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Maria del Pilar Guzman, Pilot Staff

Scripture Reflection for April 13, 2025, Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

Wednesday, April 9, 2025Culture

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After being marked with ashes from palms at the beginning of Lent, here we are at the end of the season, all these weeks later, with new palms. Here is growth. Here is renewal. We prepare to begin again.

Deacon Greg
Kandra

Lk 19:28-40
Is 50:4-7
Ps 22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 23-24.
Phil 2:6-11
Lk 22:14-23:56 or Lk 23:1-49

It never fails. Even though I've heard it dozens of times, every year when I hear the long reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday, I keep hoping it will have another ending. Of course, it can't. We all know the story. We all know the characters. We all know the inevitable outcome. Still, it stings. The heart can't help but be broken, again and again.

I think that's the point.

We hear this account -- this year, from St. Luke's Gospel -- at the start of a defining week, the one we call "Holy," to be reminded of what these last few weeks have been about. This is what everything has led up to. Lent has been a long prayerful prelude, taking us to this point, getting us ready for the supper, the garden, the betrayal, the denial and the long and anguished walk to death.

And there's this, too: if you can't find your way back to church until Easter Sunday, if your week is too committed and complicated, you will stand with the rest of your community and hear what happened. This is an opportunity to retell the story, to hear it together, to remember the suffering, and to grasp one last time what happened and why. We can't just skip from Lent to Easter. We need to acknowledge the accusations and injustice, the thorns and the nails.

We need to be reminded that our salvation came at an incalculable cost.

Luke's account is vivid, tactile, an assault on the senses. We see and hear everything. Arguments over supper. A sword slicing off an ear. A cock crowing. Cries for crucifixion. Mocking and jeering.

But what may be most powerful is the sudden, unavoidable silence at the end. This reading of the Passion from Luke leaves us with an astonishing stillness. The body has been removed from the cross. The women have seen it inside the tomb. There are no words recorded. There can't be. How do you express the inexpressible?

But in the hushed grief, we discover something else: quiet obedience. "They rested on the sabbath according to the commandment." The rest is silence. There is nothing else to say.

A priest I know always made it a habit not to preach on Palm Sunday. He would tell the people, "There is nothing I can add to what you have just heard. Our Lord's Passion speaks for itself. Let's take a moment to reflect on what we have just heard and carry that with us for the rest of the week."

But carry what?

Well, inevitably, when we leave Mass this week, we aren't empty-handed. We have fresh greenery, long strands of new life. Palms. Perhaps that is the homily we are meant to take with us, the message of this Sunday that we carry away.

Very simply: We start over.

After being marked with ashes from palms at the beginning of Lent, here we are at the end of the season, all these weeks later, with new palms. Here is growth. Here is renewal. We prepare to begin again.

That is so much a part of our faith -- we are a people who believe deeply in second chances, in forgiveness, in reconciliation. We don't have to remain the people we were. Lent offers us the second chance, an opportunity to start over. And this week, we consider all that led to the greatest second chance in history, the Resurrection.

As much as this week (and this Sunday) dwells on suffering and loss, we leave church holding in our hands a reminder of hope. Winter gives way to spring. New leaves grow. This Sunday tells us: Hold on to that. There is more still to come.

- Deacon Greg Kandra is an award-winning author and journalist, and creator of the blog, "The Deacon's Bench."