Palm Sunday – Feast of Selfless Love
(Isaiah 50:4-7; Psalm 22; Phil 2:6-11; Lk 22:14-23:56)
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Do you have a favourite coat? What would it take to motivate you to give it away?
The Palm Sunday and the Sunday of the Lord’s Passion is all about emptying one’s self in order to be filled with the selfless love of God.
Regarding the Gospel for Palm Sunday, note that the Gospel uses cloaks instead of palms. A cloak was a person’s most prized possession, constantly patched, never given away. For the poor, a cloak was their shelter and their home. The holy poor at the time of Jesus, on that day, are so caught up with who he is that they sacrifice all they have to the Messiah-King.
Remember his birth – they sing what the angels sang, and he was wrapped in swaddling cloth, the rags of the poor. Remember the leper who tossed aside his cloak to run to Jesus for healing. Look forward to the soldiers who tossed dice to see who would get the cloak of Jesus at the foot of the cross. Look at the selfless love of God made present in the passion of Jesus that we have just proclaimed.
The proclamation of the Lord’s Passion then merges with Palm Sunday. This Gospel is all about emptying one’s self in order to be filled with the selfless love of God. As Christ empties himself of his very divinity, so that humanity might be reconciled with God and filled with holiness, the humble people of Jerusalem empty themselves of their most precious possession to welcome into their midst the Anointed One of God and his reign of peace.
To be disciples of the Messiah Jesus is to put aside our cloaks of comfort and self-absorption. It is to embrace Christ’s spirit of humility and selflessness, to empty ourselves of our pride and our own wants and needs in order to become vessels of God’s life and love.
We can ask ourselves what is our own cloak, our prized possession that we can take off and place before the Messiah as he enters into the Jerusalem of our own heart and life?
It is interesting and striking that in this Gospel account, Jesus prays not to be put to the test. What Jesus is praying for here, is for the strength to withstand the greatest temptation of all, to doubt the existence of God when God is silent. He is praying to avoid the experience of the apparent absence of God, when God seems deaf, when God seems to be unhearing of our plight, and not caring about our crisis. He is praying about the silence of God.
It is this silence of God that forms the basis of the book “Silence” by the author Eno, who describes a missionary in Japan who was made to hear the cries of his fellow Christians who were being persecuted and executed until he would renounce his faith. It is that same silence being heard in the Ukraine today by the innocent victims of the unjust and merciless violence being inflicted upon them by Putin’s military.
It is this same temptation that Mother Theresa of Calcutta experienced in her spiritual life, a reality that came as a shock to all who knew her. It seems that once she began her work among the poor in India, and formed her religious congregation, that any sense of the presence of God, of a nearness to God, of and consolation from God in her prayer life, simply dried up. She wrote often to her spiritual director, that it felt as if her closeness to God had all disappeared, that it felt like God was nowhere near to her. So much so, that some media and commentators wondered out loud if she was really that holy after all.
The answer is that she was given the same test that Jesus was given on the cross when he cried out, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? That is the beginning of Psalm 22, which starts out as an expression of the experience of the absence of God, but ends up with a faith-filled declaration of the greatness of God, and faith in God who would never let us down, even though our experience might suggest otherwise.
May this celebration today and the Eucharist we receive deepen our faith in Jesus as Messiah and Lord, and motivate us to be committed followers ready to take up our own cross and follow him, not just through Holy Week and the great Triduum but also every day of our lives.
