Palm Sunday: Crossing the Rubicon

Well it’s Palm Sunday this weekend and in the Jesus narrative things will never be the same again. 

I was watching the eccentric Classics Professor Mary Beard on TV this week as she chronicled the life of Julius Caesar.  She told that part of the narrative when he marched on Rome, a somewhat disgraced general from Gaul and turned his fortunes around by bearing elected Consul and then Dictator for five years, before his brutal end in the Senate.

The story goes that once he crossed the Rubicon river just outside Rome there was no going back.  He set his face to the city.

I may all be a myth, especially as no one really knows where the Rubicon river is, until Mussolini designated a small stream just outside the eternal city with the name in the 1920’s.

Yet the term Crossing the Rubicon has entered our language.  A moment to make a life changing decision, a seminal incident in our journey that sets our course and from which we cannot turn back.

As Jesus made his way from Bethany to the city, riding on a donkey, he Crossed the Rubicon – there was no going back.

This coming week, together, we enter once more the sacred story of Holy Week. The week when everything seems to be turned upside down, yet this is also the week when, in the words of Desmond Tutu we affirm that:

Goodness is stronger than evil.
Love is stronger than hate.
Light is stronger than darkness.
And life is stronger than death.

All made possible, bearable and liveable because God is with us.

May we all have a blessed and meaningful Holy Week.