PALM SUNDAY: THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY TO CALVARY
 
          All of our preparation for this whole Lenten Season, these days of journeying with the Lord in the desert, is geared towards this week – the Holy Week, the holiest days in our Christian faith. All the things that we promised that we would be observing – fasting, intense prayer and almsgiving and also embracing the sacrament of confession – find their meaning and full significance in the very fact that we want to be resurrected with Christ and truly experience new life in Him. The celebration of Palm Sunday recalls the triumphant entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem on a donkey, which symbolizes that he comes to bring peace. During the time of Jesus, when kings and monarchs entered the cities with a horse, it meant that they came to wage war or to conquer, but when He comes on a donkey, He comes to bring peace. What about the palms? The palm branches symbolize victory and triumph. Martyrs, for example, are often pictured, like the statue of St. Cecilia, with a palm branch, which speaks of their spiritual victory and triumph over death. Having those palms with us today, in your very hands, should remind us of the spiritual victory that we need to uphold; remember that those same palms will be burned to become ashes before Ash Wednesday of next year to be signed once again to our foreheads as the priest utters this important exhortation at the beginning of Lent:
Repent and believe in the Gospel.
     As we leave the desert, where we have spent most of our Lent, hopefully we are already
reinvigorated and recharged in our own spiritual life – recharged enough to accompany the Lord as he enters Jerusalem today, as He begins his journey to the cross. In the old days, before the Vatican II changes in the liturgy, the reading of the Passion was met with total silence. At times, the most eloquent response to the piercing Word of God is silence, because there is no best homily that could really give due justice to what God did for us in order to give us new life.
     What God expects from us today is gratitude – gratitude strong enough to make us hate sin of every shade and color; strong enough to make us translate our love of God into love of all God’s people. A very poignant scene in the passion reading is when we all kneel down and pause for a few moments of silence when Jesus cried out in a loud voice and gave up his spirit. Then, right after that, we are told that the veil of the sanctuary was torn from top to bottom, the earth quaked, and bodies of saints who had fallen asleep were raised. This is the power brought by the death of Christ: the veil of the sanctuary that symbolically separated ordinary people from God was torn down, all gone. There is no longer that great divide that separates us from God. Jesus tore down that great divide of sin that shuts us off from the Father’s love. Are there still barriers that divide us from one another or from other people? The call for us is to tear down those barriers – envy, unforgiveness, entitlement, pride, selfishness, vanity, addictions of different kinds. As Christ destroyed those divisions through a huge price (his very life), may we resurrect and rise from all those petty and insignificant things that divide us as one community of faith, from those things that make us less loving and caring husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Let us not cheapen what Christ did for us by taking each day – business as usual. – Fr. Cary