Palm Sunday, Year A 2026

There are many debates that are ongoing in Episcopal preaching circles. One of those debates resurfaces every year: what to do with Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday, as I’m sure you have all noticed, is a long service. We’ve already been here for (checks watch) 40 minutes. We could have used a shorter Gospel, which would’ve started at Judas’ betrayal and ended before Joseph of Arimathea comes along. But it’s important for us to get the entire story. This is the only day every three years where we can hear the Passion according to St. Matthew, all the way through the crucifixion and burial of Jesus..

One of the solutions preachers sometimes arrive at is to nix the sermon altogether. To let the Gospel stand for itself. But, our Book of Common Prayer requires a sermon if there is to be a Eucharist. And, although the Palm Sunday service tends to be longer than usual, brevity in preaching can be impactful. A twenty minute homily isn't necessary, but it’s important to take a breath and break down some of the intense scripture we’ve just heard. And a responsible preacher simply cannot read “his blood be on us and on our children” and have nothing to say.

I spent some time reading through the entire Gospel of Matthew this week. It even checked off my “Read an entire book of the Bible” square in Lenten Bingo - if you haven’t done it, there’s still time! My biggest takeaway from reading it straight through is how apocalyptic Matthew is, which follows with Matthew’s theology. Matthew sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets. In Matthew, Jesus likens himself to Jonah twice, comparing Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish to the three days he will spend in the tomb, and speaks of the signs of Daniel. At the opening of his Gospel, Matthew goes to great pains to link Jesus to David and to Abraham in the genealogy. Matthew contains a structural feature of a sequence of five major discourses, each concluded by a similar formula, “When Jesus had finished saying these things…” These discourses may be intended to recall the five books of the Torah, attributed to Moses, since Matthew seems to have viewed Jesus as a new, more authoritative Moses offering a new Torah that fulfills the old. The Gospel also contains fourteen special “formula quotations” - that is, “this was done to fulfill what was written by the prophet…”, showing that events fulfill the holy scriptures.

Reading all of Matthew reminds me how far apart today’s two segments are. Jesus enters Jerusalem at the beginning of Chapter 21 but isn’t betrayed until Chapter 26. While we can see the break in our bulletins, reading all of those chapters really gives a picture of how much happens in those five chapters. Between chapters 21 and 26, Matthew escalates his criticism of the Jews and what he sees as the failure of the community to recognize their own  Messiah. The end of Chapter 21 contains the Parable of the Wicked Tenants where the vineyard is a metaphor for the kingdom of God which “will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom”. In Chapter 22’s Parable of the Wedding Banquet, the Jews are likened to the people who refuse to come into the wedding feast. And then Matthew’s criticism reaches its peak in Chapter 27 where the people answer Pilate as a whole, “His blood be on us and on our children!”

While “His blood be on us and on our children” climaxes Matthew’s condemnation of Israel, contextually, it was also a familiar formula for accepting responsibility for a death in ancient Israel. In 2 Samuel when David mourns for Saul David said, “Your blood be on your head; for your own mouth has testified against you, saying, ‘I have killed the Lord’s anointed.” (2 Sam 1:16) The prophet Jeremiah said, “Know for certain that if you put me to death, you will be bringing innocent blood upon yourselves and upon this city and its inhabitants” (Jer. 26:15)

While understanding this context is important, it does not undo or absolve past damages done to Jews on account of using this text as permission for violence or an ill-conceived notion of retribution. In the words of Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar, in her 2021 article “Holy Week and the hatred of the Jews: How to avoid anti-Judaism this Easter”, she wrote, “Perhaps this vilification was inevitable. Jesus's followers could not understand how the vast majority of Jews could not accept their belief in him as the Messiah. The majority of Jews, in turn, saw no sign of the Messianic age having dawned: no general resurrection of the dead; no ingathering of the exiles to Zion; no end to death, war, disease or poverty. What was self-evident to one group was incomprehensible to the other. Incomprehension turned to mistrust, and mistrust, on both sides, turned to vilification.”

As part of the Christian side of this equation, we have a responsibility as Christians to read this text responsibly, to stand up and speak up for our Jewish neighbors when anti-Judaism rears its ugly head and ensure that the people from whom Christ and all of his disciples came are not vilified, dehumanized, and victimized in Christ’s name.

Again to quote Dr. Levine, “We choose how to read. After two thousand years of enmity, Jews and Christians today can recover and even celebrate our common past, locate Jesus and his earliest followers within rather than over and against Judaism, and live into the time when, as both synagogue and church proclaim, we can love G-d and our neighbour.” Amen.