On this day the Church celebrates Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem to accomplish his paschal mystery. Accordingly, the memorial of this event is included in every Mass, with the procession or solemn entrance before the principal Mass and the simple entrance before the other Masses.

Readings:

Isaiah  50: 4-7

Psalm 21: 8-9; 17-20; 23-24

Philippians 2: 6-11

The passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew 26: 14 - 27: 66

Scripture Reflection

There is a superabundance of richness in the themes of the Scripture passages of today - Palm Sunday.

 

We began the Solemn Liturgy of Palm Sunday - which we celebrated in full at ten thirty mass this morning - in the Parish Hall. We reflected there on the Palm Sunday event and then blessed the palms and those who carried them in their hands. We reminded the people of the first words in the great Introit, or Opening Prayer, for this day in the Roman Missal: “Pueri Haebraeorum, portantes ramos olivarum (laudare Dominum)” - the Hebrew children came carrying palm branches to greet and praise the Lord. Our altar servers carried palm branches, in procession, from the Hall to the Church to join the people there in the Liturgy of the Word as we came together to greet and praise the Lord. The music group played “Give me Joy (Peace and Love) in my heart” and we sang this hymn of intercession and praise as we processed into the Church. 

 The Liturgy of the Word centres on the Passion Narrative from Matthew's Gospel but it contains also two other memorable passages - one from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah and the other from the Letter of St. Paul to the Philippians beginning, ”Although his state was divine, Jesus did not cling on to his equality with God, but emptied himself and took on our humanity.” This is known in Theology as Kenosis - a Greek word for the self-emptying of Jesus as God. We take this passage for the meaning it presents to us in our lives.

We believe that this was one of the first hymns sung by the early Christians when they gathered together after the Resurrection and Ascension for prayer, praise and worship of God. St Paul took this hymn and incorporated it into the letter which he wrote to the Philippians - one of the three great Christological Statements or Declarations which St Paul made about Jesus which are unsurpassed in the history of the Church. St Paul brilliantly connects the mystery of the self-emptying of Jesus - he embraces our humanity in the form of a servant, the suffering servant: he accepts humiliation, he accepts rejection, he accepts the lowest place, the harshest treatment and, ultimately, death itself by crucifixion - and offers this as a model for his followers. Yet we, his followers, don't want to know the lowest place or the harshest treatment, or rejection, or abandonment by friends and death. His followers, beginning with James and John and continuing down to each one of us, want the exact opposite to that. It's as if he is on a one-way street travelling down, ever down and he meets us on that same street although travelling in the opposite direction, striving to be ever up, striving for the top, for popularity, for applause, for power, for authority, to be first in all things and not to be last in any. To be master - not servant - in our homes, in our place of work and in our community. The contradiction of Calvary, of God crucified - Ecce Homo - is experienced in this experience of our daily lives. On this one-way street that we see as our lives we encounter Jesus travelling in the opposite direction to ourselves.