Homily for Palm Sunday
This is the 2d of 2 Palm Sunday homilies, delivered to 2 parishes.
April 13, 2025
Luke 22: 14—23: 49
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption,
Bronx
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Tormenting Christ |
Who are you?
Which person in our Lord’s passion do you
resemble?
Are you one of the 12, enjoying Jesus’ company but
very concerned about your own greatness, about being recognized and honored?
Are you Simon Peter, afraid of being too closely
associated with Jesus?
Are you Judas, someone who turns against a friend
or a family member for personal advantage?
Are you one of the guards, a bully who abuses
someone weaker and defenseless, someone without sympathy for the poor, the
homeless, the migrant?
Are you one of the elders, so convinced of their
own interpretation of the Scriptures and of the facts, so opinionated, so
concerned for their own standing, that they won’t consider any evidence of
Jesus’ goodness or of what he’s done?
Are you Pontius Pilate, who knows what’s right but
lacks the courage to do it?
Are you Herod, wanting a Jesus who does miracles
or solves problems (“So you are the Christ, the great Jesus Christ? Prove to me that you’re divine—change my
water into wine.”), but not willing to follow a Jesus who suffers and who
serves others?
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Christ before Pilate (Mihaly Munkacsy) |
Are you Simon of Cyrene, who—however reluctantly—helps someone who needs help?
Are you one of the women who try to console Jesus
and who would assist anyone suffering and needing material, emotional, or
spiritual assistance?
Are you one of the soldiers at the cross, who mock
a man abandoned and in pain, someone who gangs up verbally on a person at
disadvantage, someone you don’t like, someone who disagrees with you?
Are you a repentant sinner, like the so-called
“good thief,” who admits his crime and turns to Jesus for redemption?
Are you the centurion, who recognizes goodness and
praises God for that? A Christian
tradition calls him Longinus and says he became a Christian and eventually a
martyr; there’s a statue of him in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Are you Joseph of Arimathea, and the women who
assist him, in burying Jesus, ready to do a necessary work of mercy?
Perhaps you see bits of yourself in several of the
characters we meet in Jesus’ passion—“the good, the bad, and the ugly,” to use
a phrase you’ve probably heard many times, one that I’ve referred to my own
behavior when meeting with my confessor.
Obviously, the most important character to meet is Jesus himself, who underwent his passion and death in order to identify himself completely with us and who invites us to seize that identity, to join ourselves to him in all parts of our lives: in whatever we suffer, as we all must; in whatever good we do for others in his name; in our faithfulness to all that God asks of us; in the death that will come for us someday—so that we’ll also be united with him in the resurrection. That was our prayer a while ago: “that we may heed his lesson of patient suffering and so merit a share in his Resurrection” (Collect).
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