Today is a very special day. We come dressed for a feast and carrying palm branches in our hands because Holy Week is starting. For forty days we have followed the path of conversion and penance.
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 from knowing what he will suffer for us in a few days. Offended, betrayed, beaten, humiliated! We are going to see him climb up Calvary with the Cross on his shoulders and die for us.
Palm Sunday is the gateway through which we enter Holy Week. This Thursday we will celebrate the Last Supper, in which Jesus leaves us his Body and Blood, and his commandment of love. On Friday, we will go with him to his Passion and Death. Saturday will be a day of mourning, but that night, at the Easter Vigil, we will recall his passage from death back to life, and we will renew our baptismal commitments.
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, of the silence of God, of death. The Good Shepherd becomes the sacrificial lamb; the Sower becomes the grain of wheat that dies; the Lord be-comes the servant wounded by suffering, as the prophet Isaiah foretold.
This is the Jesus we want to follow, because we believe in Him, because we know that his Cross is the source of life, because we already feel in ourselves the light of the resurrection that we will celebrate in a week.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian and doctor of our Church, was asked where he got his wisdom. He replied, “At the foot of the Cross of Christ.” There, contemplating the life and death of Jesus, he found a wisdom that went beyond human wisdom. We would do well to contemplate the Cross just as Thomas Aquinas did.