DRAWING NIGH UNTO JERUSALEM

A SERMON FOR PALM SUNDAY 

It is fitting that as we make our liturgical entry into the time known as Holy Week, we should do so in company with our Blessed Lord as he makes his own entrance into the city known as the Holy City.  Jerusalem has had this title since God instructed Solomon to build his temple here on Mount Sion, the temple that would contain the Holy of Holies. This was the holiest spot in all the earth, holier than Mount Horeb where Moses encountered God in the burning bush, holier than Mount Sinai where he received the law.  Jerusalem with its Holy of Holies was infinitely more sacred than any other place, because it was here that God dwelled in his holy tabernacle, where man and God communed together in the closest union that God would grant his children of the Old Testament.

We have been thinking lately about that verse of the psalm, “I was glad when they said unto me, we will go into the house of the Lord.”  Literally, of course, it signified the joy of the people as they approached the Holy City of Jerusalem and into the Temple.  Listen to the next verses of the same psalm: “Our feet shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem.  Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity in itself.  For thither the tribes go up, even the tribes of the Lord, to testify unto Israel, to give thanks unto the Name of the Lord.  For there is the seat of judgment, even the seat of the house of David.”  Why were the people glad when they entered into Jerusalem? “For there is the seat of judgment.”  This seat of judgment was the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest artifact of the Old Testament, still sought for by archeologists to this day.  From this seat of judgment, God literally spoke to his people.  And they listened.  And they were glad.

Today, we enter Holy Week with mixed feelings.  We begin our ceremonies today with joy and gladness.  We are glad because they have said unto us, we will go into the house of the Lord.  What could make us happier than to approach the place where God is with his people. And now, on Palm Sunday, here comes the Son of God, the very Word made Flesh, to unite with his Father in the Holy of Holies, that Jerusalem may be “at unity with itself.”  But our gladness is turned into sadness and horror, as we discover that this most holy of holiest places in the world was about to witness the most infernal abomination ever committed, the murder of the Son of God by his chosen people.

Thus it was that as the high priests sacrificed their paschal lamb on the afternoon of Good Friday, the true Lamb of God was nailed to the cross.  And as the blood was drained from this most holy of animal sacrifices, so was the last drop of Blood shed by an infinitely holier sacrifice, the only truly acceptablesacrifice.  The Precious Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Blood of the new and everlasting covenant between God and man, now replaced the blood of lambs and goats and bulls and heifers.  And just as Precious Blood of Christ far surpasses the blood of these animals, so too do our the New Testament tabernacles surpass the Holy of Holies which was the Old Testament tabernacle.  For our tabernacles contain the Body and the Blood and the Soul and the Divinity of God in a Real Presence far more tangible and authentic than the merely spiritual presence of God in the temple of Jerusalem.  

This is why, at the very moment of our blessed Lord’s death, the veil separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple was rent in two.  When we think of a veil, we tend to think these days of something like a flimsy chapel veil.  But the veil of the temple was not a thin and delicate object. Without going too deeply into the dimensions, let’s just mention that it was about six inches thick!  And it was miraculously torn in half by God himself as his chosen people chose to kill their God.

The power of God was witnessed by the Jews that first Good Friday.  God could not have made it plainer to them that their Old Covenant was over!  He destroyed the Old Covenant just as the last drop of the Blood of the New and Everlasting Covenant was being spilled outside the city walls, spilled for Gentiles as well as Jews.

At the end of time, when the seven angels, one by one, pour out their seven vials, one by one, producing ever greater devastation to the earth, could it be that the final battle will take place not in Armageddon as is commonly thought, but in Jerusalem? Many biblical scholars claim that Armageddon is a symbolic name, that the word is derived from the Hebrew words meaning “mountain” and “assembly.”  And what is the mountain of assembly if not Mount Sion, home to the Jewish temple where the Jews assembled to worship?  How fitting would it be that as the sixth angel pours out his sixth vial, the Son of God should come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead? And that the divine Judge should pronounce his judgments from his Seat of Judgment in the former Holy of Holies? 

Conjecture perhaps, but certainly food for thought.  No wonder our psalm “I was glad” exhorts us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem!  For when that peace is over, when the kings of the earth rise up one last time against the Lord and his anointed, the day of judgment is surely at hand.  It will be that day of wrath when the Blood of Christ shall be avenged upon all them that have offended him and not repented.  “Deliver us, O Lord,” we pray at the funeral Mass, “from everlasting death in that fearful day: when the heavens and the earth shall be shaken: when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.”

Just as our Lord’s physical body gave up the ghost on the cross, so too shall we, his mystical body, meet our own end in that day of wrath. “When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”  Consummatum est, it is finished. And echoing out through the centuries from the moment those last two words were uttered by the Word made Flesh, across time from 33 AD to the year of the Lord 2019, and from here unto some unknown future date, mankind shall hear them once again pronounced, not from the temple of Jerusalem but from the temple of heaven, no longer from the Seat of Judgment but from the very throne of God, as the seventhangel pours his vial into the air; and, as St. John prophesied, “there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done.”  Consummatum est.  

Let us accompany our Lord today into Jerusalem.  There, let us offer up our own sufferings with his, let us bitterly weep for sins committed against him, let us promise most fervently never to offend him again, and let us prepare ourselves for the words that shall be pronounced upon us from the Seat of Judgment.  Let us make absolutely certain that when we ascend to Jerusalem and to that Judgment Seat, we will indeed be glad, because from there and for evermore “we will go into the house of the Lord.”