What We Are Prepared to See
Why Palm Sunday is not just about the crowd, but about us
Welcome to our Holy Week reflection
We are walking, slowly and deliberately, through the events that led to the cross.
Not rushing ahead.
Not resolving it too quickly.
Just paying attention to what unfolds.
It’s Palm Sunday.
Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, and the crowds are shouting and chanting. All over the world, people will be doing the same. Grabbing palm branches, or something that resembles them, and lining their own streets as an act of witness.
Taking the part of the crowd as Jesus rides in.
But I have been wondering, do we take the part of the crowd in more ways than we think?
Taking Our Place in the Crowd
On the surface, it all seems too obvious. We are beginning a week where Jesus does all the things we know well. We know what Jesus will do. We know the path leads to the cross, and beyond it to Sunday, when we will shout, ‘Hallelujah, he is risen.’
If we are in the crowd watching Jesus enter, maybe we have assumptions about him just as much as the crowd in Jerusalem did.
They expected a king, the kind that they had already made up their minds about. A king looked like someone who was going to come and sort things out, overthrow the power and finally release his people. So they welcomed Jesus accordingly.
It won’t be long before those assumptions are shattered, so let them have their moment.
But knowing what comes next does not necessarily mean we see it any more clearly. After all, the crowd were not completely wrong. They recognised something in him. They responded. They drew on language they knew, words shaped by hope and expectation, rooted in a story they have carried for generations.
They were not indifferent or opposed. In many ways, they were closer to the truth.
Close… But Not Quite
And yet, something is misaligned. Their expectations shape what they are able to see. And perhaps that is not as surprising as it first appears.
Because we rarely come to anything without expectation. We carry frameworks with us, shaped by experience, hope, disappointment, and what we have learned to recognise as meaningful or real.
We do not simply see what is in front of us. We see what we are prepared to see, and perhaps that is where we are most easily mistaken.
What We Are Prepared to See
That is what makes the moment both beautiful and uncomfortable. Because it is not simply that they misunderstand him. It is that they understand him through the lens of what they are already hoping for.
As we stand in the crowd, waving palm branches expectantly for Jesus to enter, do we do something similar more often than we might realise?
Do we approach faith with a sense of what it should look like?
Do we carry assumptions about how God should act, how quickly things should change, and what would confirm that something real is happening?
We might begin this week, leading to the cross, with clear expectations of how it will affect us, but what if the problem is that we have already decided what his presence should look like?
I find myself trying to loosen those assumptions in my own mind, to experience the walk to the cross and beyond as if I am there for the first time.
The events that we follow in Holy Week are dramatic and brutal. But much of what we encounter is subtler than that. It can become warm and familiar. Perhaps that is why it is so easy to miss what is happening.
A Question for This Week
Which circles back to a question that sits beneath the surface of Palm Sunday.
Not simply whether the crowd misunderstood.
But whether we are any less likely to do the same.
And I am not always sure that I am.
Which may be why this story feels less like a distant moment in history, and more like something still unfolding.
Not out there, in a crowd long gone.
But here, in the quieter places where expectation and reality do not quite line up.
And where recognition is not always the same as understanding.
If this reflection stayed with you, I share something like this each day at Sacred & Secular — exploring faith, doubt, and the moments we don’t always understand at the time.
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Paul