Holy Week Meditations: Palm Sunday 2018

Mar 25, 2018 by Jill

LITURGICAL THEME FOR THE DAY:  Palm branches were the conventional symbol of public approval and welcome by eastern people to conquering heroes and were strewn and carried in triumphal processions. Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem when the people strew palm branches in His path and greeted Him with Hosannas (John 12: 12-13), became a liturgical function on Palm Sunday in the 4th century. So, we today continue the invitation is to follow Jesus through the events of Holy Week. Holy Week has its origins in ceremonies devised for pilgrims to Jerusalem in the early Church.  It is marked by the distribution of Palms and the reading of the “Passion”. The colors are changed to Red for Palm Sunday. Since it symbolizes shed blood, it is used on Palm Sunday to symbolize the death of Jesus. (N.B.: Red is the color remembering the martyrs of the church and it is used for Pentecost for the fire of the Holy Spirit).

MEDITATION OF THE DAY: This Sunday is somewhat surreal to the person who enters with full heart and mind. On one hand we have crowds of 2,000 years ago who are cheering and praising Jesus as more than just a pilgrim who has come to Jerusalem to celebrate the greatest feast day of the holy year and yet we are doing the same, who have come for this anticipatory feast.  While the crowds hail Jesus as their King, as their Deliverer they also demand the Roman punishment appropriate for a rebellious anarchist, someone who sets himself up as a rival to Caesar.  There is at the least a paradox for today and at most irony as  the people rejoice, singing ‘Hosanna in the highest!’ yet fail to understand that the King they expect.

Don’t we find ourselves hailing Jesus and then betraying him because of the expectations he places on us? After all, we recall that Jesus rides into Jerusalem in victory, and yet when the going get tough, it gets unpopular to be with Him we leave him to experience the cruelest, loneliest, most painful defeat that humanity could devise. The challenge for us this day and this week is through our   imagination and liturgy to spend time thinking through the significance of these events not as a past event but a present moment that will determine the tone and direction for our own faith and life

PRAYER OF THE DAY: Dear Lord, today we remember Your triumphant journey into Jerusalem, but let us not turn our backs on you in the coming days, weeks, months and years as the rejoicing crowd did after that day! Help us to stay on our journey with You day by day. Keep us ever faithful to our commitment to spend more time with you throughout this week.

Palm Sunday Discipline – As we read of the passion and death of Jesus of Nazareth, we are reminded that the works of justice and peace are hard works. Ponder a person whom you have wronged in your life unjustly and reflect on how to bring about justice and peace in that relationship.

ANCIENT WORDS/FUTURE HOPE: “If he was not flesh, who sat on the foal? And if he was not God, whom did the crowds go out to meet with glory?” – St. Ephraim The Syrian

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