(Above) Palm Sunday/Pussy Willow Sunday procession at our mission in Northern Appalachia.

Today we celebrate what is known in Russian as Flowering or Pussy Willow Sunday, and this is how this great feast of the Church is known and commemorated by many of the hundreds of millions of Orthodox Christians worldwide, since the Russian Church is the largest of our local churches.

So today we will bear pussy willows as we process around the Church, because for centuries Russian Orthodox have done so because they lived in a clime where palm trees did not grow but pussy willows were plentiful in the early Resurrectional springtime, in a region where the desert was used as a term to describe forests where monastics lived, much like our region here in Northern Appalachia.

So we re-enact Jesus Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem with pussy willows.

But it is also for us Palm Sunday throughout the world, as it is for our Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters in Greece, in Syria, in Palestine, in Egypt and elsewhere in Africa, and so on. Orthodox Christianity is everywhere something different and something beautiful, truly the deepest gift from God, for the Church is the body of Christ, and today we mark with Him His entry on the road to the Crucifixion and His glorious Resurrection.

Every local parish, every Orthodox Church culture, becomes a fractal of this story, as so each of us, God willing, do today.

But the joy of Palm Sunday and the end of Lent also should sober us and should not be ecstatically emotional. This feast reminds us of the mutual responsibility, the shared need for repentance. Characters in Dostoevsky’s iconic Orthodox storytelling tell us that we are all in part guilty of each other’s sins. The mob that greets Jesus Christ so joyfully in the wake of the Resurrection of Lazarus, with emotionalism and the desire for a worldly celebrity king, will soon turn against him as we only know too well from the Gospel account, but also from our own lives, and ways in which we despite our professions of faith have turned on Him and ungratefully betrayed Him.

Yet the green vestments that clergy wear today remind us of how He is, as the dismissal prayer says, a good God and the lover of mankind. For after all He had been through, He sent us His Holy Spirit at Pentecost, for which we also wear the green colors. The branches and leaves today carry over into the branches with which we shall, God willing, decorate our Church for Penetecost in the Russian tradition.

This too is another layer to our celebration today. There is joy over the raising of Lazarus and the overcoming of that great fear of death that modern psychologists claim to be a great influencer of our lives, and then there is betrayal, but then there is also the redemption symbolized by the branches and leaves pointing us to Pentecost, and to the gateway to Paradise in the Church.

Then, too, the Devil seeks to decoy, distract, re-direct us in the crowd of worldly thoughts and media especially today, toward a sense of a worldly King or ruler or system of some type offering us comfort and false forgetfulness of death. When Anti-Christ comes, will we be cheering?

The antidote for such worldly delusion of comfort and power, leading us into betrayal of Christ, likewise will open up to us from God this week in His Church. The Virgin Mary and the Evangelist John staying loyally at and with the Cross provide the antidote the end of this week at Holy Friday. For such unwavering attention and love in Truth, putting our Lord first in our lives, to love our neighbor more than ourselves in Him, let us struggle and pray this Holy Week. For He is a good God and the lover of mankind, and the bridegroom of the Church whose Palm Sunday is big enough to encompass Pussy Willow Sunday here in Northern Appalachia, where palms do not grow either, but where we get our pussy willows from a local family who harvests them from their own backyard wetland area. As our mission grows, God willing, we hope to plant pussy willows in our storm-drainage pond for use on this occasion.

So we locally re-live Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem today.  St. Nikolai Velimirovich of Serbia and Pennsylvania tells us of the Gospel reading today that,

“This is the description of an historical event that took place [now more than] twenty centuries ago, as related by an eyewitness. But this event has more than historical significance; it also has a spiritual meaning, and therefore also a moral meaning for every modern-day Christian. According to the spiritual meaning, Jerusalem signifies the human soul, and the entry of the Lord into Jerusalem signifies the entrance of God into the soul.

“The multitudes of people, crowded and pushing one against another, joyfully awaiting and greeting Christ, symbolize the noble sentiments and exalted thoughts of a person who joyfully greets God, his Savior and Deliverer. The leaders of the crowd of people, who hate Christ and want to kill Him, personify the lower desires and earthbound thoughts, which take the upper hand over man’s noble nature and oppress it. Now this lower human nature rebels against God’s entry into the soul, for when God is enthroned there, the lower nature will inevitably be destroyed.

“The Temple in Jerusalem symbolizes the holy of holies of the human soul—that sacred place where the Holy Spirit has if only a miniscule haven even in the greatest sinner. But earthly passions penetrate there also, and lower human nature has used even it to achieve its base aims.

“Christ heals the soul of those sick ones who fall down before Him with faith, and this means that certain impulses of the soul, although sick, thirst for unity with God and seek for Him, the only true Doctor in the world. Christ’s prophecy of Jerusalem’s destruction symbolizes the destruction of any soul that God rejects, lays low, and spews forth from Himself.

“No one in this world is happy unless he has opened wide the gates of his spiritual Jerusalem—his soul—and received God into himself. A godless man feels lonely to despair. The society of others does not make his loneliness go away, but only increases it. However, he who has taken God into his soul will never feel lonely even in a desert. No one dies an eternal death other than one in whom God has died.”

So says St. Nikolai of Serbia and Pennsylvania.

Brothers and sisters, as we proceed to Jerusalem this Holy Week, let us not be lonely in the crowd, but let us be faithful and fulfilled in the living God. Amen.