Passion/Palm Sunday, the first day of the holiest, most hope filled week of the year!
This year truly, as St. Peter reminds us about the wonder of our redemption, we have through Baptism: ……. been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in His footsteps……..He himself bore our sins in His body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed. [1Pt.2: 21 & 24]
Dearest, let us walk with faith into Holy Week, in which Jesus suffers, dies and rises. The people and families that won’t be able to take part in the liturgical celebration are invited to recollect themselves in prayer at home, helped also by the technological means. Let us embrace the sick spiritually, their families and all those that care for them with such abnegation; let us pray for the dead in the light of paschal faith. Each one is present in our heart, in our remembrance and in our prayer. From Mary, we learn interior silence, the gaze of the heart, loving faith to follow Jesus on the way of the Cross, which leads to the glory of the Resurrection. She walks with us and sustains our hope. [1]
Pilgriming through this new normal Pope Emeritus Benedict reminds us about Palm Sunday in the early Church, applicable still today: Just as the Lord entered the Holy City that day on a donkey, so too the Church saw Him coming again and again in the humble form of bread and wine…….As pilgrims, we go up to Him; as a pilgrim He comes to us and takes us up with Him in His “ascent” to the Cross and Resurrection, to the definitive Jerusalem that is already growing in the midst of this world in the communion that unites us with His body. [2]
[1] https://zenit.org/articles/popes-palm-sunday-angelus-let-us-walk-with-faith-into-holy-week-full-text/
[2] JESUS of Nazareth; HOLY WEEK: from the entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection; Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI; pp. 10, 11; Ignatius Press, 2011
© 2020 Fr. Arthur Joseph
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