Palm Sunday 2022: Silencing truth

Luke 19:28-40

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

According to Luke's Gospel, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and people shout, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" But right away, some of those with religious power in Jesus’s day tried to silence the truth that Jesus lived and taught, the Living Truth that is the Christ. 

History shows us that those in power will go to great lengths to hide the truth if the truth might get in the way of what they want. Sometimes they silence the truth directly, by forbidding speech — “Teacher order your disciples to stop” — or censoring the written word. Often there will be active promotion of the opposite claim, the lie, in a way that makes people question the truth. Russia’s campaign at home to convince people that Russian soldiers are conducting a “military exercise”, not a war, combines the tactics of forbidding the truth to be published or spoken with an advertising campaign. 

In the United States, the truth can simply be buried when major media outlets ignore it. On Wednesday this week climate scientists around the world protested to being attention to the urgent message in the IPCC report that was released on Monday. You may not have heard about this, as it was covered by few major news outlets. I knew about it because I follow climate scientists on social media. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote a moving piece for The Guardian about the frustration — the desperation — of trying over and over again to get us to pay attention to the facts about climate change that should be spurring us to immediate large-scale action. How do we counter indifference and purposeful silence?

Jesus said that if his followers who were calling out “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” were silenced, all of creation down to the stones, the earth itself, would cry out. Nature has been crying out close to home for Americans this week, with another round of violent storms in the southeastern United States and dangerously high winds and wildfires in the Plains. 

Many people affected by these storms won’t connect them to climate change, and it’s not possible to connect any particular weather event to climate change. What we do know is that overall, warmer global temperatures result in the sort of instability that products violent storms and high winds. And what I’ve discovered in talking with people who aren’t particularly attuned to climate change is that they do know that something is different, something is “off”. Older people are eager to tell you what they have observed about changes in storm patterns and planting seasons and bird migrations in their own lifetimes. The people I talk with might not say the words “climate change”, but because they observe what happens outdoors, they are aware of climate change on some level. 

The hymn “My song is love unknown” (#458, The Hymnal 1982) breaks my heart open every year as I listen to music during Holy Week. The words, written by Puritan minister Samuel Crossman in the 1600’s, name the mix of grief and love in the Passion Gospel that is typically read after the Liturgy of the Palms in Episcopal Churches. The third verse of the hymn says:

Sometimes they strew His way,

  and His sweet praises sing;

resounding all the day

   hosannas to their King.

Then 'Crucify!'

    is all their breath,

 and for His death

    they thirst and cry.

We often act irrationally when we are grieving. We deny the grief, even the truth of the cause of the grief, at the same time that our knowledge of the grief and loss we are denying runs deep. 

As Holy Week progresses, we turn liturgically from the hosannas of Palm Sunday to the demands for Jesus’s crucifixion, and to his trial, the mocking and torment, the carrying of the cross, and the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christ, the incarnation of truth and love. As the story continues, the truth is not completely lost. One of the men crucified beside Jesus, the centurion keeping guard, and the women who had followed him from Galilee and stayed where they could stand in witness all see and acknowledge the truth. The story we tell during Holy Week can help us see more clearly what is happening now in the world around us and discern how to serve in the name of Christ at this weighty moment in history.