Transformed By the Gift

Dear Friend,

Our liturgy planning source says it well: “There is no Sunday in the liturgical year quite like Palm Sunday in terms of its dramatic quality. The liturgy captures contrasts of highs and lows…[F]rom triumph as Jesus enters Jerusalem…[it] quickly shifts into the commemoration of the Lord’s passion. The entrance into the holy city marks the entrance into the paschal mystery…”

I would add that this entrance, along with the Lord’s passion, are previewed in the liturgy by the reading from the prophet Isaiah: “The Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them…and I have not rebelled, have not turned back…I gave my back to those who beat me…my face I did not shield…I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame.”

At Mass this Sunday, as we hear this text, along with the narrative of the Passion and Paul’s great hymn from Philippians, we too are being asked, as an assembly, to set our faces forward, into the gift that is being offered to us from the table of the Word of God and from the table/altar of the eucharist. The gift is the very seed-life of the Word of God who humbles himself to be planted among us dusty, weary, people of the earth. It comes to us from the cross that looms over both altars…

And as Father Michael Blastic reminded us in his presentation on Saturday, it came to us first from the womb of Mary - humble, dependent on human flesh. Let us receive the gift, let us respond to it, and, on this most “dramatic” Sunday, let’s be transformed by it. 

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor