#easterjourney — Public Fediverse posts

Between Perfume and Silver

On this day, before the supper, before the garden, before the trial, Jesus stands in the narrowing space between love and betrayal.

One hand pours out costly perfume. Another reaches for silver.

One disciple offers a gift too deep for words. Another calculates a price.

And Jesus receives both the devotion and the treachery without turning aside from the road ahead.

Holy Wednesday is a quiet day in the Gospel story, but it is not an empty one. It is a day of gathering shadows. A day when motives are revealed. A day when the heart is weighed. Around Jesus, some are moved by love, others by fear, others by disappointment, others by greed. Yet Christ keeps walking.

There is something unsettling in this day because it reminds us that betrayal does not always come with a shout. Sometimes, it comes in a whisper, a private arrangement, a hidden bargain, a small surrender of the soul. Sometimes, it comes clothed in reason, practicality, or wounded expectation.

And still, Jesus goes on.

He does not flee the darkness gathering around him. He does not harden himself against love because betrayal is near. He allows himself to be anointed for burial. He receives tenderness even with the cross before him. He remains open.

Perhaps that is part of the invitation of this day: to ask what is being poured out from us and what is being sold off within us. What in us loves Christ freely? What in us bargains, withholds, calculates?

Holy Wednesday is a mirror.

It is the day that asks whether we will offer perfume or silver. Whether we will cling to Jesus only while it is safe or remain near when the cost becomes clear. Whether our devotion is real or only convenient.

The shadows lengthen. The story moves on. But even here, before the worst has happened, love is still poured out. That, too, is part of the Gospel. Before the nails, there is perfume. Before the cry of abandonment, there is this fragile, beautiful act of wasteful love.

Perhaps that is what we are called to today: not greatness, not certainty, not spectacle, but costly love offered while the shadows fall.

Amen.

Branch

I was cut for celebration.

Not for lumber, not for kindling, not for the weaving of roofs or baskets, but for a moment. For a shout. For the trembling edge of hope.

I had lived high above the road, drinking sun, speaking only with wind. I knew the language of sparrows, the gossip of dust, the long patience of trees. Beneath me Jerusalem swelled and sighed as she always did—stones hot with memory, gates swallowing pilgrims, rumors moving faster than feet. I had watched conquerors come clothed in metal and watched priests pass clothed in certainty. I had seen men lift swords and call it peace.

Then that morning the hands came.
Rough hands. Eager hands. Hands shaking with the fever that seizes people when they think history is about to break open.

They tore me from the tree with others of my kind. I felt the sudden ache of separation, the sharp grief of being cut from my source. Sap stung at the wound. Yet even in pain I sensed a strange gladness among the crowd. They did not seize me carelessly. They lifted me high. I became banner, signal, proclamation. The air itself changed. It was thick with breath and expectation.

Hosanna, they cried.

Save us.

I had heard human voices all my life, but never like this. This was not ordinary speech. It was hunger given sound. It was a nation’s ache pushed through throats grown hoarse from waiting. Some waved me above their heads. Some cast my companions on the road, making of us a green, living carpet over dust and dung and stone.

Cloaks followed. The road became softer than roads deserve to be.

And then I saw him.

Not from the heights of the tree now, but close—close enough to see the weariness at the corners of his face, the steadiness in his eyes. He came riding not on a warhorse with iron bit and polished bridle, but on a borrowed colt, awkward and gentle, more village than victory.

The people shouted like the gates of empire were already cracking. But he did not carry the look of men drunk on conquest. He carried sorrow. No—more than sorrow. A knowing. As though he heard in their praise another sound beneath it, something brittle already beginning to splinter.

Still they waved us wildly.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

I was swept back and forth by the arm that held me. In that motion I felt myself become what they needed: a sign of triumph, a token of national longing, a leafy cry against occupation, humiliation, waiting. For a few bright hours I belonged to joy. Children laughed.

Men shouted until their faces flushed. Women lifted their voices. Even the dust seemed golden.

I confess I believed it too.

I thought perhaps this is why I grew. Perhaps all my seasons of stillness, all my rings of hidden time, had been waiting for this—to honor a king at last. I expected the city to burst open like ripe fruit. I expected thrones to tumble, soldiers to flee, the poor to dance in the emptied courts of the powerful.

But Jerusalem did not change in a day.

By evening my green had already begun to dull.

The hand that held me dropped me at last. I landed beside the road among sandals, hoofprints, and trampled cloaks reclaimed by their owners. People went home with the heat of the moment still on them.

They talked of prophets and promises and what might happen next. The noise thinned. Shadows lengthened. I lay in the dirt.

That is where one learns the truth about crowds.

From the ground, voices sound different. Hope fades into argument. Certainty frays into rumor. Some said he would cleanse everything. Some said he would call down heaven. Some said he was dangerous. Some said he had gone too far. Some said if he were truly chosen, surely now would be the time to prove it.

The next day I was kicked into a corner near a wall. By then I had begun to curl at the edges. My sap was drying. Flies visited. A dog sniffed and passed me by. Overhead the city continued its holy business.

Prayers rose. Coins clinked. Deals were made. Religion and empire, as always, continued their old dance.
I did not see all that followed, but branches hear things.

We hear from sandals, from servants, from women carrying water, from boys darting through alleys. We hear what walls cannot hold.

I heard he overturned tables.
I heard the ones with power began to fear him more deeply.
I heard one of his own would sell him out.
I heard there was a supper, bread broken, and words heavy with farewell.
I heard there was a garden, and friends too tired to stay awake.
I heard there were torches.

By the time they spoke of the trial, I was no longer a banner. I was refuse. Brown creeping into green. Bent. Forgotten. Yet I listened.

They said the same city that shouted for him now shouted against him. Perhaps not all the same mouths, but enough. Enough to make the sound of welcome curdle into the sound of rejection.

That is another thing a branch learns quickly: the crowd that waves today does not always remain tomorrow. Human devotion can be as thin as leaves and as dry.

Then came the word cross.
Not throne. Not uprising. Not victory parade extended into revolution.

Cross.
The very syllable seemed to darken the air.

I remembered how he looked from the road—not intoxicated by praise, but grieved. I understood then, a little. He had entered the city with full knowledge that branches would not stay green, that hosannas would not stay loud, that love among humans is often mingled with demand. They wanted rescue, yes—but on their terms, in their pattern, in the shape of strength they already knew. They wanted Rome answered by something like Rome, only holier, only theirs.

But he had come otherwise.

Not to grasp. Not to crush. Not to dazzle. Not to spill another people’s blood in the name of God.

He came lowly, and lowliness is almost always mistaken for weakness until blood reveals what power truly is.

I was near enough to one roadside gathering later that week to hear people whisper about Golgotha. Some mocked. Some wept. Some could not understand how the one welcomed like a king could die like a criminal. I could not understand it either. I was only a branch, once green with praise, now brittle with disappointment.

The sun was hard that afternoon.
I thought my part in the story had been only this: to flare briefly in celebration and then decay. To be one more witness to human fickleness. To symbolize how quickly worship becomes waste. That seemed truth enough.

But then came the women, speaking in astonishment before dawn.

Then came the impossible rumor.
Then came footsteps running.
Then came laughter edged with tears and fear and wonder too large for the body.

Alive, they said.

And suddenly even a dry branch could begin to understand.

I had thought I was cut merely to celebrate an arrival. But perhaps I had also been cut to testify to the kind of kingdom this was. All green glory fades. All public enthusiasm withers. All symbols rot if they are asked to carry more than they can bear. Yet he—he passed through praise, through abandonment, through death itself, and was not undone.

I withered. He rose.

That is the difference between a sign and the thing signified.

Years have passed in the memory of the world, though branches do not count years as humans do. I am long gone now, dust among dust, my fibers returned to earth. But I still think of that day when I was torn from the tree and lifted like hope in human hands.

If I could speak to those who wave branches now, I would say this:

Do not mistake enthusiasm for faithfulness.

Do not think loud praise means deep allegiance.

Do not welcome him as the king of your own causes and then recoil when he comes gentle, undefended, refusing your violence.

Do not cry hosanna unless you are willing to follow him beyond parade and spectacle, beyond public fervor, beyond the hour when everyone else is still cheering.

For the road from Jerusalem does not end in applause. It bends toward a table, a garden, a cross, and an empty tomb.

I was a palm branch. I knew the brief ecstasy of being held high in a crowd. I knew the humiliation of being dropped and trampled. I knew what it was to be green one day and dry the next.

And because of him, I know this too:
Even what is cut down may yet bear witness. Even what withers may still tell truth. Even discarded praise may be gathered into a greater mercy.

I was cut for celebration.

He was given for the life of the world.