Palm Sunday After the Bombings

There is a Sunday in the Christian year when the church remembers a crowd, a road, and a King riding into Jerusalem. They tore branches from the palm trees. They threw their cloaks in the dust. They shouted hosanna. For the Coptic Christians of Egypt, one of the oldest churches on earth, that day is precious. They trace their faith back to the apostle Mark. They have carried the gospel through Roman emperors, through Arab conquest, through centuries of pressure, and still they gather, still they sing. And on Palm Sunday in 2017, they came as they always come, with palm branches in their hands.

It was the ninth of April. In the city of Tanta, in the Nile delta, the faithful filled Saint George's church for the morning liturgy. The branches were green. The voices were lifted. And then a bomb tore through the worship. Men, women, and children who had come to remember the King who rode toward his own suffering were suddenly caught in suffering of their own. Hours later, in Alexandria, a second attacker struck outside Saint Mark's cathedral, near the very seat of the Coptic pope. By the day's end, dozens were dead. Many more were wounded. The Guardian reported that the so-called Islamic State claimed both attacks. The palm branches lay among the broken.

Holy Week had not shielded them. The calendar of the church did not hold back the blast. And here is the hard, holy thing. They did not stop worshipping. In the days that followed, Coptic Christians returned to prayer. They buried their dead. They wept without pretending the grief was small. And still they moved toward Good Friday, toward the cross, toward the empty tomb. They refused to let the bomber have the last word over their worship.

Think of what that took. To carry a coffin and then to carry a hymn. To stand where blood had been spilled and still to confess that Christ is Lord. This was not the absence of fear. Fear does not vanish so easily. It was something braver than the absence of fear. It was grief that kept on praying. It was a wounded people who would not surrender the meaning of the day to the man who came to destroy it.

There was no romance in it. Persecution is never a story prop. It reaches into families and homes and livelihoods, into years that cannot be given back. The Coptic church knew that better than anyone. They had known it for centuries. And yet across those centuries they had learned something the rest of the world keeps forgetting. The same gospel that fills Holy Week was telling the truth even now. Jesus enters suffering. Jesus bears the evil. Jesus rises as Lord. The palm branch and the cross and the empty tomb are not decoration. They are the vocabulary by which the people of God face terror without being mastered by it.

What the world saw that Sunday was an act of cruelty meant to silence. What endured was older and stronger than the cruelty. A church that began with Mark, that survived emperors and conquests, did not break in 2017. It grieved. It buried its dead with honour. And it kept the feast. The story does not promise that the faithful will always be spared, or vindicated, or honoured in this life. It promises something steadier. That the lordship of Christ reaches even into a bombed church, even into the long waiting rooms of grief, even into the place where evil claimed the final word and did not get it. The branches were broken. The hosanna went on.