‘All glory, laud and honor!’: So on Palm Sunday Christians joyfully hymn Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem but with the full knowledge of Jesus’s arrest and execution five days later. The joy is heavily freighted with foreboding.
On Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, at an insignificant crossroads in central Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant.
In The Passing of the Armies (1914), Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who would accept the formal surrender the next day, says nothing about what kind of day that Palm Sunday was. He records only the feelings of relief, shared misery and reunitings of West Point classmates. No forebodings.
On this glorious early spring afternoon, as details dribble out of Washington about the budget ‘compromise’, I can’t help feeling as if the wrong side has prevailed, 146 years later.
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