On Palm Sunday we entered Jerusalem following Jesus into Jerusalem. Fr. Simeon Leiva, OCSO, in his homily to us, described Jesus intention in this way:
Jesus goes ahead of his followers up to Jerusalem, the holy city whose name means “city of peace” but that also is the city that kills those sent to her for her conversion. Jesus will soon weep over Jerusalem like a jilted Bridegroom, because she has failed to recognize the way of his peace, a tragic failure shared by every culture and civilization before and after Christ. Jesus shows us the only path to true peace: namely, not ever to engage in any kind of violence toward our fellow human beings, animals, and nature itself—all of God’s creatures. Christ’s kingship is not of this world precisely because, unlike worldly kings and tyrants who legalize violence and love to inflict it, Jesus radically rejects its use and, in its place, exercises only love that leads to repentance, reconciliation and unity.
Jesus refuses ever to create victims. He chooses instead with full freedom of will to becomethe one and only Victim, who allows all the hostility of the world to come crashing down on his own head. Jesus is the uncompromisingly non-violent King, to the point of assuming all the world’s violence upon himself on the cross, an instrument of torture and death which, by bearing the weight of his self-oblation, becomes the ultimate epiphany of Christ’s strange and wonderful kingship. In other words, in the Passion and on the cross Jesus willingly absorbs into his Heart’s ocean of love the universal violence that pierces and breaks him. Precisely by so doing Jesus becomes the broken Bread that nourishes us with eternal life and the outpoured Wine that makes us drunk with God’s reckless mercy—so recklessly drunk with God’s insane love that, under its influence, we long to become ourselves that poor donkey, carrying the sweet burden of a redeeming Jesus through the world on our backs.
The Tenebrae, celebrated on Wednesday night, represents the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus through the symbolic use of light and darkness and marked with scripture readings, song, and psalms.
On Holy Thursday, the Washington of the feet at the Lords Last Supper. Jesus gives us an example of service and humility that we are instructed to follow.
Good Friday – the passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. He was crucified for our sake testifying with his life that Love is the deepest meaning of it all.
