A SERMON FOR PALM SUNDAY
One of the most poignant moments
in St. Matthew’s Passion comes in the Garden of Gethsemane when Our Lord is so
overcome with emotion that he falls down on his face. And lying there on the ground, he manages to
lift his head a little, and raise his voice to his Father in heaven, with these
words: “O my Father, if it be possible,
let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”
We stand today on the threshold
of Holy Week. A week filled with
suffering. Our remembrance of our
Saviour’s sufferings for us. As the week
relentlessly proceeds, we are drawn closer and closer to the Cross, until at
last on Good Friday, we walk the hill of Calvary with Our Lord, we stand
beneath that Cross as he is raised upon it, we listen to his last words, and we
watch him die. And if there is love in
our heart, any love at all, for that Saviour who gave so much that we might
live, we are moved to tears of grief at these terrible sights. We weep with Our Blessed Lady, his Mother, we
weep with St. John, his beloved disciple, we weep with the Angels.
It is good that we weep. But how quickly do we forget our tears as the
joys of Easter replace these dark days with the glorious good news of our
Salvation, as Our Blessed Lord rises from the dead. In one sense, this is as it should be. The glorious mysteries of the Rosary have
every bit as much right to our attention and emotions as the sorrowful. But it is perhaps a sign of our own shallowness,
that as soon as those happy festival days of Eastertide are come, we tend so
quickly to forget our tears, to the point where we actually turn our back on the
price of that happiness that we are then enjoying. That heavy price which is the bitter
suffering of the Son of God made Man.
How do I know we turn our back on
his suffering? It’s very simple when you
think about it. It’s because we are so
very ready to turn our back on our own sufferings, our own crosses! We are so very ready to pray with Our Lord: “Father,
if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” – without bothering to pray the
second part. We just say: “O God, take
away this suffering from me. It’s more
than I can bear. It’s not fair I have to
suffer when I try so hard to be a good person. Why don’t you punish sinners with crosses like
this, instead of giving them to me? What
did I do to deserve this?”
And we forget the second half of
Our Lord’s prayer: “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” “Thy
will be done!”
“Aha!” says the blasphemer, as if
he has stumbled across some profound and thought-provoking truth, “What kind of
God do you Christians worship that wills
suffering? How can a loving God allow
suffering in the world? All he has to do
is snap his fingers and we could all be perfectly happy right now. So why doesn’t he?”
It’s a question we have all
struggled with at some time or other.
Usually when we are suffering, naturally. Sometimes the overwhelming depths of woe we
encounter in our lives threaten to drag us under into the cold, dark abyss of
despair. But only if we have completely
the wrong idea of who God truly is. Only
if our superficial picture of God is nothing at all like the all-loving, caring
Creator that he actually is.
I want to explain to you today
something which is of vital importance in each of our lives. My message to you is perhaps not something
you will need today, or tomorrow. But I
guarantee that each of you will need it some
day. We all have to suffer eventually,
some most bitterly. But there is consolation
to be found in our suffering if only we would look at it the right way.
I told you last week that we need
to be men and women of courage to be able to carry our crosses with Jesus up
the hill of Calvary. I’m talking about
real courage, ‘true grit’. The kind of
courage that trembles each time before pronouncing the words of the Angelus “Be
it done unto me according to thy Word,” or before hearing those words of Our
Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Not
as I will, but as thou wilt”. These are
the men and women of courage who tremble, yes… but they repeat those words
anyway. They repeat them as their
own. “Yes Lord, I want to do thy will, not mine. Thy
will be done.” These are the men and
women God is looking for in his Church.
These are the men and women who would never condemn themselves to
mediocrity and advance no further. These
are rather the men and women who will take up their cross and follow their
Saviour to Calvary.
One little saint who had such courage
was St. Catherine of Siena. In a vision,
Jesus presented her with two crowns, one made of gold, fashioned with diamonds
and glistening jewels, and the other one made up of thorns. He asked her to choose which of the two crowns
she would like to have. Her answer was
astonishing: "I desire, O Lord, to live here always conformed to your
passion, and to find pain and suffering my repose and delight." Then, she eagerly took up the crown of thorns,
and pressed it down upon her head. Do you have that kind of courage? For sure enough, her life was transformed
into one of terrible pain and sorrow. You
need to be careful what you ask for. But
if you are a generous soul, full of the love of God, and not one of those
superficial types who weep a few forced tears of compassion for Our Lord this
Holy Week, if and only if you are generous and courageous enough to repeat Our
Lord’s words during his Agony, and mean
them, “Not as I will, but thy will be done,” then you will surely merit to
weep great torrents in your lifetime, and be swept along in the tidal wave of
your tears of suffering into the eternal and immeasurable love of God.
