Homily for Palm Sunday

Homily for Palm Sunday

April 13, 2025
Phil 2: 6-11
Villa Maria, Bronx

This 1st of 2 Palm Sunday homilies was for the Congregation of Notre Dame sisters at their convent.

(Philippians 2:5-11 images free)

“He emptied himself” (Phil 2: 7).

Our Christian lives, and even more our lives as religious, rest on Jesus Christ our Lord.  We try to imitate him:  to imitate him poor, chaste, and obedient to his Father; to imitate him in doing good for our sisters and brothers; to imitate him in forgiving those who hurt us—and, unfortunately, that happens even in convents and rectories.

All of that imitation, and more, can be summarized as emptying oneself.  Christ Jesus emptied himself of his heavenly status, masking his divinity, his power, and his glory in our humanity—a real humanity, not a mask or phantasm as some early heretics held.  So in his wandering and preaching he “had nowhere to lay his head,” as he told one would-be follower (Luke 9:58).  He struggled with obedience, as when he bailed out on his parents (Luke 2:41-52) and when he agonized in Gethsemane (Luke 22:39-46).  He was frustrated by the lack of faith he encountered repeatedly and the slowness of the 12 to understand his teaching.

“He emptied himself.”  That’s so hard for us even as “professional Christians” to do.  How often we’re challenged to swallow our pride, to yield to a superior (especially when we’re right), to do some menial chore because it needs doing and no one else is willing or able.

How hard it is to empty ourselves by letting someone help us or serve us.  We take inordinate pride in being self-sufficient, or we’re reluctant to inconvenience someone—or to allow that someone the grace of imitating Jesus in regard to us.

When we think about the holiest sisters or brothers we’ve lived with—and at least in our Salesian province, it’s almost always literally brothers, not priests, who come to mind—it’s always those we witnessed emptying themselves:  humbly, quietly serving, without complaint or seeking notice.

That’s hard to do.  That’s truly imitating our Lord Jesus.  Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery.  We don’t flatter Jesus—that’s a preposterous thought, isn’t it?—but glorify his Father when we imitate his self-emptying.