Cycle [C] Palm/ Passion Sunday

 Is. 50:4-7; Phil. 2:6-11; Lk. 22:14-23:56

Today all Catholics throughout the world turn their hearts and minds once again to the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. That suffering won for all mankind the definitive victory over sin and hopelessness - a victory we declare and celebrate with these palm branches, the ancient world's symbol of triumph.

Let's not be satisfied with the symbols, but dig deeper into this mystery of our salvation.

God is all-powerful. He could have chosen to save us from sin in many other ways. Why did he choose to do it by suffering? The Passion tells us with perfect clarity the message we most need to hear. The Passion of Our Lord says to us: God is faithful; we can trust him. Trusting God is the most important thing for us, but it's also the hardest, because our trust has been violated. We have all been wounded because people we trusted let us down, in little things and big things.

As a result, we have all built up walls around our hearts, to protect ourselves from being let down again. But those walls also keep out God. God knows that unless we let him into our hearts, we can never experience the happiness we long for. So he came up with a way to win back our trust: the Passion of Christ. The Passion is God saying to us: "No matter what you do, I will keep on loving you. I will never let you down.”  

If we reject him, scourge him, crown him with thorns, betray him, even if we crucify him, he continues to love us: "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." When we ponder on the face of Christ this week he will help us open ourselves to his grace.

 

Monica Bellucci played the role of Veronica in Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ.  She was an Italian actress in her early thirties. Although she had grown up Catholic, she had long ago stopped practicing her faith. At the time when they began filming, she was at a spiritual low point in her life. She explained later that she really wanted to believe in Jesus, but she simply couldn't.

Her scene in the movie is memorable. Jesus is carrying his cross to Calvary, and he falls for the third or fourth time. The crowds surge around him, abusing him as he lies on the ground. The soldiers try to control the crowds. Gliding through the middle of this confusion is Veronica.  She looks at him with love and devotion. She kneels down beside him and says, "Lord, permit me."

She takes a white cloth and wipes his blood and sweat-stained face. Then she offers him a drink.

It is a beautiful moment of intimacy in the middle of violent suffering. It was hard to film that scene. 

The churning crowd kept bumping into Veronica and disrupting the moment of intimacy. So they had to film it over and over again. That was providential. 

After fifteen or twenty times of kneeling before the suffering Christ, looking into his eyes, and calling him Lord, the actress felt something start to melt inside her.

Later, she explained that while she looked into his eyes, she found that she was able to believe. "For a moment," she said, "I believed!"

That experience lit the flame of hope in her darkened heart. This is what Christ wants to do in his Passion, to convince us that we can believe in him, that no matter how confusing and difficult and painful life may be, and no matter how many times we may fail or even sin, he is still loving us, he is trustworthy.

The best thing we can do this week to stay united to Christ, to stay hooked up to his grace is to spend more time in prayer both in quantity and in quality. Come and sit with Jesus here in the Tabernacle.

Take that rosary off the rear-view mirror and use it for what it was meant for. Spend some time reading the Gospels and meditating on them.

Today, on this day when we celebrate the victory of Christ's love, let's ask Christ to show us what to do, and let's promise him that we will not keep the victory to ourselves, that we will carry the palm branch not only in Church, but everywhere we go - being true messengers of the Redemption.