Revisiting Palm Sunday, Revisited

I like the world in which I live to make sense, for there to be an order and purpose for everything and a reason no matter the season and then I stumble across today, Palm Sunday, and thrash about creating a lot of churn with the keyboard but little clarity in the cranium.

These are some thoughts I had on it from a number of years ago and despite strenuous exertions, little to nothing has changed I'm saddened to report. At the time I called it: 

Palm Sunday Revisited

Raised in the faith of my fathers, I know that today, Palm Sunday, begins the most important week in the Christian calendar-even if you lost your faith along the way to here and now as I have done. 

What follows is as close to contemplation as I may have gotten in recent years (or decades). It may not make sense to you; that wasn’t my intent. I needed to hold the world still for one moment so that it made sense to me-your mileage may vary in ways neither of us can contemplate.

Karl Glogauer was the wrong man at the right time.

The protagonist in Michael Moorcock's novel who travels from the future to the time of Christ, Glogauer, instead, meets a profoundly retarded child of Mary who is, in Moorcock's account, most definitely NOT the Son of God. 

Glogauer then assumes the personae of Jesus of Nazareth, based on his recollection and knowledge of the accounts in the Gospels of the New Testament, culminating in his crucifixion to fulfill those accounts which shaped history to the moment in the future in which he journeyed into the past to complete the story.

Perhaps the most simultaneously unsettling and reassuring aspect of Behold the Man is not the death of someone else in place of the Son of God but its emphasis and reaffirmation of the importance of the belief that He lived at all. 

For you today for whom this is an Ecce Homo experience, my sincere congratulations is tinged with more than just a little jealousy and envy.

Not everyone has the comfort of your beliefs and the reassurance of your faith. Some may not wish to have it while others who once did are forced to realize again the distance traveled from then to now which involved a bridge of faith that, once abandoned, has been destroyed and which can very possibly never be rebuilt.

As even Mark reported, help for one's unbelief is not easily achieved, and perhaps the realization that such assistance can only be given and never earned is part of why pride becomes the greater of the sins especially for those with so little reason to be proud. 

Perhaps it's the shadow of doubt that creates the chink of vulnerability in an armor of faith that condemns a wanderer to know the path but refuses to walk it again.

Sometimes it's the belief, and sometimes, the believer.

-bill kenny