All glory, laud, and honor
To Thee, redeemer king:
To whom the lips of children
Made sweet hosannas ring.”
— Bishop Theodulph of Orleans, 9th century
Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter Sunday, begins with Palm, or Passion, Sunday, when the Church throughout the world remembers Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. The entrance is joyful and triumphant, as befits a king. The Mass for this day begins on that high note, but it also, and always, includes the full gospel reading of the passion and death of Jesus. This ritual is an ancient one, kept by the Church from its earliest days.
We know that in Syria, by the first half of the third century, a Great, or Holy, Week was kept during which the events of Christ’ entrance into Jerusalem, his arrest and crucifixion were remembered and celebrated. The Palm Sunday liturgy, marking the beginning of this important time, is also very ancient. We have accounts of the liturgy from a pilgrim, a woman named Egeria, who probably traveled to Jerusalem from either Galicia or Aquitaine in the late fourth century. Read her writing and consider how much of it is familiar,
As the eleventh hour draws near, that particular passage from Scripture is read in which the children bearing palms and branches come forth to meet the Lord, saying: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” The bishop and all the people rise immediately, and then everyone walks down from the top of the Mount of Olives, with the people preceding the bishop and responding continually with “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” to the hymns and antiphons. All the children who are present here, including those who are not yet able to walk because they are too young and therefore are carried on their parents’ shoulders, all of them bear branches, some carrying palms, others, olive branches. And the bishop is led in the same manner as the Lord was once led. From the top of the mountain as far as the city, and from there through the entire city as far as the Anastasis (the buildings, erected by Constantine after his conversion, centering around the tomb of Christ), everyone accompanies the bishop the whole way on foot, and this includes distinguished ladies and men of consequence, reciting the responses all the while.
We also begin Palm Sunday with “a particular passage from scripture,” a reading from one of the four Gospels describing Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem. We process into the church, singing hymns and bearing palm branches, with our children carried or in tow. We all walk together — the rich and the poor, the mighty and the meek — to hear again the story of Christ’s Passion. And we all, as Christians have done since the beginning, confront again the mystery and the scandal of the Incarnation. It is a scandal that God would take on human flesh with all its weaknesses and flaws. It is a mystery that God would love us enough to do so. The text for our education in Incarnation is Jesus himself. His life is our book, and the Palm Sunday liturgy asks us to enter into the book by walking the path with Jesus.
How should a king die? Surrounded by faithful servants and his adoring people? Cared for and soothed, his every need met? Or should he die in pain and abandoned, mocked and despised? Palm Sunday is the introduction to Holy Week, when we will see the truth of the Incarnation, that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. His full divinity will be revealed on Easter. But, in Holy Week, we will see his full humanity as he shares the death we must all die, and, further, shares the death the least among us suffer. Every man or woman left to die, unmourned, untended, alone, shares this suffering with Jesus the Christ. As the story unfolds, beginning today and throughout the week, we watch as Jesus bears every weight known to the sick, the wounded, and the dying. He is afraid. He is betrayed. He is abandoned. He is tried. He is ridiculed. He is beaten. He is burdened. He is in pain. He endures, but so does the pain. He dies. As we proclaim in the renewal of our baptismal promises during Easter, “(He) was crucified, died and was buried.”
In Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Passion, we see the Son’s humanity as he speaks to God the Father about the suffering to come. He prays, with people throughout time and around the world, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” Then, with the faith to which we are all called, “yet, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26: 39b).
And Jesus prays knowing the answer to his request may be, “No.” Jesus hears, and feels in his flesh, the “No,” heard by parents standing helpless in emergency rooms and hostages tortured and children and victims of violence standing before the knife, the gun, the raised fist.
Jesus does not hide his fear from the Father. He is not ashamed of his pain, nor does he welcome future pain. Jesus is not a superhero; he is a man, with the natural and good desire to avoid suffering, for himself and for others. But he is a man in full communion with the Father, accepting of and ready to follow the Father’s will, whatever that may be and wherever it may lead.
When Adam and Eve heard the Father’s, “No,” they went searching for a way to become themselves gods. Their break with God broke creation itself and set us on a painful path. Jesus’ trust in God, his willingness as a man to follow God, even to the cross, heals what Adam has destroyed. What is revealed in this story is that the human nature Jesus shares with us is the fully human nature intended for and bestowed upon us by God. When God the Father breathes into the man, Adam, it is the very breath, or life, of God which we are given. It is a life in communion with God, the One whose breath and spirit we are to share. Human life, fully human life, is life in intimate relationship with God. Sin, and its killing separation, has neither part nor place in what God has made. What Jesus shares with us, and shows to us, is human life. What he invites us to cast aside is the gangrenous appendage — attached to our life but filled with death — that is sin.
In the Eucharistic prayer the priest prays, “All life, all holiness comes from you.” Life and holiness are linked in the prayer because they are linked in the fully human, fully divine person of Jesus. Life and holiness are linked in the prayer because God linked them at creation and re-linked them in Christ’ death and resurrection.
When Jesus, spent, cries “out in a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,’” we are hearing the voice of the new Adam. He does not deny the pain he knows, nor does he dismiss it. He never says he is no longer afraid. He just tells the truth, “I am yours, in life, and in death. I am in your hands.” Jesus speaks the way a beloved child cries out to a parent in the midst of pain and fear. She is afraid; she is in pain; her mother is her refuge. It is to that face, those hands, so known and dear, she will turn. This does not guarantee a surcease of suffering; it only guarantees that both, mother and child, are where they ought to be, in communion, in relationship, embraced and welcomed, at home.
This is a story that has held us fast for two thousand years.
This is a solemn day, but it is not a sad day. We walk with the One who shows us our full humanity and invites us to join in it. So, for a very long time, Palm Sunday has had a certain festive tone. Perhaps it is all that greenery, though not every place uses palms. In Italy, people wave olive branches. In Ireland they wave yew branches and in England, Poland and Lithuania, willow branches. In some of these places, the day is called Willow Sunday or Willow-twig Sunday. If you find a missal from the years before the Second Vatican Council, you can read an antiphon (a verse sung or read before or after a portion of the liturgy) after the blessing of the palms that mentions other flowers. In many parts of Europe, Palm Sunday thus became a day for blessing all the spring flowers. Catholics would decorate the graves of their beloved dead with flowers, a custom we might want to make our own.
You shall take the fruit of majestic trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God. (Leviticus 23:40)
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