Today is Palm Sunday

Holy Week starts today. To Catholics, Orthodox Christians, High Anglicans and High Episcopalians and the Filipino independent Catholics also known as the Aglipayans—to those of these faiths who still value the observances of the Church—Holy Week, in the forty days of Lent, stands out as the preeminent week of penance.

photo by Manila Daily Photo (Flickr)

If some of these Christians’ attention to penance and mortification has slackened in the course of the past weeks of Lent (which began on Ash Wednesday), today’s liturgy of Passion (or Palm) Sunday, will remind them that they should be truly in earnest when they prepare themselves to celebrate the sad memorial of the cross Christ bore to redeem mankind from their sins.

The gospel of this Sunday is the narrative of the Passion according to the account of Saint Matthew.

Today’s Passion Sunday Mass also includes a call to meditate on the words of Psalm 23 and Psalm 46. They inspire us to believe that—as Catholic orthodoxy teaches—Christ’s victory over sin and death is certain. And that it can also be a victory that every human being who follows his sacrificial example can enjoy and share with others.

This certitude encourages Christians to rejoice and sing out “Hosanna! Hosanna to the Son of David, the King of Israel. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.” This joyful acclamation is recited not only today but in every Mass throughout the year. (When Pope Benedict XVI visited Turkey, where the term Christian was first used to refer to Christ’s faithful, he had a warm and historic meeting with the leader of the Orthodox Church. The world saw a hint that all is well between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox hierarchies—despite outward signs of division over political things. Patriarch Bartholomew hugged the Pope and said: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna on the highest!”)

Christians today sing of the God-Man as the victor-king as he enters Jerusalem seated on a donkey. The donkey is a reminder to ordinary folk that even the humblest sacrificial person can elevate his acts of self-giving to the level of the divine through Jesus Christ.

Christ’s Passion will only be completed to the fullest later, after His death on Good Friday, when he is resurrected at dawn of Easter Sunday. But today, because he is both perfect God and perfect Man—in the doctrine of Christian orthodoxy—it is no less than God the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who approaches riding a donkey to meet his appointment with Calvary. The people hail him as their true king—not the kings who live in palaces and have armies to make the population bow to their will. Those who have cloaks and coats lay these down to form a carpet for Him and His donkey to step on. They wave olive and palm branches to welcome him.

Palm Sunday

Without any boastfulness, he matter of factly answers the Pharisees, who are scandalized by the common folk’s enthusiasm for the man they know as a nobody, the son of a mere carpenter, Joseph, and the prayerful girl Mary. “No one can stop them from honoring me. If you silence them, the stones and the trees will cry out in their place.”

We Filipinos have not lost our enthusiasm for this ancient ritual of the blessing of the palms after the procession outside the church and the waving of the palms inside the church at today’s Mass. Filipino children love watching the whole church tremble with the swishing fronds.

Today, we see Jesus as the King of the Church, and the Church as the spiritual Israel which is mankind foreshadowed, however faintly, by the Jews who went to meet him carrying palms.

The Christian faithful know that, despite all the problems she is facing now, despite the sinfulness of her members and leaders, the Church is the mankind of the future. Purified, turned into a kingdom of the people of God, made up of different and discrete individual men, women and children, the Church will also become completely one. United, just as the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity are completely united in the One God. For each of the individual members of the Church shall have become other Christs. Or—if some women prefer—other Marys. For Mary, the mother of Jesus, was His perfect human imitation.

Article source: The Manila Times

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