[Begin by playing the first 2 verses of I’m All Shook Up by Elvis Presley]

A well I bless my soul
Whats wrong with me?
I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy tree
My friends say I’m actin’ wild as a bug
I’m in love
I’m all shook up
Mm mm oh, oh, yeah, yeah!

My hands are shaky and my knees are weak
I cant seem to stand on my own two feet
Who do you thank when you have such luck?
I’m in love
I’m all shook up
Mm mm oh, oh, yeah, yeah! 

Elvis the king was all shook up with love. He must have read today’s scripture in Matthew which is about Jesus shaking all things up.

It’s Passover and every year at this time in a matter of days the population of Jerusalem rises from around 40,000 to around 200,000 people. People are everywhere and things are quickly getting shaken up. We celebrate Palm Sunday by getting palm branches and having a parade and the children wave the branches and we sing happy songs and the tone of the service is generally quite festive.

And so today we find ourselves in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday in about the year 30 C.E. Jesus paraded into Jerusalem on a donkey and crowds of people waved branches and shouted Hosanna! Hosanna! I think most of us are familiar with the celebrating part but there’s a part of Palm Sunday that we might not be familiar with. That is the fact that there were two parades that day, a peasant parade led by Jesus and an imperial parade led by Pontius Pilate.

Imperial parade
Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor and very year at Passover (and in fact at all of the Jewish major festivals) Pontius Pilate and his Roman troops made the 60 mile march from Pilate’s seaside “Crystal Palace” home located in the seaport city of Caesarea Maritima. He came with his troops because, well, he had to come. Passover was a great celebration of how Moses led the Israelites to their liberation from the oppression of the Pharaoh in Egypt. Since then Yahweh’s people had been oppressed by the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire. And now the people were oppressed and controlled in many cruel and brutal ways again by the Roman Empire. This story of liberation from oppression was a powerful and dangerous story to celebrate in Jesus’ time with the Roman oppressors breathing down their necks. Pontius Pilate would have been marching through Jerusalem to where he stayed in the Temple (yes! they had a special place for him to stay in the Temple) for one reason and one reason only and that was to keep the peace of Rome. The Pax Romana.

And so if you were one of those 200,000 people in Jerusalem on March 16, in the year 30 you would have seen the pomp and ceremony of a military parade coming in from the west end of town, by the School/Post Office. With all its magnificent warhorses, foot soldiers, leather armour, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, and you would hear marching of feet, creaking of leather, clinking of bridles, beating of drums, and as people bowed to Pontius Pilate you would hear them say things like. Hail Caesar, Son of God, our Lord and Savior. The King on a warhorse would be no less impressive than a spectacular Disneyworld light show, or even Elvis himself riding in a Cadilac.

Peasant Parade
And you would have noticed something going on at the east end of town, over by the Craft Centre/tracks. Another parade except this one would have no soldiers, no leather armour, no helmets, no weapons, no banners, no golden eagles, and no drums. You would have seen a simple man riding on a donkey and a motley crew of people spreading their coats and leafy branches on the road as they made noise shouting in an unruly manner, “Hosanna! Hosanna!” and interrupting the order of the day. The king on a donkey with all those motley crew peasants following and laying down their cloaks would impress you too for two reasons. One is that there were so many people following Jesus. And the other thing that would have impressed you (especially if you were one of the chief priests or one of the scribes), is the fact that Jesus is riding on a donkey. That would have really stolen the show for you because you would know that the prophet Zechariah wrote:

Zechariah 9:9   9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter Jerusalem! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

The two processions, Pilate’s Imperial Procession and Jesus’ Peasant Procession happened that day. Palm Sunday is about all these things being all shaken up. It’s a day of mixed emotions: joy, hope, disbelief, horror, Hosanna!, Crucify him!, love and devotion, denial. Everything’s all shaken up.

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade and pop all the balloons at the party but let’s ask seriously, "Does Jesus shake us up?" Jesus died for his so-called good news. Who wants to go down that road with Jesus that ends on a lonely hill up on a cross. I have found out that trust in God is one of the hardest things to practice. It means letting go. It means I don’t know the answer probably most of the time. It means I don’t know what’s coming around the corner and I have to let go of my agenda. It means that I can’t bring all those crowds at the mall on Sunday to church. It means that I have to stop being so busy and wait quietly until I feel the breath of God on me.  It means I have to accept the fact thatI have enough of everything that I need right now to live faithfully as a disciple of Christ. It means that in everything I do my highest goal is not to have my needs met but to simply love. It means that I have to let go of my fear of the world falling apart and do my little part to recycle garbage and stay away from bottled water as much as I can.

We walk this Lenten Journey, this Highway to Holiness, ‘all shook up’, because there is groaning and anguish and dying that has to be done. I hate (!) the fact that the good news of Jesus Christ ends with pushing Jesus out of the world and up onto a cross. Maybe we’re supposed to hate it. Sometimes I think we love the cross too much and we end up covering up its sharp edges with pretty flowers. A theologian [Moltmann “The Crucified God” p. 35] writes:

There the cross stands, thickly wreathed in roses.
Who put the roses on the cross?
The wreath grows bigger, so that on every side
The harsh cross is surrounded by gentleness.

The cross is the really irreligious thing in Christian faith. It is offensive in every way. It is the suffering of God in Christ rejected and killed in the absence of God. Moltmann writes in his book, The Crucified God “Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way.”

In many ways we have turned love shown on the cross into luv on the cross.

Holy Week tells a story of a lonely walk, where after Palm Sunday the thrill seekers will have gone home and the casual bystanders will have busied themselves with other things. The fearful ones will have gone into hiding. And there are the disappointed ones who will decide that Jesus was not the kind of Savior King after all and they will walked away in sadness. And there will be those who will not be walking this year because they will have trusted that others will walk for them. All who will be left are a handful of disciples and followers who are still trying to understand what Jesus was trying to say, what he was trying to show, and what he was trying to live. And even they will fall away, will stumble, will fall asleep.

But…

       .........Jesus will love them anyway.