PALM SUNDAY 2016
My dear sisters and brothers in Christ:
Along with the entire Church, we begin our observance of Holy Week by joining Jesus on His journey to Jerusalem. On this journey, we use our imagination and our memory in order to meditate deeply on the graciousness which God has bestowed upon us in Jesus Christ.
The journey we take with Jesus this week will, if we allow it to do so, reveal to us what is in the heart of Jesus, what Jesus desires for our good. Our journey will take us into the very heart of God, the God who loves us beyond our ability to express or imagine it, the God whose compassion for our weakness compels Him to come to our rescue, to bring us home from whatever exile may separate us from Him, to reconcile us with Himself despite whatever alienation or sin keeps us far away from Him.
Our journey with Jesus this week also allows us to be with Jesus in a particularly intimate way. It allows us to continue to learn from Him, not only about the strength and power of His love for us, but also about how we should undergo our own sufferings, our own conflict, the inevitable sorrows which we all face in our lives. On this journey, Jesus teaches us how to cope with the negative experiences in life in order to be able to realize the fullness of life, the reality of resurrection, the promise from the lips of the Father of us all that we will have eternal life.
And so, on this Palm Sunday, we use our eyes and our ears to see and hear the crowds lining the roadside to Jerusalem. We see them growing in number and in diversity: men, women, and children. We see them waving palm branches both in greeting Jesus of Nazareth and in giving Him the kind of reverence and respect reserved for the best of leaders and saviors. We hear them shouting: “Hosanna to the Son of David” with awe and with respect and with expectation, expectation that He would be the one who would free them from their slavery to Rome and restore the Kingdom to Israel. And we sense that what they are feeling is sincere and true.
However, as we focus our eyes on Jesus, we see that His eyes are cast down, that he is embarrassed at the attention, uncomfortable with the fame. What is in Jesus’ heart is not his own celebrity; it is the resolute courage to complete this journey of obedience to the Father’s will. This journey will conclude with Jesus betrayed by one He Himself had chosen, with Jesus being abandoned by those He loved, with Jesus being tortured and mistreated by ignorant men who would make themselves His enemies. This journey would conclude with Jesus being executed by the political and religious authorities, with Jesus being buried in a borrowed grave, with Jesus waiting for the reward for His submission to Divine Providence by being raised from the dead by the Father.
This is what is in Jesus’ heart as he enters Jerusalem: He is thinking about what He had to do, about what He had to endure. And, sisters and brothers, He is thinking about you and He is thinking about me, about suffering all of this for you and for me.
What we learn from Jesus today is the necessity of complete trust in the Father, of reverent submission to Him. What Jesus teaches us is how to maintain our integrity even in the midst of circumstances which could and often do turn us aside from our true purpose in life. What Jesus teaches us is that what God calls us to is the most important thing in our lives, and that we need to be more faithful to that than we are to any other thing.
What Jesus teaches us today is that fidelity to God, even and, especially, through our suffering, is the only thing which allows us to share in the resurrection from the dead.
As the ancient hymn tells us: “If we die with the Lord, we shall live with the Lord. If we endure with the Lord, we shall reign with the Lord.”
And so, as Jesus leads us to Jerusalem, we follow him and we try to imitate him.
We recall that Jesus could have turned around and gone back home to Nazareth. He could have compromised Himself and given in to the crowd’s needs for a more popular messiah, for an easier message. We know that we are tempted to give in to these temptations to cowardice and fear.
But Jesus did not; and because He did not, He won for us the gift of eternal life and calls each and every one of us to imitate his faith, trust, and strength.
Let us continue throughout this Holy Week to learn from Him, to use our imagination and our memory not only to appreciate what God has done for us but also to follow the path ourselves with Him from Jerusalem to Calvary, from Calvary to the grave, and from the grave to new and glorious and everlasting life.
As we learn from Jesus, we remember the verse from another beautiful hymn:
“There is no sorrow, pain or woe;
There is no suffering He did not know.
He did not waver, he did not bend.
He is the victor, he is my friend.”
Our friend, Jesus, now calls us to the table to share with Him the banquet which is the promise of eternal life.
Amen.