Homily for Palm Sunday of the Passion of Our Lord

Today we begin a period of time – a week – that we specifically call Holy. And during Holy Week, perhaps more than at any other point in the liturgical year, the rites of the Church call our attention to time, and to the funny things that happen to time when we enter into liturgy – into the public worship of the Church, the Body of Christ.

For example, in the rites of this day, Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord, the crowd’s joyful Hosannas during Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, are compressed in time with the crowd’s angry shouts for blood from Good Friday.

You see, liturgical time is eternity, and in liturgy the past, the present and the future are as one.

Now, of course, this isn’t how we usually experience time as human beings. In our human experience the past, the long gone good ole days, are regretfully far past – the hoped for, improved future is painfully far ahead – and in the present, time always seems to be moving either way too fast or way too slowly.

Think for a moment about how you’re currently experiencing time:

Well for one, I’m already preaching too long . . .

Maybe you’re waiting for a medical diagnosis or for treatment. You’re caught between the doctor’s tests and a hoped-for recovery – uncertain about how much longer the lifestyle you’re accustomed to will have to be put on hold.

Maybe you’re between jobs – caught between an ending and a beginning, worried about how you’ll make ends meet in the meanwhile.

Maybe you’re anxiously awaiting your wedding day, or the arrival of a newborn child or grandchild. Maybe you’re pressured by deadlines at work or are just desperate for ‘break-up’ and some warmer weather.

However you might be experiencing time right now, I’m sure you have at some point experienced time as a burden that you have to carry like a cross.

In today’s second reading, we hear from Saint Paul’s Philippians Hymn. He writes: “though He was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped. Rather He emptied Himself taking the form of a slave.”

Surely part of Jesus’ self-emptying is the fact that even though He was the co-eternal Word of God, He entered into time as a human being. Jesus humbled Himself, and like us was burdened by the passage of time – He carried it like a cross.

So, during this time, this week we call Holy, perhaps we’re being invited to pray with and through Christ as He too experiences the burden of time:

What was it like for Jesus to know that His hour was coming near – and yet have to wait through the tumultuous events of this week?

What was it like for Him to hear the adoring shouts of the crowd, knowing that soon, one of His own would betray Him, and the crowd themselves would scream for His blood?


What was it like for Him to pray in the Garden, or to wait sleeplessly in a prison cell, knowing that all His friends had left Him and that a day of torture was still to come?

If we think about time, and how we sometimes experience it as a burden, we may also be forced to admit that we would often prefer it, if God would conform His will to ours – do what we want, when we want it. We would prefer Him to remove from us the chalice that is too bitter.

But, if we pray in time, with and through Jesus during this Holy Week, He will teach us how to pray instead for the strength, simply to do the will of God – to do as God wishes, and to accept things in God’s time.

And surely Christ will also comfort us with the assurances of faith we will voice one week from today at the beginning of our Easter Vigil:

“Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to Him, and all the ages, to Him be glory and power, through every age, forever, Amen.”