Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion
Today we celebrate Palm Sunday and we enter Holy Week. This is the most solemn week in the liturgical calendar and concludes with the joyous 50-day Easter Season. In today’s Liturgy, we celebrate when the people welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem, with palm branches, welcoming the Messiah, Jesus the Davidic King, with cries of “Hosanna!” And yet we are entering the week which commemorates Jesus’ Last Supper, His rejection, His arrest, His torture, and His death—all of which we must pass through liturgically before we enter into the liturgical celebration of His resurrection.
If we take a look at the readings for today’s Mass, we find that they focus on Jesus’ passion. We read in the Prophet Isaiah how the figure depicted is buffeted with strikes, his beard is plucked, and he is mistreated and spat on (50:6). This picture takes on its full image in light of Jesus’ passion. When we turn to the responsorial psalm, Psalm 22, we find the Davidic figure scorned and rejected, pierced in the hands and the feet. The antiphon, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me” (22:2) we find in the Gospels on Jesus lips from the cross, where He is the one pierced in the hands and feet. But the psalm teaches us to recognize the full message Jesus intends to communicate by this cry: it’s not simply a cry of suffering, but also of hope. With that cry, Jesus identifies Himself as the suffering servant of the Lord, who, as in the psalm, announces the praise and glory of God (22:23-24).
This is the incredible and awesome mystery St. Paul reveals to us in his Letter to the Philippians, the great self-emptying of God, Who came among us as one of us to reunite us with Himself, so that we might share in His life. That’s what the Gospel reading for today is about. Our reading from the Passion in St. Luke’s Gospel begins with the Last Supper. The Last Supper is the beginning of Jesus’ sacrifice, unbloody for sure, but no less a sacrifice. At the Last Supper, Jesus offers up to us His Body and Blood, connected mystically and inextricably to His death on the cross.
It is in the Eucharist that we find a share in Jesus’ very Divine life. So when we meditate over the biblical passages during Holy Week, starting today, focusing on the passion of Christ—which I recommend we do—we need to imagine ourselves there. We need to see ourselves (not others) as the ones responsible for the events. We need to take turns imagining ourselves as St. Peter denying Christ, as the elders handing Him over, as the Roman soldiers piercing His flesh. We need to imagine ourselves as Jesus being crucified. We need to imagine ourselves as His Blessed Mother watching the horrific act. We need to recognize that He is there because of our sins…He is there because of my sins, not just yours, not just someone else’s, but mine. But we must not get depressed. We must not lose hope. Jesus knows what fault we share. And He loves us. We must not get so prideful that we get depressed because of our faults. We must acknowledge our weakness, because it is then we shall be exalted by God. It is then that we will be prepared to experience the joy of the resurrection. Christ is risen. We celebrate this at every Mass, even during Lent. Holy Communion attests to this, even on Good Friday when there is no Mass.
And yet, Holy Week is about walking with Jesus to death, so that we might rise with Him at Easter. There is no Easter joy without the sorrow of the cross. That’s what Palm Sunday teaches us. That’s what Lent teaches us. That’s what Triduum teaches us. This week, let’s walk with Jesus, suffering the final days of Lent with the Easter hope of resurrection in our hearts.
- Jeff Morrow