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.
