Homily for Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion

April 2, 2023
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Isaiah 50:4-7
Psalm 22
Philippians 2:6-11
Matthew 26:14-27:66

Throughout Lent we have been following Jesus on His journey to Jerusalem. We have done so like the first disciples but with the difference being that we know and are confident of His victory. Yet, even with this confidence born of faith we have traveled with Him to the heights in the shadow of the cross – His cross and our share in the cross. Perhaps we have struggled with our Lenten resolutions. Perhaps we have not tried very hard to maintain them. Perhaps we have approached them in a spirit of self-improvement and have failed in the face of what seems to us to be the futile inevitability of sin and selfishness. Nonetheless, we stand here today with an unavoidable decision to remain with the initially enthusiastic but eventually fickle and defeated crowd, or to proceed with Jesus to the victorious culmination of His Passion and Resurrection.

Saint Augustine and other early fathers of the Church held that people stand at an intersection between two diametrically opposed forces, almost like the force of gravity. There is the force of evil that pulls us away from God, down beneath our true and unique human dignity inherent in our nature. Then there is the force of God’s unconditional love, that pulls us up towards Him and draws from us the desire to love God in return. As Pope Benedict XVI beautifully described, “Everything depends on our escaping evil and becoming free to be attracted completely by the gravitational force of God, which makes us authentic, elevates us and grants us true freedom.”

Today, Jesus clearly reveals to us that we as human beings cannot lift ourselves up nor ascend to the desired heights of the pure life of God by our own efforts. Our desire for the Divine life will always be frustrated when we attempt to fulfill our desires to come to God without God. As we hear read what Saint Paul writes to the Philippians, “Christ Jesus, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted Him.”

Jesus, fully human, empties Himself of all claims to Divinity (claims that are rightfully only His to make) and humbles Himself and shows us the only path upwards is not by way of the steep climb on a rough and slippery staircase of determined and human willpower, but through His grace that empties us and like an elevator lifts us up to Him through loving God in each next person we meet and in each next good action required of us for love: small deeds or great deeds, each performed with selflessness and love. Jesus draws us upwards with Him and shows us that the only path for us to come to God is following Him on the way of the cross and uniting the suffering that comes our way with love. This is the only way that our sinful pride inherited from Adam and Eve can be vanquished.

Saint Theresa the Little Flower in 1887 discovered this metaphor of the elevator of grace as a young teenager traveling with her father and elder sister on pilgrimage to Rome. On their way to Rome, they spent a night in a hotel in Paris and it was there that the fourteen-year-old girl encountered an elevator for the first time and made the pure and brilliant connection of this device with God’s grace that lifts us up towards Him.

Over one hundred years later, a theologian researching her life would study the hotel registry that recorded the dates of her visit there. He would discover that staying at that hotel at the very same time as the Little Flower was the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche – the philosopher who would declare God to be dead and with this modern principle would pull humanity down into the bloodiest and most narcissistic century in history. Nietzsche probably took the stairs. Like Saint Therese, the elevator with Christ and God’s mercy is the only way upwards for us; it is not effortless for it involves the humility to accept the suffering that comes with sacrificial love and to be emptied on God’s terms. His Will be done.

Today we stand at the intersection of two forces, good and evil. We are too weak to take the good path alone without God’s mercy. To even think that we can do it without God’s mercy estranges us from God and drags us downwards. It is only the intersection of the horizontal and vertical beams of the Cross of suffering and love that can empty us and pull us upwards to God. “Christ Jesus, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted Him.”