The Sunday of Forever

A Reflection for Palm/Passion Sunday

Forever

"Who is this?" is the question

Forever is what is at stake

Forever unfolds

Steadfastly unfolds

Unapologetically unfolds

Graciously unfolds

Painfully unfolds

Lovingly unfolds

For us

Unfolds for us

In this moment

Forever

Who is this?

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Today we hold two Sundays in one hand.

We begin with palms — the crowd surging, the cloaks spread on the road, the branches waving, the shout rising from Psalm 118 like something that had been waiting centuries for exactly this moment: Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! It is jubilant and loud and real. The city stirs. Who is this? the people ask, and the crowd answers as best it can: a prophet, from Nazareth, from Galilee. They are not wrong. They are also nowhere near the full answer.

And then, in the same service, we turn the page — and it is already Wednesday, already Thursday, already Friday. This is what Palm/Passion Sunday asks of us: to hold the hosannas and the crucifixion in the same breath, to refuse the comfortable liturgy that lets us go from triumph to resurrection without passing through the week between. The palms are real. So is the cross. Both are part of the unfolding.

Forever unfolds. The poem names it without flinching — not just graciously, not just lovingly, but steadfastly, unapologetically, painfully. This is not a week that resolves easily into any single feeling. Isaiah's servant wakes each morning to be taught, offers his back to those who strike, sets his face like flint — not because the suffering is welcome, but because the steadfastness is. There is a word that needs to be spoken, and it will be spoken, and no one will ultimately be able to declare him guilty.

Paul gives us the shape of the whole thing in what may be the earliest hymn the church ever sang: the one who was in the form of God, who did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, who emptied himself, took the form of a servant, humbled himself to the point of death — even death on a cross. This is what forever looks like when it decides to enter time. It does not arrive with overwhelming force. It arrives on a donkey. It washes feet. It bleeds.

The Psalmist cries from a place of deep distress — my strength fails, my bones waste away, I am a terror to my neighbors — and still turns toward the One whose steadfast love endures. Into your hands I commit my spirit. Those words, first sung in desperation, will be spoken from the cross before the week is out. They are the sound of forever, unfurling all the way to the end of itself, for us.

Who is this? We have been asking all Lent. This week, we find out.

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The scriptures for this Sunday — Liturgy of the Palms: Psalm 118:1–2, 19–29 | Matthew 21:1–11; Liturgy of the Passion: Isaiah 50:4–9a | Psalm 31:9–16 | Philippians 2:5–11 | Matthew 26–27