ARCHDIOCESE OF PHILADELPHIA

Dear Friends in our Lord Jesus Christ,

Today we celebrate Palm Sunday. We accompany Jesus as He makes His triumphant entry into Jerusalem, where He will undergo His Passion and His Death—those events whereby He will save us, His people, from our sins.

Another name for our feast today is Passion Sunday, because we proclaim the Gospel of the Passion and recall the fact that Jesus suffered greatly for us. What is so important about this suffering is that Jesus underwent it all with immense love for His Father and for us. Jesus suffered at the hands of sinful people, but He did it with perfect freedom.

He freely accepted to offer His life in sacrifice, in order to fulfill His Father’s plan for the salvation of the world.

Saint Paul tells us this morning that Jesus emptied Himself, taking on our human nature, and that He obediently accepted even death, death on a Cross, in order to destroy death and restore us to everlasting life.

During the days ahead we will celebrate individually the events surrounding the last days of Jesus’ life. On Holy Thursday we will celebrate the gift of the Holy Eucharist and the gift of the priesthood, which Jesus gave us at the Last Supper. On Good Friday we will celebrate the saving death itself of Jesus. On Holy Saturday, in anticipation of Easter Sunday, we will proclaim the victorious outcome of the Passion, which is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

But today, the Church outlines for us in the Gospel so many of the details of the individual events that led up to the death of Christ on the Cross. The Church wants us to realize that every single aspect of the Passion was inspired by Christ’s love for us.

What are these events about which the Gospel speaks?

Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, riding on a donkey. He is triumphantly acclaimed, but just days later the same crowd will clamor for His death.

On Holy Thursday Jesus shares the Last Supper with His disciples and gives them His body to eat and His blood to drink. He establishes the priesthood to perpetuate His Sacrifice.

After the Supper, Jesus goes to the Garden of Gethsemane. Here it is that He suffers His agony, is betrayed by Judas, deserted by the Apostles and then arrested.

After His arrest, Jesus is brought to trial by the Jewish authorities. He is denied by Peter and finally handed over to death by the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate.

Jesus is then scourged at the pillar, crowned with thorns, made to carry His cross and finally crucified between two thieves. He died there on Calvary and was buried in a tomb belonging to another person.

Here the Gospel stops, but it will pick up again at this point on Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, in order to speak to us about the glory and triumph of the Risen Christ.

From the moment Jesus was arrested, He observed an impressive silence. He broke this silence only three times: once before the Jewish High Priest when He declared that He was the Messiah, the Son of God; a second time He proclaimed before Pilate that He was a King, and that He had come into the world to bear witness to the truth; a third time He spoke from the cross. And some of those very precious words Jesus addressed to His Father, and some He addressed to His Mother. Like all His words they were words of truth and love.

What message then does this Gospel communicate to us? What impact does this Gospel have on our lives?

Dear friends: this Gospel proclaims to us that the Passion of Jesus Christ, which He endured in Jerusalem, is the expression of God’s love for us. It means that the Son of Mary, who is also the Son of God, has, through His suffering and death, opened up for us eternal life.

And so, dear Friends, we have journeyed in faith with Jesus to Jerusalem. Here in the triumph of His sacred Passion we find the salvation of our souls and the pledge of victory over sin and death. We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world! Amen.