Palm Sunday is not a thing of the past.

Over the past weeks of Lent, our readings have been building up to the events which we have just heard—the great climax of our Lord’s passion and death. Each of the Gospels, from our Lord’s encounter with the Samaritan woman, His healing of the man born blind, to the miracle of Lazarus rising from the dead, all have spoken to us of our Lord’s Divine compassion and ability to go beyond what we might expect. God’s ways are not our ways.

Today is no different. The events of the passion speak loud and clear of how Jesus overcomes the struggles, the opposition, the betrayals, and all the paradoxes of life which so often seem to be outright contradictions. The only Man who was truly innocence becomes a convicted criminal sentence to death. Through His immense sufferings He overcomes all sufferings, through His own brutal and underserved death He overcomes death; in His lying down of His life for us, we have life. Through His sufferings, through His passion and death Jesus truly, profoundly, enters into the very midst of human misery in order to save us from the ultimate human misery, which is separation from God. By His stripes we have been healed; In His great love for us, we discover what Love really means and is.

And so, today we begin the most solemn week of the Church’s liturgical year. The reading of the passion that we heard today sets the tone for the entire Holy Week. We begin with Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem. People are rejoicing and excited about what this Messiah will accomplish.

But while we celebrate Jesus triumphant entrance into Jerusalem, this day also has a more somber note to it. The people rejoicing in the Gospel today misunderstand Jesus mission, they think he is going to help them in their political struggle to be free from their slavery to the Romans, they are only thinking in political and economic terms. They fail to see that Jesus really came to die for their sins in order to free them from their most intense slavery so that they could enter into a true freedom, a life of divine intimacy and union with God.

So we rejoice this day also, but we do so in a quiet and solemn way because today in our liturgy and in our personal prayer and in the liturgy of the Church, we begin that walk with Jesus on that terrible journey towards his passion and death. During this week, we follow Jesus from the gates of Jerusalem, to the Upper Room, to the Garden of Gethsemane, to the steps of the Praetorium, to the hill of Calvary and then to the tomb in the garden where he gloriously rose from the dead.

The mystery of these events is endless and we can spend a lifetime contemplating each aspect, each event, and each word of Jesus. With each blow of the hammer, with each scourging of the whip, and with the shedding of each drop of blood, God’s ultimate manifestation of love is shown to us.
Jesus, with the strength that only Divine Love Himself could endure, gives his very life for you and I. Yes today we celebrate the beginning of Jesus triumph over sin and death, but not without recalling the price he paid for our salvation so that we could see the depth of his love.

This week we will realize more deeply that it was God who died on that cross for us. And that it was our sins that put Him there; it was our sins that put Him to death. Yet, in His love for us He willing allowed Himself to be crucified; However, Divine Love is stronger than death; and so, the God who is Love defeated sin and so defeated the grave in order that you and I might have the hope of sharing in the Victory and Joy of His Resurrection. How dare we ever be indifferent to His great love for us.

In light of Christ love for us, we discover that our religion is not just a religion of the past…No it is a religion of the present and of the future…for we adore a God that has come, comes now and will come again…and so we are people of hope because our God is coming soon; in fact, He comes now through the Holy Eucharist. Palm Sunday is not a thing of the past. Just as the Lord entered the Holy City Jerusalem that day on a donkey, so too He comes again and again in the humble appearance of bread and wine at this and very Holy Mass.

In faith, we can greet the Lord in the Holy Eucharist as the one who is coming now, the one who enters into our midst. We can greet Him as the one who continues to come, the one who continues to leads us toward His coming. We are to meet Him at this and every Holy Mass where He comes to take us 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. (cf. Jesus of Nazereth-Pope Benedict).