For many years Palm Sunday has been a day for pleading the cause of refugees in Australia and elsewhere. The day fits the cause. Palm Sunday recalls how an out-of-towner made his way into the capital to win the people. He was rejected, tortured and taken out of the city to be killed.
On this Palm Sunday we think of the millions of people who have been driven from their own homes by war, persecution and climate change. We think of the women and children starving and homeless in Gaza, fleeing war and earthquake in Myanmar, arrested and expelled from the US. We think also of the people imprisoned and deprived in many nations, including Australia for the crime of seeking help.
When we see the extent of the inhumanity in the world that drives people from their homes and shuts doors against them in affluent nations we might be tempted to shut our eyes to their suffering and our ears to their cries. The marches, prayers, gatherings and testimonies on Palm Sunday invite us instead to open our eyes and hearts and to stand with them. They remind us that we can make a difference by holding our own government to account, listening to and sharing stories about their plight, joining the groups who help feed and accommodate refugee families, and befriending these strangers.
For Christians, Palm Sunday also reminds us not to despair at the inhumanity that drives more and more people from their homes and punishes them when they seek our hospitality.
The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem was an invitation by God to accept and offer hospitality. His execution on Good Friday was the apparently final triumph of brutality over humanity. But his rising on Easter Sunday was the triumph of life over death, of hospitality over exclusion.
It encourages us to hope in the face of the temptation to apathy and despair, to insist in the face of numbers that each person matters, and to trust that hospitality and love will prove stronger than exclusion and hatred.