Palm Sunday

Processional Gospel: Mark 11: 1-10

First Reading: Isaiah 50: 4-7

Psalm 21

Second Reading: Philippians 2: 6-1

The Palm Sunday liturgy contains within it the heights and the depths of Holy Week.

We begin the liturgy as the crowd cheering Jesus into the city - and we end the Liturgy of the Word as part of the crowd jeering him out of it. We share the exuberance of the crowd shouting hosannas to the one who comes on a colt... we share the despair of those who can respond only in silence as they watch by the death of Jesus on the cross.

Stark and contradictory.

As the Great Procession into Jerusalem began, the life of Jesus seems to be reaching its fulfilment - he has set his face towards Jerusalem and the people come from the city to welcome him. They may have recalled the words of Zechariah - and seen this a prophesying the event they were witnessing:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey...

It is worth reading the rest of the passage (9: 9-17) to see how this charged the crowds with hope that here was the messiah - the one promised -
"the Lord, the valiant in war".

To get an idea of the atmosphere, we could look back to the way those in occupied countries greeted their liberators at the end of the Second World War. Flowers were thrown - crowds danced and sang in the streets, ecstatic that their liberation was at hand.

This was the promise being invested in Jesus - here was the one who would overthrow the oppression of Roman rule.


All too soon, the Liturgy reminds us that tide turned. The King of glory that the people expected did not materialise. Jesus did not storm the Roman Praetorium. He did not raise an army to fight the Roman occupying army.

By the end of a week, the consequences of this will become apparent. The people who had hoped so much give way to disillusion - and the ferocity of that disillusion sends Jesus to the cross.

As we move from the excitement of the Procession, we can allow ourselves to be shocked and taken aback by the starkness of Isaiah’s account of how the Promised One will be treated. St Paul helps us to reflect on what the word "humble" means when applied to the one who enters the city in apparent triumph - and the Passion takes us into a week of solemn remembrance of what glory and valour really mean.

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