Palm Sunday
Malcolm Guite
Now to the gate of my Jerusalem,
The seething holy city of my heart,
The Saviour comes. But will I welcome him ?
Oh crowds of easy feelings make a start;
They raise their hands, get caught up in the singing,
And think the battle won. Too soon they’ll find
The challenge, the reversal he is bringing
Changes their tune. I know what lies behind
The surface flourish that so quickly fades;
Self-interest, and fearful guardedness,
The hardness of the heart, its barricades,
And at the core, the dreadful emptiness
Of a perverted temple, Jesus, come
Break my resistance and make me your home.
The name
Leonard Cohen
This is the way we summon
one another, but it is not the way we call upon the
Name. we stand in rags, we beg for tears to dissolve
the immovable landmarks of hatred. How beautiful
our heritage, to have this way of speaking to eternity, how
bountiful this solitude, surrounded, filled, and mastered
by the Name, from which all things arise in
splendour, depending one upon the other.
Prayer for the Week
‘True and humble king
hailed by the crowd as Messiah:
grant us faith to know you and love you
that we may be found beside you on the way of the cross
which is the path of glory.’
