It must have felt a lot like love. The adulation. The admiration. The adoration. To see people tearing off their cloaks and laying them in the street before you. To feel the gentle breeze of freshly cut palm fronds waved along your way. To sense the fever of the crowd as they invest you with their hopes and dreams. To hear cries of Hosanna and know you are being called a savior. In many ways it was a scene fit for a king.

He wasn’t Elvis, this Jesus, but a king he was. King of Kings, we say, and Lord of Lords. Son of David. The Anointed One—Messiah. He rides triumphantly into Jerusalem to claim his throne from the powers of darkness.

But he knows something in his soul that few of us want to admit. As the songwriter Leonard Cohen put it: Love is not a victory march/It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.[i]

That phrase a broken hallelujah haunts me, as the whole song does, as the whole Palm Sunday drama does. Hallelujah is the emotional and liturgical cousin of hosanna. And Jesus must have sensed as he rode into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey instead of a steed that his entry that day was no victory march. Oh, we know now that it ended in victory—but this would be a victory disguised as defeat. Jesus’ death and resurrection conquered the forces of evil and the grave by first becoming victim to the forces of evil and the grave. We learned something in all this about the way love wins a victory. The hallelujahs and hosannas of love’s victory marches are always touched by coldness and brokenness.

We practice this in our churches when we bury the “alleluias” for Lent. You may not notice, but, during the six weeks of the season that leads up to Easter, we don’t sing songs that include the alleluia. (Alleluia, by the way, is simply the Latin form of the Hebrew hallelujah.) We don’t sing alleluia because we spend our time paying attention to the coldness and the brokenness in the world and in ourselves that gave cause to Jesus’ act of self-sacrificing love for us. Too often we skip from Sunday to Sunday in our churches, pretending that every Sunday is Easter Sunday, every Sunday a reenactment of resurrection, every Sunday an unbroken hallelujah. And the week we call Holy Week has gotten that way, too. Instead of laboring through Holy Week with all its betrayal and brokenness, instead of following Jesus through his Last Supper and carrying our crosses with him on the road to Calvary, we leap from the Hosannas of Palm Sunday to Hallelujahs of Easter.

That’s not love; it’s infatuation. Love descends into hell for the sake of the beloved; infatuation takes the elevator. Jesus loved us enough to go through hell for us. And that’s why we’ve taken to calling this Passion Sunday as well as Palm Sunday. That’s why our texts come from chapters 21 and 27, from Jesus’ fame to his infamy, from his celebrity to his indignity. We have to come to grips with the difference between what we want in exchange for our love for him and what he gives us in his love for us without regard for what we do for him.

As ridiculous as this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale is, it reveals something about the way the world looks at love. It has more to do with what we can get from one another than what we will give. It has more to do with cost-benefit analysis than with laying down our lives for the ones we love.

From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. By Friday, Good Friday, after Judas betrayed him and all his sheep strayed from him … by Friday, Good Friday, after religious leaders made him a scapegoat and political leaders washed their hands and let the injustice proceed … by Friday, Good Friday, when the Passover meal had been recast as the body of Christ broken and the blood of Christ spilled … by Friday, Good Friday, when the soldiers tore his skin and the crowds mocked his pride … by Friday, Good Friday, we begin to see at last what love looks like. It looks like a light that will not go out even when darkness covers the sun in the daytime. It looks like a godforsaken man raised in dishonor on a cross he could have avoided. It looks like a broken hallelujah.

About this god-forsakenness … we are always puzzled by this cry of dereliction, aren’t we? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? What is going on there? Did God forsake Jesus in that moment of his death? And how can God forsake God and still be God? If Jesus were the Son of God, we think, he could not have said these words and meant them.

But what if we started with the brokenness of humanity instead of the hallelujah of divinity? What if we took our idea of God from the story of Jesus? What if we started from below, so to speak, rather than above? If we did that, might we not expect that the one who would save us would not only possess the power to heal us but also the power to suffer with us?

Athanasius, the great doctor of Alexandria in the early church, fought for orthodoxy against those who sought to protect God against suffering and death. What is not assumed is not healed, he said. That is, if God had not taken on our full experience of humanity, the total feeling of sin and its consequences, the brokenness and loss that leads us to wonder where God is in our pain, then God would not have fully healed our humanity. We would not be truly saved, and we might never expect anything but a cold and a broken hallelujah.

What happens on the cross that Jesus expresses in his cry of dereliction—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me—is the most profound event in the history of the world. Jesus identifies himself in that moment with every godforsaken person who has ever cried out to the heavens—Where are you, God? Are you there? Why do you not come to my aid? Why do you not answer my prayers and save me? Why do I not feel your presence? Jesus will claim no special privileges as the Son of God. He empties himself of any claim to divinity in that moment in order to bring right into the life of God your feeling of abandonment and mine. In that moment we can see something of the God who is the opposite of indifference. This God is involved to the fullest extent. This God’s compassion is on display for all to see in the passion of the Christ.

And the Father is there, too, suffering in the way only a father can. He loves not only the Son but also all the sons and daughters of earth who were formed in his image. He gives over his Son to suffering and death because if he is going to love the world as he loves his own Son, he can make no difference between us. He has to love us to death in order to love us to life.

The Italian master Masaccio painted the fresco entitled The Trinity on the wall facing the side entrance to the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. It signaled a new turn in the history of painting and a magnificent breakthrough in perspective. When you look upon the image on the flat wall, you think you are looking into a barrel vault that goes deep into space. Suspended in front of the vanishing point is the Son of God hanging on the cross. But in a remarkable second breakthrough in perspective, you see God the Father behind the Son, his own arms outstretched, holding up the crossbars on which his Son is nailed. The Holy Spirit, in a characteristically shy way, is hard to see, but the form of a dove is evident in the nexus between the head of the Father and the head of the Son at the point of the Father’s collar. The Virgin Mary and St. John look on from the foot of the cross, and then the fifteenth-century patrons of the work flank the crucifixion one level down and closer to us.

Masaccio can only be telling us that from time to eternity and eternity to time, God knows our pain and is present, whether we can feel that ourselves or not, whether we can see evidence of God’s presence or not. This is a love that will not let us go. This is a broken hallelujah that’s worth singing on Good Friday as well as on Palm Sunday.

Nicole Scherzinger of The Pussycat Dolls confessed her penchant for infatuation with celebrities that doesn’t last: You get these crushes on guys, and then you meet them and you realize you just loved the role they were playing. Like, who doesn’t love Ryan Gosling after you see The Notebook? Then you meet the person and you’re like, “Huh?” “What?”[iii]

Jesus will not disappoint you as you get to know him. But ask yourself the Palm Sunday question that becomes the Passion Sunday question: Do I love Jesus for who he is, or am I only infatuated with the role he played for me in the love story of Calvary? If you will love Jesus for who he is instead of for what you want him to be, then join his victory march of love for the world and sing your broken hallelujah.

 

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