Homily for Palm Sunday

Homily for Palm Sunday

April 8, 1990

Matt 27: 11-54
Holy Cross, Fairfield, Conn.

An oldie from the files.  We’ll be blessed with a community Mass at home tomorrow (Sunday) with Fr. Provincial scheduled to preside.

by Johannes Moskos

“He saved others but he cannot save himself” (Matt 27: 42).

Two weeks ago a friend and I went whitewater rafting in Pennsylvania.  It’s a lot of fun, especially in the spring, when the water’s high and swift.  It can also be dangerous because of rocks and underwater snags in the rapids.

The guides give every group a safety orientation before they start out, including advice about what to do if you’re thrown from your raft into the rapids.  Part of that advice, of course, concerns getting back into your raft once you’ve caught up with it again, or vice versa.  Your instinct is to grab the gunwale and try to clamber over it, like hopping a fence.  It’s nearly impossible on a rubber raft shooting rapids while your feet are treading water.  So what you have to do is turn your back to the raft and let someone in it grab you under the arms and haul you in; it’s actually easier than it sounds.

This is actually rapids on the Potomac.  No pix 

on my computer from my many whitewater rafting trips on the Lehigh.

That day a lot of people went into the drink in one or another of the many rapids in the Lehigh’s upper gorge.  Yours truly was one of them, tho he’s no novice to spring rafting.  So was the very experienced captain of our raft, a fellow bigger and heavier than I.  My friend John pulled me into the raft by himself, but it took both John and me to get Russ back in.

On the way home that evening, John said to me, “It must be a really helpless feeling to be in the water like that, knowing you can’t save yourself but have to have someone else save you.”

That’s exactly what grace is.  We’re helpless:  we can’t save ourselves; we need someone else to save us.  Grace is what the cross of Jesus Christ is all about.

Jesus spent his public live saving people from their bodily afflictions, assuring us that God’s love would also overcome our spiritual afflictions.  As a man he experienced all of our frailties, including suffering and mockery, to let us know how deeply God loves us and how closely God identifies himself with our problems, our hurts, and our fears.  As a man Jesus had to experience death to let us know that God’s love for us conquers even death.

How ironic was the jeer of the Jewish leaders: “He saved others but he cannot save himself!...  He relied on God; let God rescue him now if he wants to” (27:42,43).  Jesus’ trust in his heavenly Father endured passion and death; and the Father, we know, justified his trust by raising him from the tomb.  As St. Peter later told those same Jewish leaders, “God exalted him at his right hand as leader and savior to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:31).

We can’t forgive our own sins.  We can’t raise ourselves from the grave.  But Jesus Christ embodies God the Father’s love for us—the cross and the resurrection are our evidence of that.  We place our trust, we put our faith, in Jesus Christ, who saves us from our sins.  In him we will be raised from the grave on the last day.  St. John tells us, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (3:16).