Today is a very special day. We come dressed for a feast, carrying palm branches because Holy Week has started. For forty days we’ve followed the path of conversion and penance. Now, there are two contradictory feelings in our hearts: On the one hand, joy at seeing Christ make a solemn entrance into Jerusalem and be proclaimed king. On the other hand, sorrow that comes from knowing that he will suffer for us in a few days. He was beaten, offended, betrayed and humiliated as we see him climb up Calvary with the Cross on his shoulders to die for us.
Palm Sunday is the gateway of Holy Week. Palm Sunday begins the week that changed the world forever. On Thursday we celebrate the Last Supper, where Jesus leaves us his Body and Blood, and his commandment to love one another. On Friday, we go with him to his Passion and Death. Saturday will be a day of mourning, but that night, at the Easter Vigil, we will celebrate his passover from death to life.
Everything that is going to happen this week will trouble us and fill us with sorrow: the Son of God, who came into the world to free the poor and the suffering, decides to live out in his own body the experience of defeat and death. The Good Shepherd becomes the sacrificial lamb; the Sower becomes the grain of wheat that dies; the Lord becomes the servant wounded by suffering, as the prophet Isaiah foretold.
This is the Jesus we want to follow, because we know that his Cross is the very source of life, because we already feel in ourselves the light of the resurrection that we will celebrate one week from now.
Let’s not neglect these special days of Grace, this week that changed the world forever. Let us enter bravely into the mystery of suffering and death, because we know how it all ends—with our Lord’s victory over sin, death and the grave!