Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday was always difficult when I was a child. The story was horrifying. And it was long. Relentless and long. Novel long. And novel deep. The suggestions and conflicts of this gospel are so important it is, objectively, hard to imagine that students are regularly deprived of it. What is Truth? Barabbas. Ecce homo. 
And these questions are universal, always reframed by every new age which gives us all a chance to rethink them from our newest, temporary vantage. Now, in the time of The Virus, it is hard not to think of Pilate, the region's most powerful man, vacillating before the crowd, too weak to do what is right, even before his own law.

This is the "Tchaikovsky Legend", from a poem by Stoddard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=X-Zwjn-2n_A&feature=emb_logo

When Jesus Christ was yet a child
He had a garden small and wild,
Wherein He cherished roses fair,
And wove them into garlands there.

Now once, as summer time drew nigh,
There came a troop of children by,
And seeing roses on the tree,
With shouts they plucked them merrily.

Do you bind roses in your hair?
They cried, in scorn, to Jesus there,
The Boy said humbly: "Take, I pray,
All but the naked thorns away."

Then of the thorns they made a crown,
And with rough fingers pressed it down,
Till on His forehead fair and young,
Red drops of blood like roses sprung.