This Book: Palms and Psalms (Psalm 118 v22-26)

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Every community has their songs. Every community has their songbook. 

For the people present in Jerusalem on the day that we remember as Palm Sunday, their songbook—the songs they would be able to sing at the drop of a hat—were the Psalms: 150 songs, poems, and prayers gathered and preserved for us by the curators of the Old Testament writings. 

In particular, for the people of Jerusalem in Jesus' day, Psalms 113 through 118: a cluster of songs that they knew as the Hallel, and that were sung together every year at every Passover feast, at every table, in every home in Israel, as they shared the meal that commemorated their deliverance from slavery in Egypt.  

And there Jesus and his disciples were, getting ready for that feast. All of the people of Israel were there. Everybody that could come would come. And into the middle of it, comes Jesus. Parading into town like a conquering king. With Passover in the air, with their closeness to their history, and their awareness of their story... here comes Jesus, and they thought they knew what would happen next.  

So in the streets they sang one of their songs. A song from the Hallel. A song of deliverance and of hope.  

Please, LORD, save us, we pray. Please, Lord, give us success! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD. From the house of the Lord we bless you. Psalm 118:25-26

Theologian Walter Brueggemann categorises the Psalms into 3 categories: 

Psalms of orientation (songs for when everything is right), Psalms of dis-orientation (for when nothing is right and God seems silent), and Psalms of re-orientation (when God has acted and we see him more clearly). 

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The Psalms of disorientation express disappointment and pain. These are songs for when God seems absent, doesn't seem to care. Lament and loneliness. Repentance and frustration. Brokenness and chaos. Trust.  

There are a lot of Psalms of disorientation, for individuals or a community to sing when life is hard and they’re done pretending it’s okay. 

O LORD, how long will you forget me? Are you ever going to look at me? Psalm 13 v1 

Justice—do you rulers  know the meaning of the word? No! You plot injustice in your hearts. You spread violence throughout the land. Psalm 58 v1-2 

But this is not just people complaining. These songs are written by people of faith. They have met God. They know something of who he is, and they are trusting him with their struggles. 

Turn and answer me, O LORD my God! Restore the light to my eyes. Psalm 137 v3

They make demands of God because they expect to be heard, and by somebody who actually gets it. Someone capable of responding. Someone who is alive and listening and who cares.  

These are the voices of people who may not be feeling it right now, may not be seeing it right now, but have reason to believe that they are loved.  

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And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know how to pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. Romans 8 v26

There are things we encounter in life for which we just don't have the words. We don't even know what we should want.  

So here's the thing.  

The writings we find in the bible are inspired by God himself. The Bible is God's message to us.  

The Psalms—these prayers and songs—are our words to God. 

Those words circle down to us through the Holy Spirit, through poets and songwriters, onto the page, then into our hearts and minds. When we pray the Psalms, the Holy Spirit carries our prayers back up and into the heart of God who gave us those words. This is another way that Holy Spirit has provided for us to pray when we don't know how to pray. Holy Spirit provides for us and feeds our conversation with God.  

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Cast your mind back to the days when Israel was brought out of slavery in Egypt. They travelled through the wilderness, led by God. He told them to build a tabernacle: a space in which he would come to meet them, and where they could come to worship. One of the first things they prepared in the tabernacle was the altar. There are very specific, detailed instructions for purifying the altar and making it ready for one purpose: a place where things would be offered to God in service. At the end of the instructions:  

Purify the altar, and consecrate it every day for seven days. After that, the altar will be absolutely holy, and whatever touches it will become holy. Exodus 29 v37 

Which is backwards to the way it usually works. Usually, if something touches something unclean, then they’re both unclean. This is the other way around. The power, the meaning of the holiness of the altar is so great that anything that touches it becomes holy.  

I am very, very, well pretty good, most of the time, sort of. I’m okay at giving God my best. I'm okay at that. 

But what if I gave God my worst? What if I surrendered to God my anger? My fear and my tendency towards hatred? What if I laid those dark, dark things—all of my hurt and all of my questions—on the altar?  

• How long will you forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? Psalm 13 
• My spirit is fading, my soul is in prison. Psalm 142  
• Help, O LORD; good people are disappearing and the evil are taking over the earth! Psalm 12 

What if I allowed my lament, my anger, all of the energy that goes with those things to become holy—dedicated to the purposes of God?  

What if it all belonged now to God?  

What if, having laid my pain on the altar, I picked it up again, and now carried in my hands anger made holy, pain surrendered to God's purpose? What might that look like?  

What it would not look like is God giving me permission to literally or figuratively smash teeth or squish snails. It would not give me permission to call people slime when they do things that I don't like, or to indulge in hatred, because God does not indulge in hatred towards human beings.  

What it would do is force me to ask, what is God's purpose? What in my anger is God's purpose? What in my pain is God's purpose?  

As often as not, God's purpose is not to make me feel better about myself, never to make me feel better than somebody else.  

More often than not, God's purpose is to do the long, slow work of changing me. Of making me holy. Of giving me tools, not weapons, for doing his work of healing and love.  

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It was Passover. Jesus of Nazareth was in Jerusalem. It was Thursday night, the night before... everything.  

He was a long way from home, but surrounded at the table by the faces and voices of people he knew best. By the people who loved him best.  

They were there to share the Passover meal, and sing together, at the end of the meal, Psalm 118. Words that Jesus would have memorized as a child, would have sung countless times over the years, perhaps, before he'd come to understand their fullest meaning.  

That night at his final Passover meal, his final meal before...  everything, Jesus sang Psalm 118. Everybody sang along, as they had many times before. But I really, really think that as they sang together, the prayer everybody else was singing with the words of Psalm 118 was not quite the same as the prayer that Jesus himself was singing.  

• As Jesus sang, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His loving devotion endures forever.” V1 
• As Jesus himself sang, “The Lord is on my side. I will not be afraid. What can people do to me?” V6 
• As Jesus sang, “I was pushed so hard, I was falling, but the Lord helped me.” V13  
• As Jesus himself sang, “I will not die, but I will live and proclaim what the Lord has done.” V17 
• As Jesus himself sang, “This is the day that the Lord has made. We will rejoice. We will be glad in it.” V24 
• As Jesus himself sang the words, “Take the sacrifice and bind it with cords to the altar.” V27  
• As he sang that last verse, at the end of the last meal, on the last day before everything, he circled back around to where the song had begun, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His loving devotion does endure forever.” V29