Laugh at the Devil

This year, due to the coronavirus, St. Margaret’s Anglican got permission to celebrate Holy Week with the Orthodox according to the Julian calendar, so everything is running a week behind. This is a reflection I was asked to provide for our “Palm Sunday” weekend, Saturday service. 

I don’t like Palm Sunday. It always seems a bit too forced, a bit too put-on, a bit camp really. For over a month Lent has dragged on, making me face my mortality and the problems of sin, evil, and suffering. I read this book by Ben Myers once when I was 18 or 19 that introduced me to Rowan Williams and T. S. Eliot and the “lenten” spirituality they represent, and I’ve kind of loved staring down the barrel of Good Friday ever since. A religion that takes seriously the problem of godforsakeness that we see made manifest on the cross is a religion I can sign on to.

But for some absurd reason this melancholic spirituality that suits me just fine is interrupted by the carnival procession of foliage we call “Palm Sunday.” Why does the church want to remember this? We’ve all heard the tired sermon tropes, “Jesus rides on a donkey instead of a warhorse, wow, so humble!” Or perhaps the focus is on how fickle the crowd is, chanting “hosanna” on Sunday and “crucify him” on Friday. We get it, Jesus is cool, we’re the mob. 

But, it seems to me that these sermon tropes only work because we know the whole story. Palm Sunday is always viewed through its relationship to the rest of Holy Week, the entirety of Christ’s passion and resurrection. And this totalizing view is what makes Palm Sunday so absurd to me. The procession feels like a carnivalesque pantomime of the really serious business of the Triduum. What’s it doing there? Why is Mardi Gras showing its face again right as the drama of Lent is about to give way to the church’s most profound reflection on suffering and evil?

I think what most offends me about Palm Sunday is that, as much as I want to focus on the heavy reflections on suffering that Holy Week has to offer - especially during this pandemic - I’m not suffering at all. Life’s actually gotten better for me, I’m back in Canada, living with my wife and family on my parents farm with lots of food and space to walk around. I have a good internet connection and my studies are absolutely unaffected by all this. Yet millions have lost their jobs, over a hundred thousand people are dead and almost two million are infected with this dreadful disease. Celebrating Palm Sunday this year, accepting any cheap respite from the moral serious of Lent during this “coronatide” unmasks me and exposes my privilege a little more than I want to admit.

But all my efforts at drumming up moral seriousness and false piety are precisely what the carnival processions of Palm Sunday are meant to disrupt. King Jesus is riding in - he’ll deal with the suffering along the way, but that procession already acknowledges the Easter surprise we all know is coming. And it’s precisely this pre-celebratory carnival of Palm Sunday that has enlivened Christian responses to plagues of centuries past. When Martin Luther was asked for advice from a pastor about how to respond to plague in his city, he observed that the Christian response was to laugh at the devil. Prudence as a guiding virtue is clearly the rule of the day for Luther, but after all appropriate precautions are observed, all this plague can do is kill us, and we know that death is the only tool the devil has. So we laugh at him, because the resurrection is coming. We process with palms and make a foolish interruption of our very serious and pious Lent because Jesus has already won. 

Julian of Norwich, another survivor of plague, came to the same conclusion in her time, writing, “For I understood that we may laugh in comforting of our self, and joying in God, for the fiend is overcome.” There are going to be a lot of tears this Holy Week, and throughout the rest of Eastertide, and probably for a good part of the rest of this year. This is good, this is ok, death is the great enemy, and we do right to pray for deliverance from all the devices of death, disease, and the devil. But we can wave some pond fronds. We can hail King Jesus riding in. We can go through the absurdity of Palm Sunday’s carnivalesque rites, and at the end laugh, “for the fiend is overcome.”