Walking with Jesus

Our task, as preachers, is to offer brief words that will invite and highlight the journey with our community through the spectacle of Palm Sunday, the hope of Holy Thursday, the scandal of Good Friday, the silence of Holy Saturday and the promise of Easter. It is our job to connect the ancient stories to the reality of our lives in 2025.

This week celebrates the foundation of our faith. During the last six weeks, strengthened by our prayer, fasting, and charity, we have been preparing ourselves for the foundational mysteries of what it means to be Catholic. The Liturgies this week are ancient and contemporary, they are deliberate and poetic, they are simple and baroque. They take seriously the human experience.

On this Palm Sunday, the Gospel at the Procession sets the stage for the whole week! The confident preparation, the exuberant crowds, and the fear of the authority are met with a confident Jesus. He is unfazed by the extremes. He understands his destiny and will do it His way.

As we read the passion, the joy and hope turn to anger and fear. Is Jesus really in charge? Jesus’ passion is not difficult (studying Hebrew is difficult). How are we expected to worship this broken one?

Throughout the Gospel of Luke, the passion of Jesus shows that the betrayal, cowardice, despair, humiliation and contempt are never the final word. They are evils that are confronted and endured. Amid the joy and hope, the grief and anxiety of human life, grace uses the cracks and brokenness of our life to let God’s saving light shine.

All throughout this Holy Week we are to meditate and reflect on the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. His submission to the Will of God to save all mankind through His crucifixion, death on the Cross and His rising again to life.

This Sunday marks the beginning of the Holy Week, the holiest and most important of all weeks and periods in the whole entire liturgical year. This Sunday marks the Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord, in which the moments surrounding the Lord’s Passion or suffering is highlighted to us, in this most solemn week when the Lord fulfilled all of His promises of salvation to us, bringing unto us the fulfilment and perfect completion of everything that He had planned for us from the very beginning, the plan of bringing us all back to God’s loving embrace the moment that we fell into sin through disobedience and rebellion against Him. On this day we remember the Lord embarking on this most important mission which has been entrusted solely to Him alone in order to bring us all out of the darkness and back into God’s light and grace.

This Holy Week should be different from our past Holy Week observances and experiences, especially if we have not truly devoted ourselves, our time, attention and effort to focus ourselves and our whole lives to the Lord, to the One Who has overcome sin and death by His most painful and sorrowful death on the Cross.

Let us go forth to walk with the Lord this week.