Palm Sunday today is our entrance into
Holy Week, a very special week for us as Catholics that is really at the heart
of what we believe. For the past 5
weeks, we have been starting mass in silence, as we got down on knees to begin
our Eucharistic celebration together as a community of faith. From that moment of silence at the beginning
of the mass, we can tell that these days of Lent for us as Catholics are so
different than the rest of the year. During Lent, the Church has called us to
accompany Jesus to the cross, to pray, to give certain things up in our lives,
and to reach out to others in a special.
During this holy season, we have been called to look inside our hearts
to see the ways we need to change.
Today’s mass on Palm Sunday, however, marks a tone that is very
different from the rest of the masses that we’ve had during Lent, as we started
this morning with a grand procession, a procession that marked Jesus’ entrance
into Jerusalem.
We might not think about the two
different processions that were going on in Jerusalem on that same day almost
2000 years ago. The one procession that we celebrate today was a celebration
that the poor and the common people of society attended, a procession of Jesus
riding a donkey down the Mount of Olives.
Jesus and most of his followers had arrived from the rural area of
Galilee into Jerusalem for the Jewish holy days. The other procession on the other side of the
city involved Pontius Pilate, the military governor of this region of the Roman
Empire. Even though Pilate’s procession
is not recorded in the Gospel of Mark that we hear from today, the followers of
Jesus would have been well aware of this procession, as the Roman governors of
Judea always arrived in Jerusalem for the major Jewish festivals. While Jesus and his procession proclaimed the
Kingdom of God, the other procession proclaimed the power and might of the Roman
Empire. These were very different
processions altogether.
Where do we fit into in this story? We can choose to follow Jesus’ procession
with our hearts, with our minds, with our souls. That is what we try to do today
as we wave palms and as we process in with Jesus in his entry to
Jerusalem. Or, we can make another
choice altogether: we can pay homage to the secularism of our modern world that
tries to claim our allegiance, that tries to claim our hearts and our souls. We have honored our Lenten journey through
the promises and disciplines that we have undertaken this holy season. Yet, today, Palm Sunday, inaugurates Holy
Week and the Triduum of services on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter
Vigil mass on Saturday night. The Church calls the Triduum “the culmination of
our entire liturgical year.” This week
is a very special week for us in our Catholic faith. While our secular world has all kinds of
other events going on, while schools schedule sporting events and other
activities, while we have work and so many other scheduled events pulling at our
attention and our time, it is important for us to make time to journey with
Jesus this week, to have the events of his passion, death, and resurrection
really penetrate our hearts and make a difference in our lives.
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