When the King Wept
The crowd was shouting hosanna. The king was weeping. And that changes everything about Holy Week.
My first year pastoring in Canada, two things happened that have stayed with me. The first was I noticed a man who often came into the worship gathering on Sunday mornings and pace. He couldn’t sit still. He’d move along the edges of the room, stop, move again. It was obvious he was high. But he came anyway, week after week, pacing the perimeter while everyone else sat in their seats. And then he disappeared. He just quit showing up.
The second thing that happened was that the staff pulled me aside early. They were gracious about it, but they meant what they said. The worry was that I would turn their church into something pastel. Something bright and cheerful and disconnected from the actual weight of people’s lives. In their words, that’s what American churches do.
I pushed back. I told them they were being unfair, that they were painting with too broad a brush. I believed that when I said it.
Then one weekend I flew back to the States to visit the church my college-aged boys were attending. I walked in and stopped. I don’t know how else to describe what I saw except to say it was pastel. The colors, the flowers, the greenery, even the clothes people were wearing seemed coordinated to the mood. Everything about the place said: life is bright, things are good, victory is the baseline. It was genuinely cheerful. And I stood there and felt something shift in me, something I hadn’t expected to feel. My staff had been right. I just hadn’t had eyes to see it yet.
Not long after I got back, the man who had paced showed up. But this time, he sat. His eyes were clear. It was obvious he had gotten clean from his constant high. After worship, he came forward to talk, and told me something that I’ve never forgotten. He said that one of the reasons he could never sit down was that he didn’t think he fit in. I assumed he meant the addiction. He didn’t. He meant the clothes. He’d been watching me preach from the stage in Friday business casual: khakis, jacket or sweater with no tie, professional. And he’d look down at what he was wearing and stay on his feet, near the exits, one step from leaving.
That killed me.
The next weekend I began preaching in denim.
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Palm Sunday has been on my mind all week. And not the part that usually gets the attention.
The crowd is cheering. The disciples are caught up in it. People are throwing their cloaks on the road and someone starts the old songs and the whole procession is moving toward Jerusalem like something is finally, finally being set right. It’s loud. It’s joyful. The moment everyone has been waiting for is arriving.
And Jesus is weeping.
Luke doesn’t soften it. He doesn’t explain it away or tuck it into a footnote. He just reports it. As Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it. The Greek word Luke uses is klaio. It’s the same word he uses later in the same gospel for Peter, standing in a courtyard after the rooster crows, going out and weeping bitterly after his three denials. This is not a single tear tracing a dignified line down a cheek. This is the kind of grief that takes hold of you. Audible. Uncontrollable. Public.
The crowd is singing hosanna. The king is sobbing.
He had wept over this city before. Back in Luke 13 he’d cried out over Jerusalem, this city that kills its prophets, and said how often he had wanted to gather her children the way a hen gathers her brood, and she would not have it. That grief hadn’t left him. It had followed him all the way down the western slope of the Mount of Olives to this moment, with the whole city spread out before him and the crowd pressing in from behind.
What he says is worth sitting with slowly. “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace.” The city of Jerusalem. The word itself means city of peace. And the Prince of Peace is riding into it on a borrowed donkey, weeping because peace is hidden from its eyes.
N.T. Wright puts it this way: the crowd’s dreams were coming true, but not in the way they were imagining. They wanted a warrior king, a political deliverance, the old kingdom restored by force. What rode toward them instead was a man on a donkey, in tears, grieving a kingdom that wasn’t coming the way anyone expected and a suffering that nothing was going to prevent. He was weeping for the dream that had to die. He was weeping for what he knew was coming to the people he loved, because they could not recognize what was standing in their midst.
That phrase stops me every time. They did not recognize the time of God’s coming to them.
I think about the pastel church. I think about the theology it represents, not maliciously, not cynically, but as a kind of cultural sediment that settles over communities over time. A theology where triumph is the default register. Where things are bright and the songs are victory songs and the undertone of everything is that if you are here, you are on top of life. It is genuinely well-intentioned. But there is no room in it for a man who has to pace the edges. And there is no room in it for a king who weeps at his own parade.
Here is what I keep returning to this Holy Week. The Jesus who rides into Jerusalem is not embarrassed by his tears. He does not compose himself for the crowd. He does not wait until he is alone to grieve. He weeps in full view of everyone, in the middle of the noise, on the back of a donkey, headed toward a cross he already knows is waiting for him. His grief is not a failure of faith. It is what love looks like when it sees clearly.
Nouwen said that compassion means entering the places of pain, mourning with those who mourn, weeping with those who weep. He wasn’t offering a technique. He was describing what he saw in Jesus. A God who does not observe suffering from a safe distance but moves toward it, feels it in his bones, and lets it show.
The man who paced our church eventually found his way to a seat. He got clean. He stayed. What he needed, it turned out, was not a program or a pamphlet. He needed to believe he was in the right place. That small shift in what I wore on a Sunday morning was not a strategy. It was the closest I knew how to come to saying: you belong here. Whatever you’re carrying, you belong here.
That is what Jesus was saying to Jerusalem, even as he wept over it. You were made for peace. I came to bring it to you. And even now, riding into the city that will hand me over to be killed, I am not leaving.
I don’t know what you’re carrying into this Holy Week. Some of you are in seasons where the hosannas come easily, and that is a gift. But some of you are pacing the edges. Some of you are standing near the exits, not sure you fit, not sure there’s room for what you actually feel and carry and can’t put down. Some of you have built a picture of Jesus that has no room for his tears, and quietly, without meaning to, you’ve concluded there’s no room for yours either.
He wept over a city that couldn’t see him.
He sees you.
Gratefully,
— Gene
One more thing before you go. I have put together a Holy Week Reading Path for every day from Palm Sunday through Easter, with scripture readings and a contemplative prompt for each day. I am making it available to every reader, free and paid, as a download right here in today’s post. Download it, print it, carry it with you through the week. It is my gift to you for Holy Week.