EMBRACE THE PASCHAL MYSTERY AND PROCLAIM GOD’S SALVATION WITH JOYFUL PRAISE
In the Collect for Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent the Church prays “Father may our Lenten observance prepare us to embrace the paschal mystery and to proclaim your salvation with joyful praise”. As we enter Holy Week, I invite you to truly “Embrace the paschal mystery and proclaim God salvation with joyful praise” brought and made present through rites and prayers of this “Great week”.
This “Great Week” is marked with different celebrations, all of which help us enter and experience the last day’s of Christ’s earthly life and ministry. Holy Week is the final week of the Lenten Season. It begins with “Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord” highlighting the principal elements that mark this Sunday celebration: the reading of the Passion narrative during the Gospel proclamation, and the Commemoration of the Lord’s Entrance into Jerusalem. This has a Christological significance, a specific historical event in Christ’s redemptive ministry, his entrance into Jerusalem to carry out the Father’s plan for the salvation of humanity. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem was to accomplish the Paschal Mystery.
In the Universal Norms n. 31 is stated that “Holy Week is ordered to the commemoration of Christ’s Passion, beginning with his Messianic entrance into Jerusalem”, Rubric 1 of the Mass for the Palm Sunday says, “On this day the Church recalls the entrance of Christ the Lord into Jerusalem to accomplish his Paschal Mystery”.
Let us, “Embrace the paschal mystery and proclaim God salvation with joyful praise”. At the beginning of the Mass with procession, the priest recalls that the purpose of Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem was to accomplish the Paschal Mystery, he says “let us commemorate, the Lord’s entry into the city for our salvation, following in his footsteps”. The original event proclaimed in the Gospel is liturgically reenacted with the hope that its original purpose, human salvation, may be realized in us here and now. In this commemorative imitation, we are made contemporaries of the Lord’s own entry. The ultimate goal of his entry was our salvation.
The “Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord”, therefore, connects the two parts of the liturgical celebration by making Christ’s destination not just the city of Jerusalem but also the Passion to take place there. Today’s liturgy situates Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem and his Passion within the larger context of the Paschal Mystery and portrays his entrance into the city as the entrance into his Passion.
The liturgy of the Palm Sunday also celebrates the glorious reign of Christ in the heavenly Jerusalem, a place to which all of humanity is called. This is manifested by the fourth stanza of the hymn “All Glory, Laud and Honor” hymn addressing Christ saying that the Hebrews “offered gifts of praise to you, so near your Passion; see how we sing this song now to you reigning on high” (Hymn Palm Sunday at Lauds). And the prayer for hallowing the branches, no. 6 prays that “we, who follow Christ the King in exultation, may reach the eternal Jerusalem through him”.
Through this celebrative imitation, the procession with palms helps us to participate in our future destiny now and gives us the grace eventually to do so in all reality. This is well expressed in the priest’s opening remarks that: “Today we gather to herald with the whole Church, the beginning of the celebration of our Lord’s Paschal Mystery, that is to say, his Passion and Resurrection. For it was to accomplish this mystery, that he entered his own city of Jerusalem”. Let us, therefore, “Embrace the paschal mystery and proclaim God salvation with joyful praise”. Amen.
~Fr. Justus