Sunday's Comin'

March 29, 2026

Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord — Year A

Matthew 21:1–11 (Procession Gospel) | Isaiah 50:4–7 | Psalm 22 | Philippians 2:6–11 | Matthew 26:14—27:66

There’s a famous, old, sermon — one that resonates like few others — from a Black pastor named S.M. Lockridge. Pastor Lockridge was at Calvary Baptist in San Diego for about 40 years, and that man could preach. The sermon is called “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Comin’.” In about three minutes, he captures the entire emotional arc of Holy Week better than most of us could in a lifetime. He starts quiet: “It was Friday. Jesus was dead on that tree. But that was Friday… and Sunday’s comin’!” He builds, layer by layer — Mary’s crying, the disciples are running, evil is grinning — but Sunday’s comin’. By the end, the whole room is on its feet.

I thought about that sermon a lot this week. Here we are today on Palm Sunday, and the Church does something very intentionally with this liturgy: she gives us the both the Palm Sunday narrative and the pre-Easter narrative in one sitting — the parade and the abandonment, the hosannas and the denials. We walked in here waving palms and shouting, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” And in about 45 minutes, we’re going to hear the words “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” It is not by accident that the Church does this.

Think about the Procession Gospel for a second. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey as the King that he is. The crowds are going absolutely wild. They’re throwing cloaks on the road, waving their palms, yelling themselves hoarse. Matthew tells us, “the whole city was shaken.” These people think their king has arrived, and in the grand scheme of things, they’re right. They just have no idea what kind of king he is, or what kind of kingdom he’s building.

Fast forward five days. We are in the same city, with many of the same people, but now the loud cry isn’t “Hosanna.” It’s “Crucify him.” The palms are gone; the cloaks are back on their shoulders. Jesus, instead of being adored by many, is now being jeered at, beaten, and rejected.

How do you go from there to here in five days? Honestly, even in our day-to-day lives, it feels familiar. On a much smaller scale, it happens to us all the time. As my favorite old sports show Wide World of Sports used to say, we go from “The thrill of victory, to the agony of defeat.” We make resolutions on January 1st that are dead by February. We swear we’ll be more patient with our kids and lose it before lunch. We feel God’s real presence on a Sunday morning Mass and forget it by Wednesday morning’s commute. We are — all of us — flawed people. The crowd in Jerusalem isn’t some ancient cautionary tale. They. Are. Us.

Here’s where it gets really beautiful, and kind of wild. The Church doesn’t just give us the New Testament today. She gives us Isaiah and Psalm 22. Isaiah writes, centuries before Calvary, about a servant who gives his back to those who beat him and his cheeks to those who pluck his beard, who does not hide his face from buffets and spitting. Isaiah is describing, in horrifying detail, exactly what happened to Jesus, the servant who doesn’t fight back. He sets his face “like flint” and trusts that God will be his help.

Then, we have Psalm 22. We know it because Jesus quotes it from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” followed by, “They have pierced my hands and my feet. They divide my garments among them, and for my vesture they cast lots.”

David wrote those words roughly a thousand years before crucifixion was even a Roman practice! Let that sink in. God was telling us the story of salvation before it happened, tucking it into the prayers and poetry of Israel, waiting for us to look back and see the threads.

Then, there’s good ol' Paul, who never misses a chance to blow our minds in a few sentences. Philippians 2 is one of the most extraordinary passages in all of Scripture. Paul tells us that Jesus — who was “in the form of God” — didn’t cling to that. He didn’t hold onto his divine status like a trophy. Instead, he emptied himself, took the form of a slave, born in human likeness. Then, as if becoming human weren’t enough, “he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

I want to sit with that for a second because sometimes we talk about the Incarnation like it was a costume change, like God put on a human suit for 33 years and then took it off. That’s not what Paul says. Paul says, Jesus emptied himself. He experienced hunger, exhaustion, loneliness, grief, physical pain, abandonment, and death as a person. Fully God, yes, but also fully human, with every ounce of suffering that comes with it. He did it for you, for me, and even for the guy who cut me off in traffic this week.

I want you to think about that the next time you’re tempted to believe that Jesus “can’t understand” what you’re going through — your anxiety, your grief, your loneliness. Jesus went from a king’s welcome to utter abandonment in five days. He has walked through every valley you will ever face, and he walked through it not with divine detachment, but with a human heart that broke just like yours. He gets it, and he gets you. He is there for you with love, in your hour of need, every single time.

So where does that leave us, standing here with our palm branches, knowing what’s coming this week? It leaves us exactly where Pastor Lockridge left his congregation: holding both realities at once. It is Friday. We will walk through the Passion this week. We will hear the hammer blows on Good Friday. We will sit in the silence of Holy Saturday when the tomb is sealed and the world holds its breath.

But Sunday’s comin!   We know that, not just because we’ve heard the story a hundred times, and not just because we’ve read the ending. We know it because we’ve lived it.

A few weeks ago marked four years since the passing of my dad, and I’m thinking of him a lot this week. My Dad went from wellness to severe right-sided heart failure in what felt like the blink of an eye. Medicine couldn’t fix it. Just a few weeks later, my greatest champion and one of my best friends was gone. I think about that today, reflecting on these readings that move from triumphant procession to crucifixion in a single hour. In this life, we know what emotional whiplash feels like. We’ve all experienced the bad phone call, the unexpected job loss, or life-altering illness. One moment everything was fine, and the next, it wasn’t.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, and it took me a while to get there: the life my Dad lived — his deep devotion to God, the profound and consistent way he loved me and our family — that is an example of God’s triumph. If we keep our spiritual eyes and ears open, examples of God’s goodness and Jesus’ triumph over sin and death are all around us.

That’s Easter thinking. That’s Resurrection thinking. It's not denial of the pain — Jesus didn’t deny the pain. He sweat blood in the garden over it. As his children, we understand that death does not get the last word, that God’s love is stronger, that Sunday always comes.

We are a Resurrection people. It’s not a slogan — it’s an identity. We don’t follow a dead teacher or a nice philosopher. We follow a risen Lord who emptied himself, descended into our mess, suffered everything we suffer, and then rose from the dead on that third day, defeating sin and death forever.

So this week, as we enter the most sacred days of our faith, hold both truths. Feel the weight of the Passion — it’s supposed to be heavy. Don’t rush past the sorrow. Jesus didn’t. Carry this with you, too: death and the tomb are temporary. The cross is not the end of the story.

It’s Friday.

But Sunday’s comin’.