Palm Sunday, Year C (2025) - Fr Reginald Chua, OP

There are endless ways to imagine the motivations behind those who praise Jesus with “Hosanna in the highest” and those who say, “Crucify him!” Here I’d like to consider three possibilities (not mutually exclusive).

First, it is possible the crowd welcoming Jesus on Palm Sunday was substantially different in makeup from the crowd at Jesus’s hearing before Pilate on Good Friday. We might imagine the Sanhedrin resolving to stack the Good Friday crowd, and only that crowd, for strategic reasons. Or, we might imagine the Palm Sunday followers scattering along with the apostles after Jesus’s arrest, never to regather until after the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. Or, we might imagine two polarized cross-sections of Jerusalem (perhaps reflecting a society pierced and divided in its response to Christ’s witness), each choosing to attend only the events where they would find a majority of like-minded people, creating two echo-chamber-like bubbles, with dramatically different but equally homogenous ways of responding to Jesus.

A second possibility, of course, is that the crowds were not substantially two, but one, and the shift in response was due to something like fickle-mindedness. Fickle-mindedness is a characteristic illustrated in depth by the character of Kichijiro in both the novel and the film version of Silence by Shusako Endo. Kichijiro is a Christian in 16th century Japan, and under the weight of persecution, his faith becomes a tragic tale of recurring apostasy. When the authorities first confront his family with the choice between death and abandoning the faith, his wife and children choose martyrdom, while he alone chooses to step on an image of Jesus to express his rejection of Christianity. He is then given his freedom, but he can’t help but return to watch from a distance and in great shame, as his family members are put through cruel suffering which they all persevere heroically, becoming martyrs. This sparks off a tragic cycle of events. Kichijiro intermittently returns, remorsefully, to  the Christian community, but lives a dissolute life of addiction and drunkenness, and eventually apostatises three more times, even to the point of receiving payment to hand over fellow Christians to the authorities. It is sobering to imagine the shift of tone from Palm Sunday to Good Friday as a shift in crowds composed of Kichijiros. We don’t know what kind of coercion, pressure, or perhaps bribery were employed by the authorities to contribute to such a shift.

However, Kichijiro’s life offers a silver lining to this picture. After each apostasy, Kichijiro sought out the sacrament of confession, often with expressions of deep remorse and helplessness. To imagine the crowds as fickle-minded, then, would be to imagine them not only abandoning Jesus quickly but turning back quickly in confession after Easter Sunday, or perhaps even before quickly, like Simon Peter on the night of Holy Thursday.

A third and final possibility, one I confess I find most intriguing, is that the crowds shifted in attitude, not due to weakness of will, but rather insincerity. That is to say, perhaps the initial Hosannas were not unconditional acts of praise, but rather acts conditioned or hedged upon certain factors. For instance, perhaps their praise was hedged upon Christ’s fulfilling a particular set of expectations about his identity as the Messiah, such as his imminent fulfilment of a grand political program, or his providing some definitive sign or concrete evidence of his divinity.

This kind of hedging is sometimes seen as part of sincere Christian worship. After all, in life, we tend to recalibrate our commitments when new evidence or circumstances arise. Such awareness of the possibility of future recalibration arguably involves implicit hedging. And if that is reasonable, shouldn’t the same reasonably be said about faith in Christ? Kichijiro’s faith at certain points in his life arguably involves this thought. On one occasion, he risks his life to guide Jesuits to the right Christian villages so that they can receive the sacraments for the first time in decades, and then flaunts his heroism to fellow villagers. Before long, he hands over the same Jesuits to the authorities to be tortured. If worship is conditional on things going a certain way, it quickly becomes temporary, and that temporariness becomes ingrained: disbelief becomes a real future option on the cards, even if only for emergencies. 

If belief in Christ were like choosing to join a club, none of the above would be an issue. But the problem of Kichijiro’s belief shows us, in a deeply profound way, how belief in Christ is more like a marriage vow (i.e. choosing to say yes to God not temporarily but rather with all our mind, all our heart, all our strength) than any temporary arrangement.

In this vein, St John Henry Newman once said: “A person who says, ‘I believe just at this moment’ … does not believe now.” To believe in Christ is by its very nature something that cannot be conditional or hedged or temporary. Just as the Japanese authorities confronted Kichigiro and the Jewish authorities confronted the apostles, Christ also confronts us with a seemingly extreme choice: to make an unconditional yes in faith—an unconditional yes that could potentially cost us our life—or to say no and walk away from Christ. There is no middle ground - anything in-between will ultimately lead one way or the other. 

What ultimately happens to Kichijiro is left open in the narrative. But the last thing we are told of is a final arrest which allows us to hope that he in fact does ultimately become a martyr. The beauty of God’s grace is that, no matter what our struggles and weaknesses are, no matter how far away we feel from heroic sanctity, God sees otherwise: Christ’s promise to us is of an eternal love and an eternal truth, and to help us respond with an eternal yes.

Fr Reginald Chua, OP is undertaking further studies in the correspondence between Thomistic and Chinese philosophies.