Monday of Holy Week
Isaiah 42:1-7  +  John 12:1-11
April 6, 2020

Here is my servant whom I uphold, / my chosen one with whom I am pleased….

The Old Testament’s Book of the Prophet Isaiah contains four brief passages called “servant songs”.  Isaiah never names the servant who is described.  But in the earliest years of the Church, these servant songs were sung in praise of Christ, who fulfilled during Holy Week what they proclaim.

The First Reading on Monday of Holy Week presents the first of these four servant songs.  We might imagine God the Father speaking these words of His only-begotten Son, whom He sent from the paradise of Heaven into our world of sin and death.

Jesus is a servant.  All the words that Jesus speaks and all that He does and bears this week reveals Him as a servant.  Yet He’s a servant in a two-fold way, and we ought at the beginning of Holy Week reflect upon both of these.

Whom is Jesus serving through the sacred events of Holy Week?  Secondly, He is serving us.  All that He speaks, does, and suffers is for us:  to bring us salvation.

First, however, Jesus is serving His heavenly Father.  During Holy Week it’s easy for us to lose sight of God the Father.  Our view can become myopic, focused simply upon Jesus saving us.  But in saving us from the power of sin and death, Jesus is preparing us for new life.  This new life is given to us even during our earthly days through the gifts, the fruits, and the grace of the Holy Spirit.  But this new life in this world is only a foretaste of eternal life with our Father in Heaven.  Jesus is serving His Father during Holy Week because God the Father longs for each us to enter into His company.

Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord [A]
Matthew 21:1-11  +  Isaiah 50:4-7  +  Philippians 2:6-11  +  Matthew 26:14—27:66

“Who is this?”

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references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church cited for this Sunday by the Vatican’s Homiletic Directory:

CCC 557-560: Christ’s entry into Jerusalem
CCC 602-618: the Passion of Christ
CCC 2816: Christ’s kingship gained through his death and Resurrection
CCC 654, 1067-1068, 1085, 1362: the Paschal Mystery and the liturgy

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The rubrics for Palm Sunday indicate that a homily need not be preached.  A period of silence may be observed after the Passion instead.  The reason for the exception on Palm Sunday isn’t directly stated in the Roman Missal.

We might guess that the reason for this exception is the sheer length of this Sunday’s Gospel texts.  Not only is the Gospel of the Passion itself extremely long.  In fact, there are two Gospel Readings proclaimed on Palm Sunday:  the first is at the start of Mass, recounting Christ’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem.

However, we might guess that there’s an additional reason why the priest is permitted not to preach a homily on Palm Sunday.  The Gospel Reading of the Passion is the very heart of Jesus’ Good News.  What could a homilist possibly add to the proclamation of the Gospel narrative?  What more is there to say?

Yet this second guess ought to be challenged.  In fact, there is something more to be said, because the temptation is to admire the Gospel of the Passion without entering into it:  that is, to look up to Jesus as if His Cross were a pedestal.

The homilist on Palm Sunday, then, preaches to each member of his congregation about her need to enter personally into the Gospel of the Passion.  Each congregant needs to make the narrative of the Passion her own.  Each needs to bear the conviction that when Jesus died on the Cross, He died for that individual.  In a church like the Catholic Church, which has on earth more than one billion members (and that’s not to mention those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith), it’s easy to feel lost in the crowd.

Each individual member of the Mystical Body of Christ is loved by Christ as if she or he were the only person He died for on the Cross.  The Church has always taught this, but in recent times St. John Paul II used the language of personalist philosophy to explore the meaning of the Gospel in general, and in particular the need for each Christian to encounter the crucified and Risen Christ as an individual rather than as an historical figure or a distant deity.

We might wonder how it’s even possible for the one single person of Jesus Christ to individually relate to, much less personally love, more than a billion individuals at the same time.  While this might seem impossible, it’s not something that you need to comprehend fully but simply to believe and experience.

It’s this relation between the individual and Christ Jesus that makes a disciple into a saint.  This connection is what makes a disciple strong enough to persevere in following Jesus all the way to the top of Calvary, with eyes fixed upon Jesus and His Cross instead of upon oneself and one’s desires.

The Second Reading for Palm Sunday helps us glimpse, if not fully comprehend, how Jesus Christ can relate to each individual member of the Church, including yourself.

In theology, the Second Reading is summed up by the Greek word “kenosis”.  In English this word is translated rather awkwardly as “self-emptying”.  We might say that it’s the virtue of humility in a complete, personalistic sense.  That is to say, kenosis is not just the performance of a humble action, but the humbling of one’s whole self in a permanent yet on-going manner.

In the case of the divine Person of Jesus, He chose not to cling to His divinity.  We see this at the Annunciation, when He took upon Himself a human nature, with all its weaknesses and vulnerabilities.  But as the following thirty years of His life passed, His kenosis continued as He put His divine Self entirely at the service of His earthly mission.

Yet the whole of Jesus’ earthly life was oriented by God towards a single hour:  the hour of Divine Mercy on the afternoon of Good Friday.  The kenosis of the Incarnation and public ministry were designed to lead individuals to Calvary:  not just the individual apostles, disciples and others who lived in the Holy Land 2000 years ago, but each individual living today as well, including yourself.

It’s at the Cross and through the Cross that Jesus Christ relates to each individual.  Through the Cross, the individual can enter into the mystery of Christ’s kenosis, sharing directly in Jesus’ Incarnation, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension.  It’s not in spite of your sins that Jesus chooses to relate to you, but through your sins.  The depth of your human sins reveals the depth of His divine love.

Saturday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Ezekiel 37:21-28  +  John 11:45-56
April 4, 2020

So from that day on they planned to kill him.

This morning’s Gospel Reading bears a sense of anxious anticipation.  Its final verse leaves us on the edge of our pew:  “They looked for Jesus and said to one another as they were in the temple area, ‘What do you think?  That he will not come to the feast?’”

Just a few verses before, St. John the Evangelist explains the reason for the heightened sense of anxiety:  “So from that day on they planned to kill him.”  The motive for this plan of the chief priests and Pharisees is the focus of this morning’s three readings.

Both this morning’s First Reading and Responsorial Psalm come from books of Old Testament prophets:  the First Reading, from Ezekiel; and the Psalm, from Jeremiah.  Both look to Israel’s future, when a shepherd king would reign over a united Israel.  The Responsorial is very strong in describing this shepherd

Yet the language of king is only implied, although in two ways.  First, Ezekiel prophesies about Israel being restored to one kingdom.  However, second and more intriguingly, Ezekiel prophesies that “there shall be one prince for them all”:  not one “king”, but one “prince”.  Twice in the verses that follow, Ezekiel identities David as this prince.  Through the prophet the Lord declares:  “My servant David shall be prince over them, and there shall be one shepherd for them all”; in the Holy Land, Israel shall dwell “with my servant David their prince forever.”

Everything that Ezekiel and Jeremiah prophesy about this shepherd king is fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.  More specifically, Jesus fulfills His earthly mission as Christ the King upon the Cross on Good Friday.  Jesus is drawing close to “His hour”.  Through the New Passover—the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass—we are able to enter into Jesus’ life and saving mission.

Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Jeremiah 20:10-13  +  John 10:31-42
April 3, 2020

“If I do not perform my Father’s works, put no faith in me.”

Some disagree with the saying, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” claiming that a little is better than none.  They do not see that those having the “little” often self-righteously and proudly conclude they “know it all.”

The Pharisees, purported Scripture scholars and experts in the Mosaic Law, fell into this latter category.  When Christ revealed Himself to them as the Messiah, though they had well documented knowledge of the miracles He had performed, they immediately rejected the evidence, accused Him of blasphemy and prepared to stone Him.

What rendered them more dangerous than their intellectual presumption, and perhaps their fear of losing authority and position, was their faithlessness, their lack of God’s light and love.  In this, Christ Jesus is their opposite, and this opposition to the Pharisees is what each of us must imitate:  knowing that in God, we have everything we are, and that all we are, God calls us to give:  for the sake of others, and for the greater glory of God.

Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Genesis 17:3-9  +  John 8:51-59
April 2, 2020

“Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.”

While yesterday’s Gospel Reading looked in part upon Abraham, today’s Scriptures double down on this focus.  Today both the First Reading and Gospel Reading look at “our father in faith”.  In fact, it is Abraham as father that is the specific focus.

In the First Reading, God changes Abram’s name to “Abraham”.  This new name can be literally translated as “father of many”.  But God’s own explanation of why he’s bestowing this new name is worth our attention:  “for I am making you the father of a host of nations.  I will render you exceedingly fertile; I will make nations of you; kings shall stem from you.”  You could use any one of these four phrases for meditation, especially in terms of how this call from God to Abraham foreshadows the mission of Jesus Christ, who fulfills Abraham’s call in a new way.

Yet there’s another important aspect of God’s covenant with Abraham that’s not captured by these four phrases.  Later in the First Reading, God vows:  “I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land in which you are now staying, the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession”.  The Holy Land for the people of the Old Testament was a geographic place upon the earth, with Jerusalem as its capital, and the Temple at the capital’s center.  This is where we Christians need to understand the “Holy Land” of God’s covenant with Abraham in a new way:  the Holy Land is Heaven; its capital is Christ, the Head of the Church; and the Temple is the Cross on Calvary, from which Christ’s self-sacrifice radiates throughout human history, leading the faithful of Christ’s Mystical Body into the heavenly embrace of God the Father.