Dear Brothers and Sisters,
It is one of the most important Sundays for our spiritual life and to understand the love that God has for us. What we have just proclaimed is a declaration of love greater and truer than any one has ever seen before. It is not a declaration of love with a letter of pretty words. It is a declaration of love with concrete facts. Each phrase in the gospel is a small caress from God for you and for me. And the Lord is telling you, I love you, I adore you, I give my life for you! He loves you like crazy. That is why Palm Sunday is also called Passion Sunday due to the passion that God feels for you. He loves us passionately. The liturgical color today is red which also means love and signifies blood, the blood he shed for you. The Lord shows us with concrete facts that he has this incredible love for each one of us.
Today is a day to be happy and to have this joy for all of Holy Week. Hopefully, let us reflect a lot these days on the passion of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. We can read a part of the passion account each day from one of the gospels and use your imagination to see what the Lord has done for us. We can also watch the movie The Passion of Christ and try to go a bit deeper into this mystery of love!!
I am impressed by several things in this gospel. One is the misunderstanding of the people towards Jesus. They do not understand what he is doing for them. The world and even the local people laugh at him, spits at him. Not even do the disciples understand Christ after spending three years with him. They don’t understand why Jesus dies. The people at the foot of the cross say, if he is the son of God let him come down now from the cross. They don’t understand that the Son of God has to die on this cross, die for us. This is not understood even by the disciples.
If we are truly Christians, we will be subject to the same mockery, the same misunderstanding from people, from your wife or your husband, your children, your boss. They don’t know why you are faithful to your spouse or open to life and having more kids or that you don’t steal, or you don’t cheat on your taxes. They will laugh more at us more than they did with Christ. The mission that we have is wonderful. Christ has loved us in a very particular way, it is amazing.
I am also touched by the two thieves. What a privilege they have to be one at the left and one at the right of Christ in his kingdom. It is what James and John asked for. The kingdom of God is inaugurated on the cross. An ancient hymn says that God reigns from the tree of the cross. He is sitting in his kingdom with two thieves, like us, who are always taking his glory because we act like the god of our life.
It might be easy to think that Jesus is no longer God. He is totally disfigured. Pilate says, behold the man! He is disfigured for us because of our sins. And our sins have also disfigured caused us to be disfigured. He does not demand that we re-configure ourselves. But gives us the possibility to let him make us beautiful again. God has loved us when we were so dirty, ugly, disfigured. He has disfigured himself so that he can fit in with us. In a relationship of love the two people need to fit together. A man and a woman can fit together perfectly when they are one with Christ. When Christ is with us, we can experience eternal life, we can experience the resurrection today. Christ lowers himself deeply so he can be one with us. You will see next week that on Good Friday and Holy Saturday he descends into hell, our hell so that on Easter Sunday we can see the resurrection.
So, this Palm Sunday is a wonderful day to be full of joy, happy in the midst of your difficulties, knowing that the Lord loves you, that he is with you, he wants to give you eternal life, to rid you of your sins and to take you to heaven. This experience does not come from money or affections; it comes from Jesus Christ who loves you. This is the true happiness. This is what the Lord wants to give us today. He wants to give us this love when we cannot love the other.
Courage, brothers and sisters, this is a spectacular Sunday, the most loving Sunday of the year. In the gospel of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem we see how Jesus sends the disciples to find a colt and tells them to untie it. This is impressive because we are that donkey. He wants to ride us into Jerusalem, this heavenly Jerusalem. He wants to ride on us. He uses this image to show us how we can enter heaven. But first he has to untie us. If they ask what we are doing with the donkey, tell them, the Master has need of it. This is a huge mission, to carry Jesus. It always impressed me that we cannot believe in Christ unless we know that we are the donkey that carries him. There is a nice story that the donkey thinks the applause is for him. He doesn’t realize it is for the one that he is carrying. The same can happen to us because of our pride we think we are better than the other. How many times we distort the truth.
Jesus wants a donkey, not a horse, to do his mission to enter into Jerusalem. He will take us with him because he will ride on us. Lower yourselves these days and enter this great joy by carrying the Lord into the heavenly Jerusalem.