It is impossible to overstate the dramatic change from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. The typical Palm Sunday service is filled with kids waving palm branches, upbeat songs, and a vibe of joy. Good Friday, on the other hand, is a service in a dark room, marked by Scriptures read that describe brutal violence, ending in silence. 

That is a stark change in just five days, like driving a car on a new spring day then suddenly slamming into a wall. What happened in those five days? What happened between Palm Sunday and Good Friday?

The presence of Jesus is what happened.

The original Palm Sunday was a day long in coming for the people of God. It was first spoken of in Genesis 3, it was hinted at by God when He promised David an eternal line of kings through his descendants, it was described in full by Zechariah, and now – at last – it was here. The Messiah was coming into Jerusalem to establish His reign. Everyone knew what that meant. Jesus was going to throw out the Roman oppressors and establish God’s world-wide reign of peace. 

Then Jesus showed up and ruined everything.

He confronted the people of God, not the Roman oppressors. He said to them “My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.” (Luke 19:46) 

Now a decision had to be made. What to do with this confrontational Jesus?

This is where things turned tragic, how we get from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. The religious leaders of the day determine they are not interested in what Jesus is offering, so they scheme, plan and devise a way to get rid of Him. Instead of instituting the reign of God from the hill of the Temple, Jesus was crucified on a hill called “place of the skull.” What a drastic, rapid fall.

What happened?

It is easy to believe that we want Jesus, but we must confront the fact that it only took five days for an entire city to go from revering Jesus to rejecting Him. Five days is all it took for Jerusalem to move from cherishing Him to crucifying Him. That is the message of Palm Sunday.

Palm Sunday reveals how fast my reverence for Jesus can turn to rejection.

In the presence of Jesus, I am confronted with where I am broken, where I am hostile to the Kingdom of God, where God’s purposes are at odds with what I want to do in the world. As Barbara Brown Taylor wrote:

In the presence of his integrity, our own pretense is exposed. In the presence of his constancy, our cowardice is brought to light. In the presence of his fierce love for God and for us, our own hardness of heart is revealed….He is the light of the world. In his presence, people either fall down to worship him or do everything they can to extinguish his light.

Holy Week is an invitation for us to meditate on the ways in which our hearts move from welcoming the presence of Jesus to trying to extinguish His light. To let His integrity expose the false ways I live. To let His courage and constant commitment to others expose my selfishness. To let His love and devotion to the Father expose my own fickle commitment to the path God calls me to follow.

Meditate on those themes, and the weight is crushing. However, the irony of Holy Week is that while our pretenses are laid bare and exposed, Jesus’ commitment toward us is firm, resolute, and irreversible. The way we tried to extinguish His light became the very means by which He flooded this world with His light. Crucifixion. Death. Resurrection. The dramatic shift from Palm Sunday to Good Friday may reveal the darkness of our hearts but it also sheds light on the glory of Jesus.

My reverence for Jesus may quickly turn to rejection, but Jesus never responds that way to us. Whether we are waving palm branches, shouting for joy and worshiping Him as Messiah, or trying to go our own way, rejecting Him and blocking His light from our eyes, He continues on His way to the cross, committed to our salvation, our healing, our redemption.

Palm Sunday may reveal how quickly we turn on Him, but that is not the message of Palm Sunday. The message of Palm Sunday is that our heart toward Jesus will not affect His heart toward us. He is always working toward our healing, even while we are trying to snuff out His light.