I’ve always thought Palm Sunday was a strange feast to celebrate. It marks the day when Jesus entered Jerusalem triumphantly and the crowds started waving palms to celebrate his arrival. That in itself is not strange. However, Palm Sunday also marks the beginning of Holy Week and this means that by the end of the week, we will also be commemorating Jesus’ death. And death, especially one so brutal and of one so loved, even if it occurred two thousand years ago, is never an easy thing to remember. Even harder is the realization that I caused that death, that I could inflict and continue to inflict pain on One who loves me so dearly.
So to me, Palm Sunday is relegated to that in-between-feeling. Everybody knows that feeling, I presume. It’s that feeling of partying with friends and having a good time, all the time knowing that there’ll be a scolding waiting at home because of the missed curfew. It’s that euphoria at the end of the exam that is always tinged with the apprehension of not having answered the last question. It’s the satisfaction of withdrawing hard-earned salary that comes along with the frustration of having paid an enormous percentage to taxes. It is the exhilaration of making it to graduation day and the pain of having to let go. Life is, after all, one in-between feeling after another.
This is perhaps because none of us were born as one dimensional characters. We do not live in graphic novels and movie reels, where only one emotion is heightened at a time. But we must constantly struggle with our emotions and with the paradoxes of life—that joy comes with sorrow, life with death, and love with pain. The in-between feeling comes because all of us are straddling temporality and infinity at the same time.
Because we never really belong in this world in the first place. Because we were born for things that are, as yet, beyond our grasp.
So we are always looking for the next thing. To see behind the corner. To catch a glimpse behind the cloud. To feel more than two emotions at the same time, because being present means being aware of both past and future. And so there stands Palm Sunday, in between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. And there stands Good Friday, in between Palm Sunday and Easter. And there stands Easter between Palm Sunday and Christmas.
Our in-betweenness need not be an excuse not to live each moment fully, nor should it be used as a scapegoat to live an unremarkable life. But I’d like to think of it as a consolation—that it is perfectly human not to always understand our emotions, that it is perfectly natural to feel unsettled, that Palm Sunday, like most our experiences in this life is not something that we can categorically analyze as a purely happy or sad occasion. Perhaps, at the end of all this, everything will be clear, every moment will be understood, and every emotion will be sorted out. But until that end comes, we must all make do with our in-betweenness and our Palm Sundays.