Palm Sunday: “My heart is filled with sorrow to the point of death”

Mar 26, 2015

Palm Sunday of the
Lord’s Passion
At the Procession with Palms: Mark 11:1-10 or John 12:12-16
Readings: Isaiah 50:4-7;
Philippians 2:6-11
Gospel: Mark 14:1-15:47

I can admit now, that when I was young, I hated those movies portraying the life of Christ. They were never snazzy enough. The miracles were never convincing. To top it off, those movies always ended in failure. There was no way around it. He died. He failed. And it was a mess.

Perhaps that is why I rarely found our churches very appealing. In addition to the associations of glumness and guilt, there he was, bleeding and broken up, for all to see.

One of the best things about the Forty Hours devotion was the fact that, in addition to the incense and the processions, the cross, especially the body, would soon be covered.

Much later in life, I would hear reports that the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the head of the Unification Church, as well as Ted Turner, found it somewhat strange that people would worship a figure who ended up in such failure.

And that’s what it was all about. I wanted, we all want, a winner. And a winner does not end up like the rest of us — weak, beyond earthly help, frail, and failing before the great force of death.

Superman had X-ray eyes and could fly. Captain Marvel muttered “Shazam!” and zapped defeat into sudden victory. Wonder Woman, better than the Amazons, could take on armies of marauders. But not Jesus.

I would have rewritten the script. Instead of picking up the ear of an enemy and somehow reattaching it, why not have Jesus use that power to knock all their heads off?

Even after Jesus was put on the cross, I thought the cavalry could have come in at the last minute. The heavens could have opened up and the thunderous voice of God boom: “What are you doing to my beloved Son? Take that!” Lightning and earthquakes. Instead we get this: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I chose, then, to ignore this unpleasantness for years. Easter would come sure enough, candy, spring, and all.

This avoidance reappeared when I became a Jesuit novice. I could never adequately enter the mystery of the third week of the Spiritual Exercises, the week (or day, as the case may be) that concentrated on the passion and death of Jesus. Everything seemed to come to a stop. I would wait for the resurrection narratives and the promise of the retreat’s end.

Somehow, over the years, it has all ,changed. A child knows death, but not its implications. Most adults do.

When you get right down to it, every death is disaster. Death is a total, utter negation of everything that leads up to it. Many nonbelievers, in their more honest moments, admit the unmentionable: death seems to mock our every hope and achievement.

And after seeing so many loved ones die, whether old and frail, middle-aged and struck down by infirmity, young and suddenly disappeared, I realize that nothing less than a God who would face our death could suffice., Could a God truly love and heal us, all so burdened with sin and its weight of death, if that God, too, had not been filled somehow with sorrow, even to the point of death? -- By Fr John Kavanaugh, SJ

Thoughts From The Early Church

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord
When Jesus entered Jerusalem like a triumphant conqueror, many were astonished at the majesty of his bearing; but when a short while afterward he entered upon his passion, his appearance was ignoble, an object of derision.

If today’s procession and passion are considered together, in the one Jesus appears as sublime and glorious, in the other, as lowly and suffering. The procession makes us think of the honor reserved for a king, whereas the passion shows us the punishment due to a thief.

In the one, Jesus is surrounded by glory and honour, in the other, “he has neither dignity nor beauty.” In the one, he is the joy of all and the glory of the people, in the other, “the butt of men and the laughing stock of the people.”

In the one, he receives the acclamation: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes as the king of Israel”; in the other, there are shouts that he is guilty of death, and he is reviled for having set himself up as king of Israel.

In the procession, the people meet Jesus with palm branches, in the passion, they slap him in the face and strike his head with a rod. In the one, they extol him with praises, in the other, they heap insults upon him. In the one, they compete to lay their clothes in his path, in the other, he is stripped of his own clothes. I

n the one, he is welcomed to Jerusalem as a just king and saviour, in the other, he is thrown out of the city as a criminal, condemned as an impostor.

In the one, he is mounted on an ass and accorded every mark of honour; in the other, he hangs on the wood of the cross, torn by whips, pierced with wounds, and abandoned by his own.

If, then, we want to follow our leader without stumbling through prosperity and through adversity, let us keep our eyes upon him, honoured in the procession, undergoing ignominy and suffering in the passion, yet unshakably steadfast in all such changes of fortune.

Lord Jesus, you are the joy and salvation of the whole world; whether we see you seated on an ass, or hanging on the cross, let each one of us bless and praise you, so that when we see you reigning on high, we may praise you forever and ever, for to you belong praise and honour throughout all ages. Amen. -- By Guerric of Igny, (c. 1070/80-1157)