April 13, 2014: Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord
Matthew 21:1-11: The crowds preceding 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.”
Isaiah 50:4-7: 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.
Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Philippians 2:6-11: he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Matthew 26:14-27:6 : The Passion of the Lord according to Matthew. …
April is the month of the Holy Eucharist:
We are now entering Holy Week
Scripture Notes from the Sourcebook:
ABOUT PALM SUNDAY: Branches of palm, olive, or sometimes even budding willow, are ancient symbols of victory and hope, as well as of new life. The procession celebrating Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem overflowed with praise and excitement, as onlookers waved these triumphant branches and proclaimed their blessings. Yet, in a few days, they will cry, “Crucify him!” The crowd’s change of heart illustrates the problem of holding God to our expectations. The crowd expected a liberating leader, the Messiah, to free them from Roman oppression. Jesus instead takes up his Cross and invites us to do the same. Through his Death and Resurrection he is indeed a liberator, but from Death and sin, not from Rome. But unable to see past their need, the crowd’s disappointment turns into anger and a death order. As we enter Holy Week, Palm Sunday teaches us to let God be God, and to trust in God’s wisdom not only to meet but shatter and exceed our expectations.
GOSPEL AT THE PROCESSION WITH PALMS: Matthew is ever ready to demonstrate that Jesus fulfills all the prophecies of the Old Testament, in this case, Zechariah 9:9. The prophet’s words acclaim the coming of Zion’s (Jerusalem’s) king, the Davidic king. In the opening words of his account of the Gospel, Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ descent from David (see Matthew 1:1) – and in today’s text, the crowd cries out “Hosanna to the Son of David … Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth. …” The acclamations here are joyous, in praise of the one whose words and deeds were so powerful, whose coming had so long been awaited.
THE FIRST READING: One of the four so-called “suffering Servant Songs” of Isaiah (we will have the others in the course of the week) depicting a prophet who willingly submits to shame and disgrace in carrying out his ministry with God’s help. In the context of today’s liturgy, Isaiah’s words point to Jesus, the suffering prophet from Galilee. Throughout his ministry, Jesus’ words were meant to rouse and give hope to a weary people. Faithfully, he listened to the Father in prayer. Faithfully he carried out his mission. Hear how Isaiah’s words about the prophet’s sufferings are echoed in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Passion.
RESPONSORIAL PSALM 22: The words of today’s antiphon are placed on the lips of the crucified Jesus in Matthew’s account of the Passion. Did Jesus feel abandoned by God? The psalm is a prayer of lament uttered in the depths of great distress. Note how the psalmist’s descriptions of his suffering are echoed in the Gospel account of Jesus’ Passion and Death. Note the confident change of tone in the last stanza of the psalm. The psalmist has moved – or been carried – through his suffering into a new stance in life. SO, too, was Jesus. So, too, can we be.
SECOND READING: Today’s text is an early Christian hymn that concisely summarizes the Christian mystery: though divine, Jesus willingly embraced human likeness and was obedient to God, even unto a shameful Death. “Because of this” he was exalted by God. And as a result, all creation reverently acknowledges him as Lord.
THE GOSPEL: This year on Palm Sunday we hear Matthew’s account of Jesus’ suffering and Death. Matthew follows Mark’s account closely while at the same time incorporating information from his own sources, such as Judas’ remorse and suicide (see Matthew 27:3-10)., the dream of Pilate’s wife about Jesus (276:19), Pilate’s assertion of his own innocence with regard to Jesus’ Death (see Matthew 27:24-26), and the placement of a guard of soldiers at Jesus’ tomb in order to prevent his body from being stolen and his Resurrection asserted (see Matthew 27:520-66).
As in Mark, all takes place at Passover, the annual commemoration of the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. As Jesus celebrates this feast with his disciples, he will undergo his own Passover from Death to Life. He will be “handed over” (note how often the verb occurs) by one from his own circle of disciples as well as by the religious leaders of his people. And in a very real sense, he likewise handed himself over to the Father: “Your will be done” (Matthew 26:42).
The sufferings of his Passion are not only physical. In addition to the betrayal just mentioned, “all” of his disciples abandon him and flee at the moment of his arrest. He is denied by Peter, the very one whom he had earlier made the head of his Church, the community of his followers. How would Jesus have felt in the experience of betrayal and abandonment by his closest friends at this time?
On the other hand, in contrast to Jesus’ male disciples who betrayed, denied, and abandoned him, there are the “many” (the use of the word here is unique to Matthew) women disciples who had “followed” Jesus from Galilee, including Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the unnamed mother of the sons of Zebedee (Matthew 27:56; see 20:-28). They are present at Jesus’ burial and Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” remained there, sitting facing the tomb. It is these two who come to the tomb on the morning of the day after the Sabbath (Matthew 28:1). Their actions have much to say about discip0leship and the fidelity and fears of disciples – f those who were contemporaries of Jesus as well as ourselves today.
Matthew depicts Jesus’ Death (and Resurrection) as “earthshaking” events (Matthew 27:51-54, 28:2). The earthquake signaled the inauguration of the end time (see Matthew 24:7, revelation 16:18) as does the Resurrection of the death (Matthew 27:51-53; see also Daniel 12:1-4). The earthquake was also associated with manifestations of the presence of God in the Old Testament (see, for example, Judges 5:4, Psalm 77:19) and it is this that prompts the centurion and his companions to acclaim: ”Truly, this was the Son of God” (Matthew 27:54).
PASTORAL REFLECTION: The essence of everything we are and believe in is shared at length today. A feast has to first be seen in its entirety, with the awestruck sense of all it holds seen in the heart, before the small bites can be taken, tasted, and understood. The bite-size pieces of sustenance come as we will live the Last Supper, walk the Stations on Good Friday, and watch Jesus crucified. Until those known moments, listen deeply to where you need to “sit” in the story; open your eyes to how you need to grow and which character you might be, and wait in trust that all can b egiven to God and made new. -- 2014 Sourcebook for Sundays, Seasons & Weekends
-- Anna Akhmatova
Gospel Commentary from the Irish Dominicans
The crowd that cheered him on were soon yelling 'Crucify him!' That's the way a crowd, "that numerous piece of monstrosity," tends to behave. "Who do people say I am?" he once asked. How could they know who he was? They didn’t know who they themselves were. A crowd are not a community; they have no lasting purpose, they hardly even know one another; but somehow they are able to energise one another for the worse. At his birth the angels sang, "Peace on earth!" Here he is, near the end of his life, at the mercy of a mindless mob screaming for his blood.
His life has been called "the greatest story ever told." It is not only the story of Jesus, it is also the story of the world. It is the two together forming a single story. He is one of us, he was born here, he walked our streets. This is how our world deals with such a person. The death of Jesus reveals many things: the incorruptibility of his spirit, the depth of his love and forgiveness, the reality of his relationship with the Father; it also reveals the barbarity, legal and illegal, that ordinary human beings are capable of. It shows us "the light of God's glory shining in the face of Christ" (2 Cor 4:7); it also reveals the ugly face of humanity. It is a double revelation.
Is there any hope for our world? Look again. He is one of us. He called us brothers and sisters. We know we are capable of the worst, but by being one of us he makes us capable of integrity, love, forgiveness…. We are a crowd, but we can be a new community. It is a double revelation.
He showed up the weakness of power - and revealed the power hidden in weakness.
His resurrection will reveal that the Father is indeed like the Prodigal Father in his parable. It will also reveal that we too are mysteriously raised up with him - because he is one of us.
--- Donagh O’Shea, for Today’s Good News, the website of the Dominicans of Ireland-________________________________________________________________________
It is immensely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to suffer in the freedom of one’s own responsible deed. It is immensely easier to suffer with others than to suffer alone. It is immensely easier to suffer openly and honorably than apart and in shame. It is immensely easier to suffer through commitment of physical life than in the spirit. Christ suffered in freedom, alone, apart and in shame, in body and Spirit, and since then many Christians have suffered with him.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who suffered and was executed by the Nazis in 1945
Pilgrim, pilgrim, pilgrim:
There is no way, there is no way!
You make the way, you make the way,
by walking, walking, walking.
– Anthony Machado
Thoughts on the Cross of Christ:
Two of the noblest pillars of the ancient world – Roman law and Jewish piety – together supported the necessity of putting Jesus Christ to death in a manner that even for the day was peculiarly loathsome. Thus the cross stands for the tragic folly of human beings, not just at their worst but at their best. Jesus needn’t have died. Presumably he could have followed the advice of friends like Peter and avoided the showdown. Instead, he chose to die because he believed that he had to if the world was to be saved. Thus the cross stands for the best that human beings can do as well as for the worst. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken?” Jesus died in the profoundest sense alone. Thus the cross stands for the inevitable dereliction and defeat of the best and the worst indiscriminately. For those who believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead early on a Sunday morning, and for those [who don’t believe] the conclusion is inescapable, that he came out somehow the winner. What emerged from his death was a kind of way, of truth, of life, without which the last two thousand years of human history would be even more tragic than they are. A six-pointed star, a crescent moon, a lotus – the symbols of other religions suggest beauty and light. The symbol of Christianity is an instrument of death. It suggests, at the very least, hope. – Frederick Buechner
One white face shimmers brighter than the sun
When contemplation dazzles all I see;
One look too close can take my soul away.
Brooding on God, I may become a man.
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire.
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire…
Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day:
From me to Thee’s a long and terrible way.
---- Theodore Roethke
__________________________________________________________________________________________
These words (“My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”) from the cross, and the cross itself, mean that the Father is to be found when all traces of power, at least as we understand power, are absent; that the Spirit’s authoritative witness is most clearly revealed when all forms of human authority are lost; and that our God’s power and authority is to be found exemplified in this captive under the sentence of death. The silence of Jesus before Pilate can now be understood for what it was -- namely, that Jesus refuses to accept the terms of how the world understand power and authority. In truth, we stand with Pilate. We do not want to give up our understanding of God. We do not want Jesus to be abandoned because we do not want to acknowledge that the one who abandons and is abandoned is God. We seek to “explain” these words of dereliction, to save and protect God from making a fool out of being God, but our attempts to protect God reveal how frightening we find a God who refuses to save us by violence.
God is most revealed when he seems to us the most hidden. “Christ’s moment of most absolute particularity – the absolute dereliction of the cross – is the moment in which the glory of God, his power to be where and when he will be, is displayed before the eyes of the world,” says David Bentley Hart. Here God in Christ refuses to let our sin determine our relation to him. God’s love for us means he can hate only that which alienates his creatures from the love manifest in our creation. Cyril of Jerusalem observes that by calling on his Father as “my God,” Christ does so on our behalf and our place. Hear these words, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” and know that the Son of God has taken our place, become for us the abandonment our sin produces, so that we may live confident that the world has been redeemed by this cross. … We are spared because God refuses to have us lost.
--Stanley Hauerwas, from Cross-Shattered Christ
THE PASCHAL TRIDUUM: We Christians are a people of sacramental signs. We search for signs of Christ in everything around us. In doing this, we take our cue from the Gospels. Jesus said that he can be found in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the sick. Even the stars in the sky can lead us to find the Lord. … Once each year, at Easter, it seems as if all the signs point in the same direction: Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Why is this astounding day so important to us?
When the spring equinox comes, daytime grows longer than night. Springtime begins. When the moon is full, it rises in the east at the same time the sun sets in the west. So there is never a moment when either the sun or the full moon isn’t shining in the heavens. … Every year on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring, we Christians keep the Lord’s Day with all our might. In English we name this Sunday “Easter,” from an ancient word for the first light of dawn. In most other languages, the word for Easter is based on the Hebrew word for Passover, Pesach. That’s where we get the English word “Paschal.” On the Friday and Saturday before Easter Sunday, we fast, rest and keep watch. …We do what we can to come together with others in prayer. Then, in the night between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, our fasting ends and the feast begins. This is the best time of the year for baptisms. … The fast and the feast together – Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday – are called the Paschal Triduum, which means “the Three Days of Passover.” These three days are begun and ended not from midnight to midnight but from sunset to sunset, in the Jewish manner of reckoning days. That way these three days match more closely the days of creation. The Triduum is the year’s heart – the three days of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. It is the Passover of the Lord. –Mary Ellen Hynes, from The Companion to the Calendar
“The great appeal of Jesus, Sean, is the willingness of God to walk among the benighted creatures He just can’t seem to give up on. … There is a glorious looniness to it – the magnificent eternal gesture of salvation in the face of perennial, thickheaded human inanity! I like that in a deity.” – Mary Doria Russell, from her novel, Children of God
But that was then, and this is now, and an awful lot can change in the world in a very, very short time. Then, everyone vied to be close to Jesus, mobbing him like a rock ‘n’ roll star. Now, even his best friend, Peter, turns away and pretends he doesn’t know him. Then, everyone that he met overflowed with love and praise for him. Now, the only kiss he gets is from the so-called “friend” who is betraying him.
And this is just the beginning; it all goes downhill from here.
There is not much in the world that’s meaner and uglier and more downright stupid than the sin we call prejudice – particularly the sort known as anti-Semitism: something that has stained the life of the church for centuries, leading so-called Christians to condemn and murder their neighbors as “Christ-killers.” The cruelty and the ugliness are obvious, and the stupidity is overwhelming: because the very man these anti-Semites claim to worship was of course a Semite, a Jew who at one point proclaims “Salvation is from the Jews.” And you and I are the spiritual descendents of Jews, brothers and sisters in faith even now, despite all our real and imagined differences.
I don’t know where prejudice comes from, but it seems to me that we hate the things we fear, and I think we especially fear the deep dark places buried inside the basements of our own hearts. Every Christian has to deal with what happened to Jesus, and there’s not a one of us who doesn’t secretly want to duck away from that painful story. And one of the easiest ways to do that is the one we learned as 4-year-olds: Whenever there’s trouble, act first oblivious and then self-righteous, and be sure to blame everything on somebody else. My little brother broke the glass. The cat knocked it over. It wasn’t me, Your Honor, it was him! It was self-defense. I didn’t see the kid crossing the street. Not me, no sir, I’m innocent -- she’s guilty, or maybe he is! Besides (as our imaginary mental lawyers quickly point out) I’m really the victim here! Besides, I wasn’t even there in the first place. So it’s obviously someone else’s fault – hey, it was probably those Jewish people! I mean, they were there on the spot! Or, even if they weren’t, somebody like them probably was, and that’s close enough, because it sure wasn’t me! This is one of the nastier human traits, and no religion or race or ethnic group has a monopoly on it – the persecuted often turning with frightening ease on those who persecuted them, as soon as the roles reverse. We will do almost anything to avoid taking responsibility for the things we know in our hearts we’re most responsible for. “It’s not my fault,” we say, even as we’re doing whatever it is. “He started it. Everyone else does. Besides, I was just following orders. Oh , God: I was just following order: Those are words that we will all have to account for when we meet on Judgment Day.
You and I weren’t in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, but would things have been different if we had been? What would we have done? I used to think how brave I would have been – that I would have put those wimpy disciples to shame, staying fearlessly with my Lord to the bitter end. But I am older now, and I have lived long enough to have failed both God and myself, as well as pretty much everyone else I love – and to have failed them all more than once – been lazy or willfully ignorant when I should have been wide awake, been timid or easily intimidated when I should have been courageous, been petty and mean when I should have been generous. And so I wonder with a new sad wonder: What would I have done, if I’d been there? What would any of us have done?
We can’t answer that, but we can ask ourselves: Well, what do we do now? How do we live our lives in this difficult world? Because we become the people we make ourselves, day by day, with all we do and all we don’t do; we are shaped by what we love, and fear, and ignore, and deny, and make fun of. None of us is a murderer now, but that doesn’t mean we’re not capable of it. And few of us may think we qualify as saints, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t capable of true holiness and self-sacrifice. The choice is always before us. If we can torment people who are foreign or disabled or gay or “weird” or any in way different from the majority, if we can persecute Catholics or Protestants or Jews or Moslems or Hindus or Buddhists or atheists, if we can kill or encourage -- or even stand by and quietly acquiesce in the killing of people we’re frightened of or threatened by, we are fully qualified to crucify Jesus Christ. If I do something as seemingly innocuous as to laugh at a vicious “joke,” or pretend to ignore a nasty, mean-minded slight against someone too powerless to object, I’d be right at home in the back of the crucifixion crowd, joining everyone else in denying Jesus. Which direction do we point our lives? The way of love, or its opposite? The very stones will cry out, Jesus said. They still do: the stones of the ground where Auschwitz was built, the bloodstained stones of Cambodia and Rwanda, Sudan and Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, our own troubled cities. The Passion Story continues today. We have to listen. We are part of it. -- Diane Sylvain
.