AS WE JOURNEY WITH HIM!

Today being Palm Sunday is also known as Passion Sunday. Our Lenten journey continues with greater intensity as today marks the beginning of Holy Week, leading to Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday with its culmination on Easter Sunday. Today, we recall our Blessed Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We pray for the grace to identify with him in his suffering and death so as to experience the joy of his resurrection at Easter.

Beloved People of God, this journey of faith with our Blessed Lord requires us to take a stand. May we never be among those who would see him and deride him, curl our lips nor toss our heads. No mockery is to be found on our lips. Instead, may we be among those who will tell of his name to our kin and praise him in the midst of the assembly. We praise him, give him glory and revere him (cf. Ps 22/21:8-24). We pray to receive the ‘tongue of those who are taught’. The prophet Isaiah says that the purpose of this tongue is, ‘that I may know how to sustain with a word, him who is weary’ (cf. Is 50:4-7). This suggests compassion. We are invited to be attentive to the weary, those who are weighed down. 

As we read that, ‘morning by morning he awakens; he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught’, we pray to be able to have docile ear that hears like those who are taught. May we be willing to listen more and speak less this Holy Week. We journey with humility, learning from our Master and Lord who, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross’ (Phil 2:6-11). If we share in his suffering, we shall definitely share in his glorious resurrection.

                                                                         Fr. Ted