Sunday Meditation: At the Procession with Palms

We finally come to the Passion Week, and of course we start with Jesus entering Jerusalem in triumph on what has become to be called Palm Sunday.  Mass starts with the short narrative of the entry into the city.

 

When Jesus and his disciples drew near to Jerusalem,

to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives,

he sent two of his disciples and said to them,

“Go into the village opposite you,

and immediately on entering it,

you will find a colt tethered on which no one has ever sat.

Untie it and bring it here.

If anyone should say to you,

‘Why are you doing this?’ reply,

‘The Master has need of it

and will send it back here at once.’”

So they went off

and found a colt tethered at a gate outside on the street,

and they untied it.

Some of the bystanders said to them,

“What are you doing, untying the colt?”

They answered them just as Jesus had told them to,

and they permitted them to do it.

So they brought the colt to Jesus

and put their cloaks over it.

And he sat on it.

Many people spread their cloaks on the road,

and others spread leafy branches

that they had cut from the fields.

Those preceding him as well as those following kept crying out:

    “Hosanna!

        Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

        Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!

    Hosanna in the highest!”

~Mk 11:1-10

The Gospel passage continues with the long Passion narrative starting with the Wednesday evening at Bethany to the arrest, the torture, the crucifixion, and the burial of Jesus.  It is too long a narrative (Mk 14:1 to Mk 15:47) to quote, so I’m only going to provide the scene with Mary anointing Jesus.

 

The Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread

were to take place in two days’ time.

So the chief priests and the scribes were seeking a way

to arrest him by treachery and put him to death.

They said, “Not during the festival,

for fear that there may be a riot among the people.”

 

When he was in Bethany reclining at table

in the house of Simon the leper,

a woman came with an alabaster jar of perfumed oil,

costly genuine spikenard.

She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on his head.

There were some who were indignant.

“Why has there been this waste of perfumed oil?

It could have been sold for more than three hundred days’ wages

and the money given to the poor.”

They were infuriated with her.

Jesus said, “Let her alone.

Why do you make trouble for her?

She has done a good thing for me.

The poor you will always have with you,

and whenever you wish you can do good to them,

but you will not always have me.

She has done what she could.

She has anticipated anointing my body for burial.

Amen, I say to you,

wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world,

what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

~Mk 14:1-9

Fr. Geoffrey Plant provides an understanding of the narrative.

 

Second, Bishop Robert Barron provides the more theological implications of the passage.

 

I think between Fr. Geoffrey’s and Bishop Barron’s homilies one understands the fullness of the Passion Week.

 

Meditation: “She has anticipated anointing my body for burial.”

I close with a musical antiphon for the day.

 

“Palm Sunday Entrance Antiphon" by Sarah Hart, Curtis Stephan and Steve Angrisano.  Happy Palm Sunday.