Welcome to Roseville Covenant Church!

There may be no holiday on the Christian calendar soaked with more bitter irony than what we call Palm Sunday. As the story goes, after upwards of three years of preaching, teaching, healing, and performing signs and wonders, Jesus makes a journey to the capital city of Jerusalem and is greeted with waving palm branches and shouts of, "Hosana!" It is a victory parade to hail a liberating hero, one who will conquer his enemies and establish a new kingdom. In a way, those crowds greeting Jesus weren't wrong; Jesus has come to liberate the oppressed and establish a new order. Yet what they didn't understand was the method by which he would do it—not by way of political cunning or violent uprising. He liberated the universe by dying a criminal's death on a cross. It is the mystery of all mysteries. 

This is why we mark Palm Sunday not just with a retelling of his arrival at the capital, but we extend our storytelling to include his betrayal, capture, and execution. Our focus this Sunday will be a dramatic retelling of "The Passion," Jesus’ suffering and death. The passion play is not simply a performance to sit back and watch. The congregation joins its voice with the readers when welcoming Jesus into the holy city with shouts of "Hosanna!" (Mark 11:10) and the congregation also joins its voice with the mob who condemned Jesus with shouts of, "Crucify him!" (Mark 15:13). By participating in these theatrics, we don't simply commemorate events long ago, but consider the way we, "carry in our body the dying of Jesus, so that the living of Jesus also may be manifested in our body." (2 Corinthians 4:10).