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Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion
March 29, 2026
At the Procession with Palms
When Jesus and the disciples drew near Jerusalem
and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives,
Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them,
"Go into the village opposite you,
and immediately you will find an ass tethered,
and a colt with her.
Untie them and bring them here to me.
And if anyone should say anything to you, reply,
'The master has need of them.'
Then he will send them at once."
This happened so that what had been spoken through the prophet
might be fulfilled:
Say to daughter Zion,
"Behold, your king comes to you,
meek and riding on an ass,
and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden."
The disciples went and did as Jesus had ordered them.
They brought the ass and the colt and laid their cloaks over them,
and he sat upon them.
The very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road,
while others cut branches from the trees
and strewed them on the road.
The crowds preceding him and those following
kept crying out and saying:
"Hosanna to the Son of David;
blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord;
hosanna in the highest."
And when he entered Jerusalem
the whole city was shaken and asked, "Who is this?"
And the crowds replied,
"This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee."
At the Mass
The Lord God has given me
a well-trained tongue,
that I might know how to speak to the weary
a word that will rouse them.
Morning after morning
he opens my ear that I may hear;
and I have not rebelled,
have not turned back.
I gave my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard;
my face I did not shield
from buffets and spitting.
The Lord God is my help,
therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.
Responsorial Psalm
R. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
All who see me scoff at me;
they mock me with parted lips, they wag their heads:
“He relied on the Lord; let him deliver him,
let him rescue him, if he loves him.”
Indeed, many dogs surround me,
a pack of evildoers closes in upon me;
They have pierced my hands and my feet;
I can count all my bones.
They divide my garments among them,
and for my vesture they cast lots.
But you, O Lord, be not far from me;
O my help, hasten to aid me.
I will proclaim your name to my brethren;
in the midst of the assembly I will praise you:
“You who fear the Lord, praise him;
all you descendants of Jacob, give glory to him;
revere him, all you descendants of Israel!”
Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Matthew 26:14—27:66 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032926.cfm
(I normally copy all the readings into my reflection to make it easier for readers to look into the actual texts rather than just my thoughts. But the Matthew Passion narrative is too long, so I must leave it to you to find it for yourselves.)
*****
If someone were to ask you 'What is Holy Week? How do you “do” Holy Week?' I wonder what you'd tell them. What answer will I give here and now?
One quick response says it this way: It's the Week when we remember Christ's last days, his passion and death, and then his rising from the dead.
But then, it's so much more than just remembering. In fact the catholic liturgy seems to be something quite different from other memorial services. On Anzac Day, Armistice Day and the like, as we remember those who gave their lives in wartime the pervading hope is that it will never happen again. No more war. No more death and destruction. No more sacrificing young lives. We recoil from the very memory.
But in our liturgy of remembering we place ourselves with Jesus. Year after year we join him along the way of the cross, we identify with him in his giving up his life. We not only keep alive his memory; in ourselves we live his passion step by step; we join with him over and over again, seeing his death as the most precious thing. This might seem to be a very odd thing to do.
The idea goes back to the way the Jews celebrated their liberation from slavery in the Passover festival. In that celebration, even today, they see themselves as the people who are being saved. They re-enact the escape of that night, although in a very slimmed down symbolic way. The Passover Meal of roast lamb and bitter herbs is accompanied by recitals and songs, recalling the great exodus in such a way that they identify with the people who made that original journey out of Egypt, through the reed sea where the pursuing chariots got bogged, eventually to meet their saving God in the desert and say Yes to the Covenant proposed to them.
So on Palm Sunday we are the people who welcome Jesus in a wild procession, waving branches from palm trees and chanting loud Hosannas. On Thursday evening we will eat the Passover meal with him along with the apostles. On Friday we will walk with him through the hours of his torture and stand in silence by the cross as he gives himself in death to the Father.
We do not shun the memory but recall it in detail so we can live it as if we were there. Still we need to ask: Why do we do this ? It seems unnatural. What is its meaning? There is nothing like it anywhere in human experience.
The key idea at the heart of it is that in his whole life Jesus was giving of himself. And this reached a final stage when he gave himself up under the olive trees in that hillside orchard. “Who are you looking for?” he asked the police. And then, “That's me. I'm the one you're looking for. Let these others go free.” And he didn't flinch when they laid violent hands on him and hustled him away to their boss.
He gave himself up. That's the heart of it. All his life he'd been giving. Self-giving is the soul of his message. We like to call it “love”. Love is expressed, made real, when we give ourselves to the other, for the other.
So we say Jesus gave himself up for us when we were sinners. (Paul writing to Christians in Rome) https://biblehub.com/romans/5-8.htm
John, introducing his reflections on the last supper, writes that Jesus, “having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end.”
“To the end”. Or “to the utmost”. Or you could also say “without limit, even to the point where it killed him, his loving us.” That is what self-giving is. It recognises no limit. It is in no sense conditional.
What were his alternatives, that night in the orchard? As soon as he heard the guard coming he could have slipped away, got lost among the heavy shadows of the trees on a bright moonlit night. With a head start they would never have caught him. But the disciples would have put up a fight and some would have been killed. Others would take to their heals; some would get caught. What then would be the lesson of that night? Would it be: “He gave himself up for them, for us” or “He gave them up to save himself”?
His message had to be lived out in real life. As long as it remained just words it could be argued about, watered down, ignored, but when it is lived through to the bitter end there is no room left for holding back. Everything is given.
I suppose you could re-write the whole story and have events unfold differently, but then would this lesson of self-giving be sufficiently convincing? We are very hard-headed and hard-hearted when it comes to learning the message of love: self-preservation mostly wins out. When he died for us, he made himself the example, showing us the way; showing us what metanoia means; what it takes to change the world. What it takes to change ourselves. What we can contribute to the life of a loved one.
Hopefully it won't take a violent death like his. Most of us have learned the lesson of self-giving love and lived it out day by day for the better part of our lives. Every year, re-living the passion step by step is a way for us to get some idea of the meaning of life and love, truth and lies, fidelity and betrayal – some idea of the world's continuous trauma from man's inhumanity to man. We dare to get involved.
To complete the picture of Holy Week we must not stop at the death of Jesus. Holy Saturday is an eerily empty day. Visiting the church is like going into a tomb. There are no lights, no flowers. The altar table is bare; the tabernacle door stands open. We experience, along with the disciples, a whole day and two nights of emptiness - life without Jesus.
Then come the mind-blowing encounters with Jesus risen from the grave. But I'm not sure we have got the balance right here. There seems to be something lacking in the way we celebrate the resurrection. Many are likely to go to Mass – and then, glad the whole thing's over, get out and have a day of fun or sport or anything, provided it's not religious. Presently, in old age, I'm finding the belief in – the very idea of – one rising out of death to experience life in a new dimension is utterly mind-boggling. I firmly believe it, but the closer I get to my own passing over, the more stressful is the thought of such an experience.
It is odd that the liturgy views Jesus' resurrection as a victory. "He has conquered death, our Hero." Surely it is more a simple fulfillment. Death is not an enemy to be conquered, not really. It is a door that opens wide upon a fullness of life, a fullness of being. It is all we ever wanted, and as Jesus rejoined the disciples and talked about it, so we need to make our own their experience. Going back to where we began this reflection: we are the people who go into this new dimension of life with Jesus. There's no end to the celebrating...
*****
It's been a long journey with Jeshua as Master. Sunday by Sunday: # fasting in the desert with a definitive commitment to the task; # transfiguration giving a small taste of future glory sometime, somewhere beyond; # a chance conversation with a woman from an heretical sect with talk of worship in spirit and truth; # the cure of a man born blind setting up a challenge to those who think they know what it's all about; # Lazarus, three days dead and raised from the grave; # finally the time of crisis, precipitated by a roudy welcome to the Holy City and a vigorous clearing out of temple traders.
The procession had taken them right up to the temple. Suddenly Jeshua was caught in a rage. At the sight of the traders noisily shouting their prices, he picked up some rope, made a whip out of it, and chased them out of the temple, tipping over their tables and spilling their coin across the pavement in the process. We might wonder how he got away with that but the presence of a dozen or so hefty men from Gallilee may have been protection enough. John would have said 'his time to be arrested had not yet come.'
Our starting question today is Why? Why this display on this occasion? If he sensed the time was ripe, this public acclaim not only confirmed it but brought it on. There was to be no "escape to a desert place" from here on.
*****
In the reflection for the fourth Sunday of Lent I suggested that the action makes the idea a reality. So also for Jeshua. In his passion and death he made his teachings real. He lived out what he had taught in the Beatitudes: he became one of the defenceless poor, surviving only on the hope of blessings to come; he endured humiliating maltreatment, blows, physical assaults, intimidation, lack of due process, all with meekness and mostly in silence; he mourned the betrayal of his closest associate, Peter, and offered forgiveness with a look of understanding that made Peter go out and cry his heart out.
He took the false accusations, the bullying interrogations, the vicious beatings, and in the end the indescribably cruel death by crucifixion, with amazing endurance, invincible in his belief that God would provide. Except for one dreadful moment when he lost his nerve and cried out in despair; that must have felt like a most humiliating defeat, having failed to hold on to the end. But hope did endure, and he was able to surrender himself in death to the Father.
As we follow the Anointed One through this passion week we will be living our commitment to his standards. Trying to be real, we will keep an eye out for disparities between our conduct and those standards. We might notice, for example, that we sometimes fight against some twist of 'fate', not with humility and courage but with bitter pride.
Or we might remember how emotional we get under criticism at home; how defensive we become, even self-righteous. Or we might be pulled up short at the lack of compassion we showed at someone's death - the time we just did not want to be involved in the mourning. Or more likely it happened when a neighbour lost his job and they were in a bit of a panic - and I couldn't care less.
As for fighting for your rights: you're ready to take anyone to court if they take advantage of you in any least way. And you'll make sure they feel the full force of the law. But what would Jeshua do? Is this what it means to fight for justice and truth - defending one's own rights and going all out for revenge? It wasn't his way. He said to forgive, to forego what is owing to us, to be generous as your heavenly Father is generous and to give double.
*****
I'm convinced that, overall, the majority of people in their private lives do in fact live up to the standards of the beatitudes as spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount, not just in the West but world-wide. In public life, however, it's a different matter. Here, to dominate is everything. "Win at any price; do whatever it takes!" No business executive would dare suggest they risk insolvency when there was a way survive with as small 'adjustment' here and there - to bend the law just a bit; in business you can't afford to be too sensitive about morality and ethics. No political Party would win an election if they were too conscientious about truth and integrity in every statement and promise. We expect our leaders to be winners, and we'll toss them out if they disappoint.
This is the ChristPassion of the world. To save the world with the Christ every last human being has to 'do justice, be compassionate, and walk humbly with their God.' In other words: 'with their conscience'! Will this ever happpen?
I believe it will, because this is God's purpose and intent, but the yeast, for its rising, takes long and thorough kneading over countless generations. The whole human family is being kneaded, trampled under foot like the grapes after harvest - pressed, forked over and pressed again. How else to explain the recurrence of warfare with its massive pain. At least if we can believe there is a process, some purpose in all this, we might find a way to hope. Blind, stupid, meaningless, pointless fate is too hard to swallow.
*****
Our task is to turn all this negative to positive, by God's gracious kindness. We do what Jeshua did, and that's what this week of remembering is all about. The rituals we perform together memorialise his critical last week, but it is for each one to think it through for themselves and keep on wondering until some understanding comes to you. There are plenty of words about Christ dying for us, about us following Christ, carrying the cross with him, sharing in his suffering for sin, joining his sacrifice, but to make all that real for oneself is the work of a lifetime.
And in the end there's no simple answer that you can put into words, for yourself let alone for anyone else. But, at some level beyond words, you know, and knowing, you commit yourself to doing whatever you can. First comes compassion which is possible for everyone. Compassion will lead us to give whatever we have to give, whether it's rolling up your sleeves and helping or just giving some cash, or volunteering with a team, or something more substantial like legal assitance, or even political representation. The effect of this combined good will of millions of people must act as a counterweight against the combined evil blocking the kingdom from coming. This is our prayer that the Kingdom come on earth, among us, among our nations, among all our family members worldwide.The Kingdom of justice, truth, compassion and Divine Love.
From Kyiv to Tehran, the Christ is being crucified this year again - still! We can look away, thinking how lucky we are it's not happening here and not likely to. Or we can look at those wrecked homes, imagine those broken bodies, see the agony in those terrified eyes - and weep! Weep as Jesus wept. Allow compassion to tear our heart as we struggle, with the world in agony nailed to us and we to it.
*****
If the raising of Lazarus is to be interpreted as a political statement, then the roudy entry into Jerusalem was an open declaration of war. But it will be a peaceful war. No violence. No fighting. No mishandling of the truth to deceive rather than enlighten. No winners and losers; just the kingdom of God like a new dawn breaking.