All Saints’, Dorval
April 20, 2025
Palm Saturday, 2024
A week ago yesterday, All Saints’ held our fourth annual “Palm Saturday,” an event for children at which we reenact the story of Holy Week and Easter, bake bread, make crafts, and sing together. To tell the story, we begin in the chapel, where we welcome Jesus – played by a man with a red sheet tied over his shoulder, who never speaks – by waving palms and throwing our coats on the floor. I tell the kids that we’ve heard Jesus might be getting ready to fight the Roman Empire and set us free, and as he walks through the crowd of children, I say, “Look! Let’s follow him and see where he’s going!”
We gather around the altar, where Jesus does not overthrow the Romans. Rather, he shares the Passover meal with his disciples: he breaks bread, pours wine, and washes the children’s feet. He then disappears into the chapel while I tell how he was betrayed, arrested, tried, and executed. Together, the kids carry the big wooden cross to the back stairwell, and then squeeze themselves small to go “into the tomb”, crawling down the stairs under an old bedsheet that has been painted to resemble the cave where Jesus was buried. Waiting in the dark at the bottom of the stairs, I tell them that we’re waiting in Sheol, the place of emptiness and silence after death – but we’ve heard that someone might be coming to set us free.
Jesus, meanwhile, has snuck down the stairs at the other end of the building, and now reappears, walking toward us down the dark hallway, carrying a lighted candle. Again he makes his way through the crowd of children. And once again I say, “Look! Let’s follow him and see where he’s going!” And he leads us up, out into the light, and we run out onto the church lawn and I give the kids wildflower seeds to plant in the cold spring soil.
“Look! Let’s follow him and see where he’s going!”
I didn’t plan it that way. But over the course of telling the story this way twice to two successive groups of kids last weekend, I noticed this parallel and realized it shed new light on the story.
When the women come to the tomb early on Easter morning, according to Luke’s gospel, they encounter “two men in dazzling clothes” and are terrified. As Mary and her companions fall to the ground in terror, the men (angels?) quote Jesus’ own words back to them: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”
“Look! Let’s follow him and see where he’s going.”
In this passage, the first twelve verses of the last chapter of Luke, nobody actually sees Jesus; they only see the evidence that he has risen from the dead.
The next thing that happens, though, is that two other disciples encounter Jesus on the road back to their home village, and don’t recognize him until they invite him home and he breaks bread and blesses wine at their kitchen table. They run pell-mell back to Jerusalem where the other disciples are, and while they’re there, Jesus appears among them again. He leads them out to Bethany, where he blesses them and ascends to heaven.
And the story doesn’t stop there, of course: Luke is the only gospel with a sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, from which we also read this morning, and it could be argued that the entire story of Acts is people encountering Jesus and saying to each other, “Look! Let’s follow him and see where he’s going.”
As a parish, we’ve just lived together through the reenactment of Jesus’ suffering and death. We did so in worship, just as the kids did together on Palm Saturday. We shared a meal, washed feet, and blessed bread and wine on Thursday. We lamented Jesus’ death and venerated the cross on Friday. And last night, in the pitch-dark chapel, we told all the old stories of how God saved God’s people, and followed the light of Christ out of the tomb into the joy of the resurrection.
Hearing these stories of Jesus’ friends seeing him – or not seeing him – outside the tomb on Easter morning can feel a bit distancing. Sure, we’re happy for them that their friend wasn’t dead after all, but what does it have to do with us, here, now, today?
First of all, of course, it isn’t that he “wasn’t dead after all”. Jesus did very much die. The Resurrection didn’t undo anything; it took him beyond death into a whole new kind of life, one in which his rising from the dead also makes it possible for us to share.
“Look! Let’s follow him and see where he’s going.”
So one place to which, if we follow him and see where he’s going, is precisely that new and transformed life. Encountering Jesus will not leave us where we are. It may take us to hell and back. But on the other side is always – always – something far greater than we could imagine. Something that began with a few people getting their friend back on a spring morning in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, but is so, so much more than that.
“For as all die in Adam,” writes Paul in the letter to the Corinthians, “so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in [their] own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.”
“Look! Let’s follow him and see where he’s going.” He’s going through death and out the other side.
But we can start to follow Jesus and see where he’s going long before the end of our lives. Starting right now, the journey of faith is precisely to find Jesus – to see where God is acting in the world today – to follow him, and to see where he goes.
The Gospels and Acts give us some clues. Following Jesus and seeing where he’s going will take us all over the world. It will take us to the homes and tables of people whom we had never imagined meeting and with whom we thought we had nothing in common. It will take us to places where people are being healed and given new hope. It will take us to where seeds are being planted, children taught and cared for, and justice being demanded for all.
Easter Sunday is the biggest Sunday of the year for a good reason, and it’s always a joy to see everyone who comes to church on this day. But the church is here the rest of the year precisely to embark, together, on the journey of looking for Jesus, and when we find him, following him to see where he’s going, so that we can go with him, in lives of faith and service, through death to the other side.
“Look! Let’s follow him and see where he’s going.”
Christ is risen!
Amen.
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