Admit it. Did you not feel a bit silly at the corner of Elgin and Somerset Streets this morning as part of our annual Palm Sunday procession? Imagine how we clergy, choir, and servers felt dressed as we are!

Could there have been, as we turned the corner, a family sitting in their car waiting for the light to turn green. A boy asks his father, a lapsed Anglican, "Dad, what are those people doing in dresses and carrying grass in their hands." The father replies, "its Palm Sunday, son, it has something to do with Jesus and a donkey, ask your mother, maybe she knows." Mom, who never went to church says, "Maybe they`re hunting for Easter eggs".

More importantly, do we know what we're doing? Maybe part of our embarrassment is because we`re not really too sure ourselves apart from making a public display of our religion.

Part of our problem may have to do with the very nature of this Sunday. Ambivalence is built into it. Commonly it is called Palm Sunday commemorating the gospel story of Jesus` triumphal entry into Jerusalem to the enthusiastic cheers of the crowds. More significantly, it is called the Sunday of the Passion, because it marks the beginning of Holy Week, a whole week of intense focus on the events leading up to the crucifixion and death of Jesus. The liturgical colour is red- the colour of blood symbolizing martyrdom. This Sunday begins with shouts of praise and ends with shouts for murder. We begin the service with "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" and then later on find ourselves shouting, "Crucify him, crucify him". It`s a bit like going to a Santa Claus parade which unexpectedly turns into a nasty and brutal riot.

A few years ago someone told me at the church door after the Palm Sunday service, "I just can`t bring myself to shout 'Crucify him' ". What she was really saying was, "I would never have done that to Jesus". We are repulsed by the violence- as we should be. That has been the reaction of many to the much discussed Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ. It is an appropriate reaction as long as it is not a denial of the reality of evil in ourselves and our world. "I`m not like that, I would never have done that to Jesus." And yet people all over the world professing an ethic of love and obedience to a prophet of peace are persecuting or annihilating one another. If they are not doing it directly they are willing participants in regimes and industries which enable others to do it for them. As St. Augustine once said, "Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside yourself".

Evil people are often drawn to religion. As church members we should never forget this. We profess that the church is a spiritual community mandated to fight evil in the name of Jesus Christ. As such it is a natural target for the assaults of evil. Furthermore, we sometimes are so self-deluded that we are not capable of recognizing the evil within us. That is why some have described evil as a soul hiding from itself. What better way to disguise one`s evil from oneself and others than wrapping it up in piety and by crusading against the evil lives of others by attacking them with biblical quotes and church dogmas. Disguise is the most important weapon of evil: disguise means calling evil good. It is a sorry fact of today`s world that much evil does hide itself behind the skirts of religion. Violent extremists of every stamp commit the most atrocious acts in the name of their religion. We cannot deny it. What we can do is be vigilant.

As a professional Christian, that is a priest, I have learned to expect to find evil in church members. There are two reasons for this. First of all the church is supposed to be a hospital for sinners not a spa for saints. A priest should be no more surprized to find a sick soul in church than would a doctor a sick patient in hospital. I like the metaphor of the church as hospital. It implies we are all searching for wellness. Hospitals are places we go to get well, to find out what is wrong with us, and to be nursed back to health. Churches need to do the same for sick souls. Often when we go to the hospital we do not know what is wrong. But we do know that something is wrong and need help to find out what it is.

The second reason why I am not surprized to find evil in the church is because I find it in myself. I recognize that to some extend, your soul, like my own, is hiding from itself and thus capable of dark motives and actions. We are all souls in various states of health. Not one of us is perfectly and permanently healthy. So if you find it difficult to cry "Crucify him, crucify him" it may be a good time for you to stop and have a deep and prayerful look at yourself. Think of yourself standing with all the other patients in the hospital crying "I`m sick, I`m sick".

So there it is, Ambivalent Sunday- it even has two names Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday. Little wonder we feel a bit perplexed. And yet, practising Christians love to be in church on Palm Sunday.

All four of the gospels devote major space to the passion of Jesus: Luke has 4 chapters out of 24; Matthew 3 out of 28; Mark 3 out of 16; and John 3 out of 21. Three times as much attention is given to the trial and suffering of Jesus as is to his resurrection. And the passion narrative is fascinating reading. Fascinating to imagine the motives of the principal characters and fascinating to compare the 4 different versions of the same events.

One of the reasons why I love the passion narratives is because they portray religious and political institutions at their very worst :devious, treacherous, self-serving, and denying the very human dignity which they profess to uphold. So when I read the passion I hear myself saying, "yes, I recognize my world in this".

The passion narratives portray for us the darkness of the human heart, the ruthlessness of power, and the horrific results of mass hysteria. In doing so they rehearse for us what shouts out at us from every newspaper and newscast. As a perceptive preacher once said, "..every bullet and missile passes through the body of Christ" (partial quotation, p.96, Credo, William Sloane Coffin, Westminster John Knox, 2004). That for me is the power of Jesus Christ. He absorbs every bullet and missile, every holocaust, every form of oppressive, abuse, torture, neglect, and cruelty, every intolerance, every apathy and indifference. He absorbs them all into himself, and unlike most of us, does not return the same in kind. He faced down the powers of evil. Who knows better the power of an enemy than the one who does not surrender but who stands against it!

As Jesus enters Jerusalem he is not deluded into thinking that all will go well. He had a pretty clear idea of what lay ahead. We read that Jesus wept as he approached Jerusalem and then he says, "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes ...they will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God" ( Luke 19:41ff). It is hard to read that without remembering the latest television images of body parts in the streets of present day Jerusalem.

To my mind, this is the most important part of the story of the entry in Jerusalem. The grief of Jesus over the wilful blindness of the people of Jerusalem is his grief over the wilful blindness of us all.

We do not know what makes for our peace.

Isn`t that the question which the passion asks of each of us in every generation, "do you really have any idea what makes for your peace?" If we look at where we spend our money as individuals and as nations, and how we define peace, we see how far off the mark we are.

For most of us - persons and nations- peace means my peace, my life, my comforts, my security. And because peace is centred on me and mine it can never be achieved. Real peace can only be achieved in a commonwealth where all are fed, and cared for, and secure.

The peace that Jesus has to offer is a peace grounded in the politics of eternity according to William Sloane Coffin, the American preacher, peace activist, and retired pastor of Riverside Church in New York City. Peace grounded in the politics of eternity contrasts sharply with our conception of peace which is grounded in the politics of self-interest and expediency.

The politics of eternity, he asserted, are nonviolent which is "...an affront to most every revolutionary, they (the politics of eternity) insist on "one world"-an affront to every nationalist". He adds, "We shall begin to understand the politics of eternity when we recognize that territorial discrimination is as evil as racial discrimination" ( p. 104, Credo).

Shouts of Praise, shrieks for blood, that is what this Sunday is about. Those two extremes bookend the human soul. As we journey through Holy Week, may we, by the grace of God, move our souls one step further along the path of praise and one step further away from the path of blood.