Homily for Palm Sunday

March 24, 2024
Saint Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Isaiah 50:4-7
Psalm 22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 21-22
Philippians 2:6-11
Mark 14:1-15:47

Death on its own terms is an annihilation. It is a total and violent obliteration of every part of life that leads up to it. It ends friendships, it makes widows and widowers, it makes orphans, it closes the future, it bluntly ends life. Many nonbelievers, even those who enjoy life, in their more honest moments will speak out loud the unmentionable: death mocks our every action and achievement; it mocks all our hopes; it casts a shadow on everything we do and enjoy in life. Death haunts and terrifies us.

After we experience the death of many of our loved ones, whether old and frail or middle-aged and struck down by infirmity, or young and taken from us by tragedy, we realize that nothing less than the true and loving God who would willingly and freely face our death with us could bring us hope and light and life through the transformation of death and the eradication of the shameful power of sin in our lives.

Could God so love and heal us who are burdened with sin and weighed down by death unless He chose to face the emptiness of death not only as God but fully as man? He did so. In that moment when He offered His own human fear and loneliness, rejection, and emptiness, that He accepted as part of our human condition, Jesus was completely open to receive God and enabled us to do likewise what we could not do before in our humanity. “Christ Jesus, [who] 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,” the supreme act of love: Divine and human.

Our desire for the Divine life will always be frustrated when we attempt to fulfill our desires to come to God without God. In this, the most Holy Week of the year for us, we are called to follow the Lord in His Passion and Death. We are called to realize how futile and empty our lives are without His Holy Spirit and grace. We are called to empty ourselves of our sinful grasping at equality with God and accept from Him the full gift of our redeemed humanity. We are called to ponder the wonderous and unspeakable love that He has given us. Let us not let this week pass us by without Him.