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From the Pastor's Desk: Palm Sunday-March 28, 2021
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With the liturgy of Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, we stand at the threshold of Holy Week. This special week in the life of the Church and our own lives, we commemorate the most profound mysteries of life and death, of God and man, of love and sin. To fully and most authentically experience Holy Week, forty days ago we entered a pilgrimage of faith with a precise direction – to turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel. The point of Lent was to prepare ourselves – taking a step at a time - into a new life won for us by Christ at a high cost. The cost is indeed high - for making His life a gift to God and to others in every moment of His life through His healing, preaching, welcoming, forgiving– Jesus dies on the Cross.
We call today “Passion” Sunday not because of Our Lord’s passionate love for us, even though He does love us passionately in the true sense of the term. We call it “Passion”, because it comes from the Latin word “passio”, which means suffering or undergoing something. Our Lord enters Jerusalem knowing a new level of suffering is at hand, but He does not hesitate because the stakes are our salvation. The love of God is on the highest form of display in the Passion. God is saying to us: "No matter what you do, I will keep on loving you. I will never let you down." The irony of the Lord’s Passion is that even if we reject Him, scourge Him, crown Him with thorns, betray Him, even if we crucify Him, He continues to love us: "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." God's love and faithfulness doesn't depend on us being perfect but rather walking step by step in the future of becoming – becoming the best version of ourselves placing our total trust in Him. That's the message of the Passion. And it's the message that each of us, wounded and sinful as we are, most needs to hear. We have to learn to trust God more and more in order to be transformed by Him into the kind of person God created us to be.
I would like to extend a personal invitation to everyone to make time in your schedule to participate in the liturgical celebrations of Holy Week in the parish. The three great days of the Holy Triduum offer us one long liturgy that is at the very heart of the liturgical year of the Church. We are invited to enter the upper room to celebrate the Passover, to accompany and to follow Jesus through the halls of judgment, bitter Passion, Crucifixion, and His burial. We wait in solemn vigil to bear witness to His Resurrection as He rises again in our human flesh, glorious and immortal.
On Holy Thursday, the evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper celebrates the three gifts of Jesus Christ to His Church – the Priesthood, the Eucharist and the life of service. The one main theme that unites the gifts together is Love. The Liturgy does not simply tell us about Christ’ love, but through word, ritual action and sacrament, we can truly experience it.
Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion celebrates the day when our Lord through love gave His life to redeem us from sin and death. Today’s celebration allows deepening our reflection upon the mystery of the Trinity – the God who is Love is revealed in the ordinary language of a fallen world through rejection, pain and suffering. At the heart of the Passion we also reflect upon the divine paradox: “Death itself is put to death on this day which we call ‘good’.”
Holy Saturday is traditionally a day of fasting, silence, and contemplation. But also it is a day of excitement and anticipation for the elect, who have been preparing for months, perhaps years, for the sacraments they will receive tonight. The Easter Vigil is the “mother of all holy vigils.” It celebrates the Lord’s rising from the dead who took our human flesh and now rises to new life of the Resurrection.
I wish all of you a most beautiful and grace-filled Holy Week. Please follow closely the schedule for Holy Week to share generously with one another the gift of your time in prayer.
With prayers,
Fr. Andy
