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What is this week all for? Many of us look at the weekly schedule and see… so many things, and a few worship services on top of them. It can sometimes seem like it’s a bit overkill to do these services.

Yet this is the week. THE week which celebrates God’s unrelenting love, Christ’s solemn unity with humanity and unspeakable suffering, and the Holy Spirit’s persistent gentleness, breathing life again.

As we prepare to enter into Palm/Passion Sunday, I invite you to reflect on the ways that this day encompasses a wide spectrum of human experience: from praise to denial, joy to fear, and palm waving to stone throwing.

Jesus did not have to suffer. He did not have to endure the mocking, the betrayal, the shame, and injustice of it all. He, though he was God, emptied himself and became obedient to the point of death. And the beauty of this reality about the God whom we worship is that this is the truth of love.

I find this Jesus, the suffering servant, to be welcoming and comforting – one who stretches his arms wide on the cross, willingly bearing suffering and evil knowing that the resurrection dawn will certainly come.

This year the suffering servant text struck me differently – struck me almost in the way Rocky Balboa gets struck over and over in the famous movie franchise Rocky.

In anticipation of Palm Sunday, and in the aftermath of yet another shooting, today’s devotion is a poem written b Pr. Katy Stenta. Hosanna, a dangerous prayer indeed.