Palm Sunday is one of my favorite Sundays, right after Easter Sunday. I love it because it is a celebration and it child-friendly. I have memories of the church I attended in college with its long sanctuary and walls like the inside of a pearl, bright, white, and clean. The children would parade down the aisles waving palm fronds. It was wonderful.

Now I have my own children and we put on our own Palm Sunday celebration on our back porch. Before we celebrated we talked about the elements of the story of Palm Sunday: the borrowed colt, the worshippers, the meaningfulness of precious clothes laid on the ground for a king. It is a beautiful story with a hard and merciless ellipsis. Between events celebrated on Palm Sunday and the following Sunday lie the darkest days of human history.

What we do with those days matters. Do we see why they are dark? Do we see our own selves in the story? I am the worshipper who flees, I am the soldiers gambling for the seamless clothes of a Savior. In fact, I am all the characters in the story except the figure on the central cross. That is a job he has taken from me, a death, a punishment I will not have to face. God sparing me at the ultimate cost to himself.

I think we should remember those clothes -clothes laid down, clothes taken as the Son of God dies alone. These are my clothes-no matter how precious the robe of human consolation, gift or love it is appropriate to lay it down on the path of a suffering Savior, not just a shining Christ.

You wish you could shout out to the crowd-be there for this man, Jesus on Thursday in his loneliness and betrayal, turn back your jeers on Friday during his lonely death, worship in awe and grief and gratitude as he alone dies for us all.