Palm Sunday homily - Fr. Reutter

Here is the YouTube recording of my Palm Sunday reflection.

The notes for that homily are below.

Palm Sunday 2020

You all know by now that we are celebrating one of the most memorable of weeks, at this very sad time when due to a world-wide health epidemic, Catholic communities will not be able to celebrate the beautiful Holy Week liturgies together for the first time in the memory of nearly all us.

So we should keep a few things in mind.  First, that God is still glorified whenever and wherever the holy Mass is celebrated – whether it is with one priest and seminarian or a congregation of hundreds in the pews.  The second that God is with us and does not abandon us, even when we can’t be united to Him in Holy Communion.  I recently watched a move entitled Silence about the Japanese martyrs in the 17^th century, missionary priests and lay faithful who gave up their lives for the practice of their faith, even in the face of brutal persecution from the shogunate who tried zealously and violently to stamp it out.  Throughout the Church, there have been countless times when the faithful have heroically clung on to the faith, even when they had limited or no access to the sacraments, sometimes for decades on end.  So we should pray through the intercession of these saints, for perseverance and creativity, as we seek out ways to remain united to Christ in this challenging time.  I’ve got several ideas on my parish blog, sccrparish.blogspot.com – some borrowed, some of my own – and  your local diocesan website should have a lot of ideas too.

As we initiate this holiest of weeks, I’d like to reflect on the Gospel of the Passion and suffering of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  If you are viewing this at home on YouTube, I hope you’ve had the chance already to either listen to a livestream or televised Mass, or to read and pray over the Gospel on your own.  [Scripture reference is  Mt 26:14—27:66].  Every three years, the Church alternates the Passion stories of Matthew, Mark and Luke, plus St. John on Good Friday, so we get the full picture of the four evangelists eyewitness accounts of just how Jesus’ death saves us.  This year, the Church reads St. Matthew.

There’s an overwhelming amount of material in his Gospel to pray over and contemplate, so to narrow it down, today I want to focus on a few things that are recorded only in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the passages that are unique to his story.

The first is the heart-rending story of Judas Iscariot.  The evangelists all tell us that Judas betrayed Our Lord, but only St. Matthew tells us what happened to him afterwards.  If we read the Gospels carefully, we find that Judas is very deeply rooted in the love of material things, the love of silver, the love of money.  He has clearly placed this first in his life.   So much so that it is not the chief priests who come to him, looking to betray Jesus, but Pilate who takes the initiative to go to them first.  He doesn’t even have a fixed price in mind for his terrible betrayal.  He just asks them, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over?”  In other words, he has already made up his mind that his love of the material world is greater than his love of Jesus.  He is “one of the Twelve” – gifted with the almost unsurpassable privilege of being chosen by Christ to be one of His great Apostles, the greatest missionaries ever.  And yet he actively seeks out ways to throw that away for a pittance of material gain.

But what is especially tragic – even unsettling and disturbing – is that Judas begins to repent but can’t bring that to completion.  He recognizes that Jesus was innocent, he tries to backpedal on the terrible deed he has done.  He even tries to return the money, to get rid of the evidence of his sin, desperately flinging it into the temple.  But the damage has been done.  He can’t just wish it away.  Here is where the truly devastating turn occurs.  Recognizing his sin, He does not wait for the Lord.  He chooses not to throw himself upon the Lord’s mercy.  He does not wait in trust.  He doesn’t wait until after the Resurrection, so that, like Peter who denied their Lord, he could beg the Lord’s forgiveness for what seemed unpardonable.  St. John stood by the Cross, courageous to the last.  The other disciples fled in terror, but at least continued to hope in the Lord.  Only Judas refused to believe that there was any possibility of hope in the Lord, and so threw away his own life. 

There are a lot of lessons in that for us in our Christian discipleship.  The Church has always taught us to be on guard, to avoid the occasion of sin.  That it is always better to grow in virtue to avoid sin in the first place, because the Evil One will always try to blind us of its terrible consequences until it is too late.  We can repent of our sins, but we can never completely undo the damage that has been done by them, when we offend the Lord.  That is why even those who remain faithful to the Lord generally have to go to purgatory before we can be admitted into Christ’s Heavenly Kingdom.

We learn also from Judas that we should do whatever is in our power – by God’s grace – not to get trapped in an excessive love of the material world.  That is seductive, but spiritually dangerous and blinding.  It can consume us so much that it will turn us against Christ.  It is interesting that in this time of pandemic, many people are just as afraid of the economic fallout from this virus as from the threat to physical health.  Because for many of us, economic security is all we know.  We have placed all our hope in this instead of the Lord.

But most importantly, Judas teaches us never to lose hope in the mercy of God.  We pray for the grace, even when we have seriously failed to love Our Lord, to remain at the foot of His Cross, like St. John and the Blessed Virgin, and never to fall into despair – the false belief that our sin is so great, it is beyond the divine power of Jesus to forgive.  Until our dying breath, there is always room for full repentance and sacramental confession.

The second passage that is unique to St. Matthew is the account of Pilate washing his hands of the conviction of Christ.  Far more than the other evangelists, St. Matthew presents Pilate as a very complex character.  A man who was this close to heroism.  A man who had every opportunity to do the difficult and heroic thing – but just couldn’t make that final leap.

St. Matthew – alone – reminds us that the Lord was intervening in his life, because he had such a critical role in deciding Jesus’ fate.  Pilate is an intelligent man, a shrewd man.  He even knows why the Jewish people are turning against Jesus – out of envy – one of the deadliest of sins.  Most men are of course deeply moved by the pleas of their wives and don’t want to see them suffer.  So the Lord takes the extraordinary measure of sending a vision to Pilate’s wife, a vision of great suffering, if this righteous man is condemned to death.  Pilate at first seems open to his wife’s plea.  He tries to divert the wrath of the crowed.  He begs, he argues, he pleads.  He has no desire to see this just man condemned.  Yet ultimately, the crowd grows louder and louder and louder, and Pilate just caves in.  Caves in to fear about what would happen to himself if he does not meet the demands of the crowd to release Barabbas instead of Jesus.  He even washes his hands – a symbolic act in the ancient world indicating: I am not taking part in what I believe to be a crime.  But in the end, none of that is enough.  He had the ability, he had the power, he had the authority to override the mob – and did not rise to the occasion.  In the end, it does not matter that Pilate resisted at first.  Or tried to signal that this was not his fault.  Because this act of moral cowardice reverberated through all of human history.  He would forever be remembered as the judge who dared to judge Jesus the Divine Judge.  The one under Whom Our Lord was crucified.

That has some obvious lessons for us.  In our spiritual lives, we are often tempted to settle for ‘good enough.’  “I’ve tried to resist this sin, but it is just too tempting.  The crowd is screaming too loud, I just have to give in to the pressure.  Everybody else is doing it.”  We see that play out in countless ways.  If it weren’t for this attitude, we would not be suffering from a culture where unborn children are routinely killed by abortion, where unnatural counterfeit marriages are considered legitimate, and the Lord’s holy sacraments are mocked.  These happen because, far too often, we are like Pilate.  Not actively advancing these evils.  Even issuing mild complaint against them on occasion – but unwilling to pray the price that would inevitably come from bucking the crowd.  We can say “we wash our hands” of these things, but until we are willing to truly stand with the Lord at great cost to ourselves, it makes no difference.

There is a fascinating line in St. Matthew’s account of the encounter of the people with Pilate.   When Pilate insists, “I am innocent of this man’s blood! Do it yourselves!”  the crowd’s response is “His blood be upon us and upon our children!”

That is a figure of speech meaning that they will accept the curse they have brought upon themselves – from generation to generation.  And Our Lord, in His Divine Justice, would be perfectly just in allowing the full measure of His divine wrath to come upon all of us who reject the Lord time after time in sin.  But He does not.  He does the opposite.  That phrase “His blood be upon us and upon our children” is taken by Our Lord in His infinite love and mercy and turned – inverted – toward our good, toward our salvation.

So that all of us who do repent of our sins – and seek forgiveness in the sacrament of confession – will not have the curse of His blood upon them, but rather receive the unspeakably beautiful gift of His blood upon them – from generation to generation: His Precious Blood, the Blood poured out from His side from the Holy Cross, as He voluntarily surrendered Himself to death for the sake of our salvation.  That Precious Blood that is poured out in every holy Mass.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  That is the story for Holy Thursday later on this week.  Stay tuned.