THE HOLY CITY OF OUR GOD

A REFLECTION FOR PALM SUNDAY

A great deal of Holy Scripture takes place in or near the Holy City of Jerusalem. What concerns us at the start of this Holy Week is its connection with the end of our Lord’s earthly life.  As home to the Temple of Solomon, Jerusalem had long been the focal point of Jewish spiritual and ceremonial life.  We have several examples of this in the life of our Lord himself, such as his presentation in the temple forty days after his birth, and the pilgrimage made there by the Holy Family when Jesus was twelve years old.

But now, as the drama of our Lord’s last days begins to unfold, the Holy City of Jerusalem plays as great a role as any of the other main actors.  Today, Palm Sunday, we begin our Holy Week by following our Lord ever closer to his ultimate fate.  But where do we follow him?  Into Jerusalem.  And why does he go to Jerusalem?  Because it is there, at Jerusalem’s Temple, that the Passover Lamb is to be slaughtered later in this same week, the Lamb which our Lord, the first-born of the Father, the Lamb of God, is to replace once and for all.  What had been enacted time and again in ceremonial symbols by the Jewish priests, was now to be fulfilled. What had been foreshadowed now dwelt amongst them, and what the people had seen through a glass darkly was now there for them to behold, face to face.

How fitting it is then, that it would be in Jerusalem that the Last Supper would also take place.  Those rituals of worship that the Jewish sacrifices foreshadowed would not be fulfilled only by the ultimate and infinite sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, but would be memorialized in perpetuity through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, first offered by the same priest and with the same victim as the Sacrifice of Calvary.  Where else could this sacrifice take place then, that in the Holy City itself?

When it came time for our Lord to be put to death, however, the sanctimonious and hypocritical Jewish High Priests could not allow their Holy City to be desecrated by the execution of a prisoner.  They had long ago arranged with the Roman occupiers that executions should take place outside the city walls.  Our Lord was thus marched out of Jerusalem, in stark contrast with the scene of triumph we witness today.  The cries of “Hosanna” were replaced by screams of “Crucify him!” and instead of palms of glory, the mob now wielded scourges and thorns with which to inflict their hatred on their Saviour.

Jerusalem is a symbol of the Church.  When we read the psalms we can substitute in our minds the word Church whenever we see “Jerusalem” or “Sion”.  It is the Holy City, the temple in which the sacrifice of the Old Testament is fulfilled, and the sacrifice of the Cross is renewed daily and perpetuated.  It is from our own Jerusalem, our Church, that all graces flow through the sacraments today as they flowed from the wounds of our dying Lord on Calvary.  And all we who come to this living water of grace shall be saved from our sins, as the Jews of old were blessed by their own close observance of the law of Moses.

This Palm Sunday, let us be resolved to follow our Lord through the remainder of this week, through the joys of his triumphant entry into Jerusalem to the sorrows and suffering as he carries his cross back out through the city gates on the Via Dolorosa.  We have much to learn and much to endure if we follow him closely in and out of the Holy City. For it is here that we make our farewell to the Old Testament and here that we greet the New.