Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

Surely this Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter will be completely different from any other time in our lives. The viral pandemic and attempts to contain it have altered our ways of living. Will we or can we return to what at one time was considered “normal”?

Palm Sunday, also known as the Sunday of the Lord’s Passion is usually well-attended with people expecting to receive the blessed palm branches signifying the welcome of the Saviour into Jerusalem. Many will later place them behind crucifixes in their homes or in their cars. It used to be a commonplace thing, but not this year.

Perhaps the absence of palms can help us appreciate their deeper meaning. Like the ashes on Ash Wednesday, these palms seem to attract a lot of attention, I suppose because they are blessed but it seems few have thought through what they signify. We hear in the Gospel of Matthew that Jesus entered Jerusalem and great crowds greeted him crying out “Hosanna”, laying branches in the road before him and welcoming him as a victorious king.

Anyone knows that at the high point of the story, when it looks like the bad guys just might win, our hero approaches with supreme confidence and routs the enemy, saving the day to the acclaim of all. However, Jesus arrives on a donkey, not very impressive. By the end of the reading, instead of saving anyone, he ends up crucified. Mystery.

Jesus is indeed a king, in fact, the King of Peace. With passionate love for us he gains victory over the enthrallment with what we believe is life through confidence in the Source, the unending life revealed in the Father, and Jesus’ resurrection as final proof that a life completely surrendered to God, a total negation of self-reliance in love, opens to the mystery of life eternal.

Could there be something beyond this pandemic? This Palm Sunday not only points us to God and spiritual realities, but to that which is beyond God. Beyond God? Surely anything we can think or imagine, no matter how lofty, is not equal to God as God is. Pandemic or no pandemic, when we place our ultimate trust in the Lord, an infinity opens up beyond our normal, limited view of things to mystery, the extraordinary Kingdom of God.

Fr. Bryan Patterson
Pastor
St. James Cathedral Basilica