for my worth rather than from it.
The reality I had to accept was, I could do everything right and I still could not control the thoughts, opinions, or behaviors of others. They could pay for our trainings, attend, and still leave bound to their agreement that God can’t free them.
My story was showing up really big in my impulsive reactions in this circumstance, but I could not see it by myself. We don't heal by knowing what to do and always doing it right, we heal through rupture and repair.
This is what Jesus was offering in His example in His final days. His sorrow, his challenge, his warning, and ultimately his own submission to the process of grief and suffering opened the door to repair for his disciples then and for us now.
What is our right response to this? We receive His kind rebuke. We unveil our faces. We shed tears. We receive His love. We revel in the glory and mercy of God. We are transformed. We live for an eternal joy set before us.
So, before this loving friend, the tears flowed and instead of choking them down, I unveiled my face. I let the tears fall to give voice to the grief I was avoiding and name how I participated. Through this, God illuminated the path of repentance to bring me back to connection with Himself, myself, and the others around me within the boundaries of His love.
Stop Resuscitating What Needs To Die
We often feel pressure to rush to Resurrection Sunday, to stay in the joy, to avoid the sorrow. But Jesus invites us to all of it—the rejoicing and the weeping.
Turns out, messy grief is not a sin. It’s usually the avoidance of our sorrow that leads us to the familiar traps of sinful self-protection that keeps us far from people and from God.
I once heard someone say they know they have the presence of the Holy Spirit in them because they know when they grieve the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4:30).
A friend of mine recently asked me to go to coffee with her because she needed encouragement. Sitting across the table, she began saying how the enemy was torturing her with the things she was guilty of. When I asked her for more details around what she was being tormented about, she explained some historical failures she was currently repeating in her life right now. Everything in her was groaning with the grief of her guilt. The Holy Spirits conviction and sorrow was loud within her. But she was resisting humility, honesty, and her hiding was not only creating consequences for herself but for her family as well.
All the while, she was doing everything in her power to avoid responsibility and find a way to make things right without owning what she had done.
For Jesus, his grief was naming the harm done against Him and His father. For us, our grief must not only name the harm done to us but also the harm done by us as a result.
Brené Brown's definition of shame, in contrast to guilt, is that shame is the feeling of, "I am bad". Guilt, on the other hand, is associated with the feeling, "I did something bad.”
My friend was confusing the two of these realities. God was calling her to let her pride die so she could receive mercy and experience resurrection.
David describes this sort of sorrow in Psalm 32 saying, “When I refused to confess my sin, my body wasted away, and I groaned all day long. Day and night your hand of discipline was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water in the summer heat.”
This was not the hand of the enemy against her, it was the merciful conviction of God. She needed to weep before God, her family, and for the story that set her up to respond in such a destructive way. Such a response would be so healing for her and her family.
But instead of accepting responsibility and choosing repentance, she blamed the enemy for shaming her when God was lovingly revealing her guilt. Avoidance of grief makes us susceptible to that kind of deception. Truth is rejected, and we are bound to false freedom that glorifies being right over having right relationships with God, others, and even ourself.
When our spirit is moved to lament, it’s always an invitation back to hope, repentance, and redemption through the process of grief. Our sorrow names a hope we are desperate to see fulfilled.
David describes the relief of his grievous confession like this, “Finally, I confessed all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide my guilt. I said to myself, “I will confess my rebellion to the LORD.” And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone.” (Psalm 32:5)
What proceeds resurrection? Death.
We want resurrection Sunday without the death of Friday and the mysterious middle of Saturday. Jesus could have died and immediately resurrected but He didn’t. He was in the tomb until the third day. Could it be that He is inviting us to embrace the wailing waiting that grieves what has died before he brings resurrection power? How would this deepen the work resurrection brings?
If my friend ever chooses to confess her sin, accept grace and mercy, and begin healing in her story, she will be invited into a process to engaging the mystery of Saturday. To understand the harm in her story that shaped her reaction to hide and lie. To move toward truth, love, and freedom and away from falsehood and self-protection.
She must choose to lose her life to find it and follow God into the valley of the shadow of death to meet His resurrection power face to face. I hope she does.
Avoiding grief moves us to resuscitate what needs to die.
Grief allows what has died to be honored and laid to rest.
You may or may not know this about our God, but he delights in bringing dead things back to life.
So I ask you…
How are you transformed in beholding a wailing and weeping Jesus?
Is there a message of peace you are protecting yourself against?
What has been stolen, broken, or lost in your life that grieves the heart of God?
Will you unveil your cry face before Him and others to name what has been lost what you are hopeful for?
This Palm Sunday, may you be moved to follow Jesus’s example to engage the grief that invites resurrection power.
For Eternity and Until,
Tori
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