PALM SUNDAY
By our Pastor, Fr. Carmelo Jiménez
We have come to the end of our Lenten journey and have begun Holy Week. Today’s liturgy prepares us to celebrate the great mysteries of our faith. Mysteries which become our salvation.
Palm Sunday: “Those preceding him as well as those following kept crying out: ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come! Hosanna in the highest!’” (Mk 11:9-10). That is why we go out to meet him. Because we know that our redemption has to come from God and this is also the invitation of Holy Week. Let us pray that God does not deny us the liberating strength that Christ Jesus brought. Christ is God who comes. Christ is the Redeemer that brings liberty and dignity which we have lost through sin. Christ comes and this is the gesture of the liturgy this morning: go out to meet him, be here to wait for him. To fulfill our duty to hear his word, that is our hope.
The second reading invites us to see the Mediator: “found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:7-8) God the almighty comes but he wants to identify himself with the figure of a servant that humbles himself even to death to be joined to human misery. In that way he can give a divine meaning to the vindication of the whole world, such as peace, the right to life, human dignity, etc. but at the same time he plants hope that we do not need to put our trust solely in the powers here on the earth. “Unless he Lord build the house,” says the Bible, “they labor in vain who build.” (Psalm 127:1)
This past Wednesday, March 25th, we celebrated the Annunciation of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. I love to reflect on the short phrase that the priest or deacon or even the bishop says when he adds a little water to the wine during the offertory at Mass: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” Jesus Christ knows us perfectly; he knows our weaknesses because he himself shared in them. But, his passion becomes redeeming and saving because he is the one who came down to take on our condition in order to raise us up to his condition of being the son or daughter of God.
In the Gospel of Saint Mark, we will hear the testimony of a pagan: “When the centurion who stood facing him saw how he breathed his last he said, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God!’” (Mk 15:39) The soldier that should have given testimony that he had died; is the centurion who was going to tell Pontius Pilate and the people and the world: “Truly this man was the Son of God.” Christ had won; his humiliation had not been a failure.
The cross is the way to glory and this is the hope that I would like everyone to reflect on during our Holy Week. May this Palm Sunday, amidst the palms that accompany the triumph of Christ entering in our lives, be a time of praise and a cry of hope for the world to change because we have put it under the protection of Christ. We say: in our Lord we have put our trust and we will not be confused. Amen.