Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

I hope our Lenten exercises of prayer, fasting and almsgiving have reinvigorated our life with God. 

 This April, we find three major religions celebrating a holy time.

 For Muslims, the month of Ramadan began April 2.  Our Jewish brothers and sisters will begin Passover during our Holy Week.

 Today, Palm Sunday, we enter the chief week of the Christian liturgical year. We focus upon Jesus's journey from this earthly life through the mystery of death into heavenly life. Commemorating this Paschal Mystery is a time of wonder, of sorrow, and ultimately of gratitude.

“Paschal” refers to the Passover, the passing of the angel of death over the homes of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt (a passing over that spared their firstborn child from death). In a larger sense, Passover refers to their liberation from their oppressors.

On Palm Sunday, we reflect upon a paradox of triumph and tragedy: the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, and the Gospel proclamation of His passion and death. Yes, in the tragedy of Good Friday, there is the triumph of Easter—Jesus crucified, risen, and gloriously alive among us, especially in the sacramental life of the Church.

 We keep our blessed palm fronds as a reminder to welcome Jesus into our hearts each day.

 The word of God from Isaiah is a poem about a “servant” who suffers for us.

 Paul’s letter to the Christian community at Philippi quotes an early Christian hymn about God who became one of us, obedient even to death on the cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him.

 And the Gospel according to Luke proclaims the passion and death of Jesus.

Thursday commemorates the Lord’s Supper: there is the washing of feet (a symbol of service) and the meal in which Jesus gives himself to us sacramentally in the signs of bread and wine (a symbol of our oneness with God and with our fellow human beings).

Good Friday, we meditate upon the passion and death of Jesus: the Garden of Gethsemane; the trial; the Crucifixion; the burial; the veneration of the cross; and a simple Communion.

 Saturday, at the Easter vigil, we reflect upon the passage of Jesus from this earthly life through death into a transformative, transfigured heavenly life. The resurrection is a pledge of our own liberation from death or nothingness into eternal life.

The vigil includes fire (a symbol of Jesus as the light who illuminates the darkness around us); the story of our salvation in the scriptures; the baptism of our candidates; the renewal of our own baptismal promises; and the Eucharist.

Easter proclaims that Jesus is risen, gloriously alive among us. This is indeed a paramount week of our salvation history, and I urge all to participate in these services as much as you can.

I conclude with a remembrance about a ship swamped by fierce gale winds off the coast of England in 1875. Among the passengers who perished were five Franciscan nuns. They were immortalized in a poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

As the waters swamped the boat, the nuns stayed below because there wasn’t room enough for them on the deck, and were heard to say, “O Christus, O Christus, komm schnell” meaning “O Christ, O Christ, come quickly!”

The poet saw in their deaths a parallel to the sufferings of Jesus for the sake of the many.

 

         Hopkins concludes with this line referring to Christ: “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us.” He uses the word “easter” as a nautical term, meaning steering toward the east, into the light. That light is Jesus.

During our forty days of Lent, we have been striving to steer toward the light, to handle the challenges of daily life.

Yes, let Christ easter in us, abide in us, so that he may empower us to serve like him, and so that we may bear our crosses as he bore his for us.

 I pray that this Holy Week will inspire us to seek the God who became flesh in Jesus, who through his dying and rising opened up to all humankind eternal life, a God who is gloriously alive among us by the power of the Spirit. Amen.