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Friday, March 29, 2024

Hosanna to our King!

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As I do every Holy Week, I will devote the next three columns to spiritual topics. I will resume writing about the ICC, impeachment, and other mundane matters after Easter Sunday.

Tomorrow, Palm Sunday, is the day Christians commemorate the triumphant entrance of Our Lord Jesus Christ into Jerusalem, the eternal city. It is the start of the Holy Week which is the week before his resurrection. On this day two millennia ago, Christ, astride a donkey, entered the Holy City and was met by a throng of worshippers, laying palm leaves and spreading their cloaks along the path and crying out in acclamation Hosanna! “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the king of Israel.”

Jesus was the Messiah, the long-awaited Ruler of Israel, the culmination of all of God’s promises to his people. The people, aware of the miracles and wonders he had been performing, believed that he was the promised savior who would free Israel from the Roman oppressors. The entry into Jerusalem came after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. No small wonder the multitude was awestruck. They must have thought that if Jesus can raise a man from the dead and heal the sick, he can also drive the Romans away. But fickle as they are, this very same crowd will condemn him to be crucified and cry out for his blood, choosing Barabbas, a murderer, and a known robber, to be freed.

Pilate offered them a choice between a known criminal over a failed Messiah and they chose the former. Disenchanted that a while ago he was performing wondrous deeds but now before the Sanhedrin and before Pilate, Jesus was utterly helpless and cannot defend himself from his malicious accusers. Even Peter and the disciples who accompanied him during the three years of his public life dared not lift a finger in his defense.

But how the people of Jerusalem were sorely mistaken. For indeed the meek man before them was the Savior foretold by the prophet Isaiah who, in 8th century B.C., described him as the Suffering Servant of Yahweh, the man oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

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Jesus did not enter Jerusalem to be worshipped as an earthly king. In fact, it is the opposite—he came to be scourged, abused, spat on, mocked, rejected and finally to suffer the humiliation of being nailed on the cross like a common criminal.

His kingdom is not temporary and finite but one that is everlasting. He promises a kingship that will free humanity from the bondage of sin. His throne is the Cross. It does not promise the absence of physical pain and hardship, but one that liberates all of us from selfishness, greed, envy, and other vices. By his resurrection, all these will come to fulfillment.  

Looking around, we readily discern why Christ allowed himself to suffer and die on the Cross. Love of power, hatred, violence, economic conflicts that prey on the less fortunate, greed for money and power, divisions, crimes against human life and against creation abound. Jesus on the Cross took it upon himself to carry the weight of man’s iniquity and with the force of God’s love he conquers it, he defeats it with his resurrection. Christ’s Cross, while unappealing to those who hate and do not love, if embraced with humility and meekness with love leads to joy, to the joy of being saved.

In his Palm Sunday homily last year, Pope Francis described the celebration of Palm Sunday as “bittersweet.” On this day, Christians experience both joy and sorrow as we recall the cries acclaiming Jesus as king during his entrance into Jerusalem, followed by the solemn proclamation of his Passion and death. According to Francis, “In this poignant contrast, our hearts experience in some small measure what Jesus himself must have felt in his own heart that day, as he rejoiced with his friends and wept over Jerusalem.”  

The Pope observed that “Jesus himself sees in this joyful welcome an inexorable force willed by God,” but noted that while he enters the city in this glorious manner, Jesus “is no misguided purveyor of illusions, no new age prophet, no imposter…Rather, he is clearly a Messiah who comes in the guise of a servant, the servant of God and of man, and goes to his passion. He is the great ‘patient,’ who suffers all the pain of humanity,” Pope Francis said, encouraging the faithful to reflect on the suffering Jesus would face in the week before his death.

As we listen to the crowd joyfully acclaim Jesus as our King, we are also called to reflect on “the slanders and insults, the snares and betrayals, the abandonment to an unjust judgment, the blows, the lashes and the crown of thorns, and lastly, the way of the cross leading to the crucifixion.” Said Francis, “Jesus never promised honor and success. Rather, the Lord had always warned his disciples that his was a path of suffering and that the final victory would be achieved through his Passion and death on the cross.”

“All this holds true for us too,” the Pope said, and urged those present to pray for the grace “to follow Jesus faithfully, not in words but in deeds.”, to pray also for the patience “to carry our own cross, not to refuse it or set it aside, but rather, in looking to him, to take it up and to carry it daily.”

I make mine the final exhortation of Pope Francis in that homily:

“This Jesus, who accepts the hosannas of the crowd, knows full well that they will soon be followed by the cry: ‘Crucify him!’  He does not ask us to contemplate him only in pictures and photographs, or in the videos that circulate on the internet. No. He is present in our many brothers and sisters who today endure sufferings like his own: they suffer from slave labor, from family tragedies, from diseases . . . They suffer from wars and terrorism, from interests that are armed and ready to strike. Women and men who are cheated, violated in their dignity, discarded  . . . Jesus is in them, in each of them, and, with marred features and broken voice, he asks to be looked in the eye, to be acknowledged, to be loved . . .

It is not some other Jesus, but the same Jesus who entered Jerusalem amid the waving of palm branches. It is the same Jesus who was nailed to the cross and died between two criminals.  We have no other Lord but him: Jesus, the humble King of justice, mercy and peace.”

That is why tomorrow and in these next few days, our hearts rejoice and sing: “Hossana to our King!”

Facebook: Professor Tony La Viña or deantonylavs Twitter: tonylavs

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