REFLECTIONS ON OUR REDEMPTION 2 - PALM SUNDAY

Today as we sit in our homes on Palm Sunday morning, the first time in our lives for most of us, instead of processing with our palm branches, we are grateful to our Chaplain, Father Christopher Colven, for this second Meditation in this series. Let us unite ourselves together spiritually as Brethren in one holy Order, in true fraternal charity, as also with our families and friends, and all those who have gone before us on the path of Salvation.

HOSANNA! FILIO DAVID!

2020. A Palm Sunday reflection … The emotion of a crowd is not be trusted. It can change in a moment. Two thousand years ago in Jerusalem (as we hear in Sant Matthew’s account of Palm Sunday) the crowds, literally, fall over themselves to welcome Jesus. They call him a Prophet – they cheer him – they are excited by him. But the “Hosannas” are short lived – by the next Friday they are calling for the release of Barabbas and the destruction of Jesus. “Crucify him” is shouted from those same throats that had sung his praises on the Sunday. Human beings are fickle – easily influenced. Saint Paul says it: “instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want”.

Holy Week is the very heart of the year for us as Christians, for what we commemorate and celebrate in these next eight days is nothing less than the turning point of human history, the fulcrum which redefines and rebalances the whole created order, the moment of change after which nothing can ever again be the same. Back in the 9^thcentury one of the Church’s Councils, that of Quiercy said: "There is not, never has been, and never will be, a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer”. That statement goes to the heart of our confidence and our hope for we believe that God has reached out to us in Christ and raised us to a wholly new level of dignity. As the Letter to the Philippians has it: “his state was divine, yet Christ Jesus did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave and became as men are: and being as all men are he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross”.

Jesus is human – yes – he loves with a fully human heart – he feels with a human consciousness. But his humanity is the expression in time of the Eternal God. As he says of himself: “to have seen me is to have seen the Father”. In Jesus, God takes flesh and walks and talks and moves in this world, just like any of us – but he does not lose his nature as the Second Person of the Godhead. When Jesus goes to the cross it is as a man, and as God. In his humanity, Jesus may have been limited by gender, age, culture, language and all the rest – he lives and functions at a particular time, in a specific society – but, in his Divine nature, Jesus is not limited. In some wonderful way – and one hesitates to try to put this into words – his foreknowledge as God remained intact. That signifies, that as Jesus offers himself in the atoning, self-abandonment of the Passion, there is a level at which he is conscious of human history in its entirety.

What does this mean? It means that, in some way, as Jesus died he was aware of you and me, and of all our brothers and sisters, without exception. “There is not, never has been, and never will be, a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer”. Whatever we are, whatever we have been, whatever we have still to become, already finds an echo within God, for, in his Divine nature, there is nothing beyond the understanding of his Christ, and everything has already been comprehended within the heart of the dying Saviour. God was, indeed, “bearing our faults in his own body on the cross”.

Every time we recite our Creeds, we profess our belief in “the forgiveness of sins”. What Jesus achieved on the cross, underscored in that final cry of vindication, “it is accomplished”, means that everything about us, our strengths and our weaknesses, our joys and our sorrows, our wrong choices as well as our right ones, have already been raised to the Father. – “when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all things to myself”. Saint Rose of Lima can say that “apart from the Cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven”. How right she is – for Christ draws us after himself – his is a universal invitation – there is no one excluded from this reconciliation … except those who choose to exclude themselves.

Each of us has a decision to make as we stand on the threshold of Holy Week. Christ wants to take us into his Passion as never before – to give us fresh insight into the mystery of the Cross. Will we let him? Clearly this must be a Holy Week unlike anything we have ever known. Circumstances mean that we cannot share as we would wish in the liturgical life of the Church, but we can consecrate these days in a special way through our sense of loss and deprivation. We can come to a fresh understanding of that notion, much loved by Saint John Paul 11, of the “domestic church” where we try to reproduce the rhythms of the Church’s prayer in our own homes. It also does us well to remember the point which Cardinal Nichols has made that our temporary sacramental quarantine is the norm for so many of our brothers and sisters in other parts of today’s world who are denied the sacraments through conflict, persecution or indeed a lack of priestly ministry. “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). Oremus pro invicem.

(The painting shows a fresco from Assisi by Pietro Lorenzetti)

COMMENTS: Exceptionally this Holy Week, since we are physically separated by our imposed isolation, we shall enable Reader Comments for these meditations, for those who wish to engage in a fruitful spiritual exchange of thoughts. If this is abused, by silly or offensive people, we shall disable them, to the detriment of many.