Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: Betrayal

As a kid I had a love-hate attitude toward Palm Sunday.

What I loved were the palms themselves, the perfect instrument for tickling my sister’s nose, or, depending on my mood, jabbing her in the neck. I loved, too, that we’d head over to Nana and Papa’s house after Mass, where we’d eat chocolate-frosted donuts from Donut Dip and watch my grandfather weave the supple yellow-green fronds into crosses.

The part of Palm Sunday I hated was the Mass itself, because we read the dreaded Passion, the interminable story of Jesus' crucifixion. It was long and boring, and we stood for the entire reading, shifting from foot to foot and leaning heavily on the pew.

I was always shocked to witness my mom repeat the words, “Crucify him. Crucify him. Give us Barabbus instead,” with the rest of the congregation. “How could she?” I’d think, horrified by what I perceived as my mother’s betrayal of Jesus. I refused to speak my required part, clamping my lips tight when we got to the courtroom scene, convinced that I was the only honorable Catholic in the bunch.

Part of me hasn’t entirely abandoned that self-righteousness, even thirty years later. When I read the scene in which Jesus rides in to Jerusalem on the donkey, the bystanders laying palm branches at his feet and singing his praises in joyful expectation, I’m unnerved by the disparity between this triumphant entrance and the violence and abuse that quickly follows.

“How could they dismiss him so easily?” I wonder. “How could they turn against him so quickly?”

I’d like to think I wouldn’t have reacted the same way. I’d like to think, just as I refused to condemn Jesus when we performed the Passion in Mass as a kid, that I would have been one of his few, loyal followers until the bitter end.

But I’m kidding myself.

Sometimes God doesn’t act or respond the way I want him to, or the way I expect him to. Sometimes I wonder why he’s not changing a particular situation in my life, or not answering a specific prayer. Sometimes I get angry, frustrated or disappointed with God. My trust in him falters; my faith wavers. I turn my back against him.

Even today, two thousand years later, even when I know how the story ends, I’m still capable of betraying Jesus. I’m still capable of turning from praise to protest. My crucifying may be metaphorical, my abandonment may occur in my heart, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

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