Every year, the liturgy of the Church forces believers to confront the most basic questions, the deep ambivalence that gnaws at the roots of faith, by presenting us with the spectacle of Palm Sunday. For weeks through Lent, we’ve been fasting and sacrificing in one way or another, with our churches draped in purple and an aching hole where “Glory to God” is supposed to be. In my parish in Dallas, even the statues of saints hide under shrouds of purple silk.

We are building up to the darkest day in history, the death of God at the hands of men. Not especially bad men, either. No, Jesus died at the word of the faithful priests of the purest and truest religion on earth, and at the hands of the greatest, most advanced empire in history. In other words, faith and reason collaborated in Jesus’ death sentence, and on some level we know it. We know what’s coming, in five short days.

And yet here we are, expected to wave around blessed palms, maybe even march in procession, to mimic the fickle crowd in Jerusalem that greeted Our Lord with hosannas, then just a few days later would call for Him to be crucified. We walk in their sandals, as on Friday in the Gospel of the Passion, we will shout out their words in unison, “Crucify him! Give us Barabbas!”

The Church, in her wisdom, is rubbing our noses in it, reminding us that it is each one of us, every sinner born on this earth, who shed the blood of Christ. We can’t blame the Jews, or even the Romans, though that would feel much better. (And indeed, at shameful points in Christian history, mobs would spill out of churches during Holy Week and attack the local Jews, the people who brought them monotheism in the first place, and then a Redeemer.)

Why must we wave these palms in pantomime? God has His reasons, and I think that the Holy Spirit was somehow at work in shaping the Church’s liturgies to march us through these paces. We must re-enact these events with our own limbs and our own vocal chords to appreciate what they mean.

If you’ve seen The Passion of the Christ, or any other harrowing depiction of Jesus’ suffering, perhaps you have shared my reaction. As the Romans wielded the whip and the rod, then imposed the crown of thorns, I found myself saying — or rather sobbing: “It wasn’t worth it! I don’t want a redemption that costs this much. I never asked for it, either!”

It’s not that I hanker for Hell. But why are the stakes so high? Couldn’t God choose some rational, sane middle way? What if Jesus had suffered just a little, and gained for us something less than Heaven? The old, perhaps abandoned Catholic theory of Limbo, as depicted by Dante, was a place for the virtuous pagans who lived before Jesus came, and for children who died unbaptized before the age of reason. It was a place of perfect natural happiness, rather like the Garden of Eden, except without the vision or presence of God. Sounds good enough to me! In fact, if offered the option, I’d leap into Limbo today, rather than walk the taut tightrope that’s supposed to lead to Heaven, with one eye always glancing down at the Abyss. Be honest. Wouldn’t you?

And that’s what the crowds wanted, too. On Palm Sunday they turned out by the thousands, to cheer what they thought was the start of an earthly utopia — a kingdom where the Messiah threw out the Romans, replaced the priests, and reigned as a godly prophet over a just and prosperous society. Not bad, not bad at all. The one thing they weren’t looking for was a “suffering servant,” a Passover lamb who would re-enact Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, as another holy victim sent down by God to die in our place. Not even the Apostles got this. I can almost hear them saying, in Larry David’s accent, “Who has time for such craziness?”

God has all eternity. He wants great things from us, far greater than we want for ourselves. His demands seem equally mad in human terms. Likewise, His gift of Redemption. It’s all just so… beyond that it totally overwhelms us, like standing too close to a waterfall or staring into a forest fire. Or contemplating the infinite, dead reaches of space. We want something much cozier, plausible and manageable.

But it isn’t an option for us. We can’t choose Eden, Limbo or even oblivion. We can’t stop Friday from coming, or the Cross from rising above the vast, fickle crowd. So we’d better move closer to it, even try to grab hold of the bloody thing. And hold on tight.