The Painted Prayerbook

Image: Where the Way Leads © Jan Richardson

At the opening of her book To Dance with God, Gertrud Mueller Nelson tells the story of an afternoon she spent absorbed in a project at her sewing machine. Her daughter Annika, three years old at the time, dug into the basket of scraps that sat at her mother’s feet. Annika pulled out several long, bright strips of discarded fabric, gathered them up, and slipped away. Gertrud writes than when she went to find Annika, “I tracked her whereabouts to the back garden where I found her sitting in the grass with a long pole. She was affixing the scraps to the top of the pole with great sticky wads of tape. ‘I’m making a banner for a procession,’ she said. ‘I need a procession so that God will come down and dance with us.’ With that she solemnly lifted her banner to flutter in the wind and slowly she began to dance.”

This week we celebrate Palm Sunday, remembering the day when the crowds of Jerusalem offered a procession to celebrate the one who came to live, and walk, and work, and dance among us. Matthew gives us the Gospel lection for Palm Sunday this year. Matthew 21.1-11 tells the familiar story of how Jesus sends two disciples ahead to the village to bring back a donkey for Jesus. (An art historical note here: Matthew’s claim that Jesus rode a donkey and a colt, which probably stemmed from a not-entirely-precise reading of the Isaiah prophecy that he quotes, produced some unusual medieval depictions of Jesus riding two animals at the same time. Not saying he couldn’t have done it, but I think he already had enough going on that he would have avoided that particular balancing act.) Matthew goes on to tell of the crowds: they line the road with cloaks and branches, they go ahead of Jesus, they follow after him, they shout Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven! And to those in Jerusalem who ask, “Who is this?” these same crowds say, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

It is a scene of jubilation, this procession in honor of the prophet. For those who know the rest of the story, however, there is an eerie note to the cries of the crowd. The way of palms will lead to the way of the passion, a path marked by shouts of accusation and a collective demand for Jesus’ death, a path traced in blood.

Amid the hosannas of the festive crowd, I keep hearing a voice that echoes from the other end of Jesus’ story. It belongs to John the Baptist. It is a lone voice, a ragged, fiery, locust-and-honey-drenched voice, a voice that raised its cry long before the crowds began to do so. Early in his Gospel, Matthew tells us of John, and he turns to the prophet Isaiah for words to describe him:

This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'”
(Matthew 3.3, quoting Isaiah 40.3, NRSV)

John had indeed prepared the way for his kinsman Jesus, whom he recognized long before anyone else, even, as Luke tells us, leaping for joy in the womb when his pregnant mother Elizabeth heard the pregnant Mary’s voice. By the time that Matthew tells of a cloak-and-branch-strewn road, John is gone, dead at Herod’s command. What would the Baptist have thought of where this way, so well prepared, was taking Jesus? A prophet steeped in the stories of his prophetic forebears, John would have been well acquainted with the evils that can be visited upon a prophet. Yet he would have known, too, that evil never has the final word.

In the same Isaiah passage that Matthew quotes to describe John the Baptist, the prophet goes on to say this:

A voice says, “Cry out!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower
of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord
blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will
stand forever. (Isaiah 40.6-8)

The word endures. The Word endures. We who stand among the Palm Sunday crowds know that the Word will soon be beaten, mocked, and killed. We know, too, that that is not the end of the tale.

But we have not yet moved on to that part of the tale. This week’s Gospel lection beckons us to linger alongside the road, to lift our voices in celebration, and to ask ourselves a few questions. I find myself wondering, what is the way that I am preparing for Christ? Am I clearing a path by which he has access to my life? Am I keeping my eyes open to the variety of guises that Christ continues to wear in our world? Taking a cue from Annika, what am I lifting up, that God might come down and dance with me?

On the cusp of Palm Sunday, on the threshold of this Week of Weeks: blessings to you, and a pair of dancing shoes.

[To use the image “Where the Way Leads,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

This entry was posted on March 14, 2008 at 3:36 PM and is filed under art, lectio divina, lectionary, Lent, sacred time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.