The Contrast

A Homily for Palm Sunday
given at St. Patrick's Church
By Rev. Fr. Ronnie P. Floyd, STL


What a contrast!

Today the world welcomes Jesus into the city of Jerusalem with shouts of Hosanna Filio David, praise of son of David! Days later, as we hear in the Gospel account of the passion, they greet Him with another cry--this time--Crucify him!
At one moment they want to make Him their king at the next they want to make Him a scapegoat. How good is our God for giving us this contrast to show us the difference between His way and our way.

The people had heard great things about Jesus, they had heard how he cured the sick, and healed the lame, created food out of thin air, and gave the blind sight and the deaf their hearing. They probably also heard that He even raise the dead! What's more He spoke with an authority not seen in Israel since the days of David and Solomon. And His message seemed not just counter-cultural but revolutionary--Jesus was preaching change and living in a difficult time in history--we know how much people like the idea of change--even if they don't really know what the change will be! And so they saw Jesus as the Messiah, but not the Messiah Jesus came to be, they saw Jesus as the Messiah that they, that the world, wanted. So they welcome Him as their King, shouting Hosanna son of David and taking palms down from trees to create a royal carpet all the way into the Kings gate of Jerusalem

According to tradition it's not hard to understand why days later He was betrayed. Tradition says they wanted to force Jesus' hand, they were tired of waiting for Jesus to stop pretending to be a holy roller, they wanted Him to take power, by any means necessary, and they were willing to use violence either to help Him or to force His hand.

The Sanhedrin also saw Him as the revolutionary, as a threat to stability and the status quo that guaranteed them their power. And so this Jesus who the people regarded as a prophet and who healed so many people, bringing so many to conversion of life is at the beginning of the week welcomed as a king and by the end of the week dies the death of a criminal.

Palm Sunday is all about this contrast, so often today we do what the crowds did to Jesus so long ago, so often we remake Jesus the way we want to see Him, as the glorious and powerful son of God. We strip the Passion and Death of our Lord from its ignominy and shame. We want a Messiah, a King, a God full of power, and so we twist the crucifixion around to make even this atrocity look quaint. It's not suprising that so many take offense at our Christian faith, claiming the one true God, a God who doesn't love us enough to save us from suffering and sin. The Cross explains this scandal, and shows us what God is doing, and how in reality this is so much better than our way of doing things. But it wasn't quaint, and it's so important to realize this!

No matter how much the world speaks of freedom, I believe what we really want is a tyrant. We want Jesus to be a superman God who fixes the world's problems with fireballs and bolts of lighting, a God who doesn't allow the sick to suffer, or the sorrowful to weep, who defeats death by simply keeping everyone alive, and giving them all spiritual Botox to keep us looking good. Instead Jesus comes into the world not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Jesus lives by the same rules that He created for us from the beginning of creation, though He never sinned! He submitted to the rule of sin, that requires all of us to suffer and die in this life because of our sin, and the sin of the whole world. Jesus is God, and God is all-powerful, and yet He doesn't use His power to save Himself

What a scandal--this is the fact that continues to scandalize people today and it's because they think that the crucifixion was just play acting. They don't understand the Jesus was truly a man just as much as any of us
and that He really and truly suffered in every way the we suffer, because of sin!

Jesus allows us to suffer, no more than what He himself suffered; and He does this not because He wants us to suffer, but because He wants to show us that the World is Good.

The History of Creation culminates on Mount Calvary: God created the world and declared that it was good! We sinned by trying to choose for ourselves what was good. Our sin lead to suffering and death.

Jesus came to show us that if we can get over ourselves, if we can set aside our pride and willfulness if we can choose to do God's will instead of our own and trust God's plan instead of the World's, which over and over again causes sin, suffering, shame, and ultimately death! If we can go to the cross, with trust and joy in our heart like Jesus did, then God who created the World good will make good things sprout from the seeming evil of suffering.

This is the wisdom of God,
foolishness to the wise, and a stumbling block to the proud
but to those of us who are being saved the Power of God.

God's way is not our way, because we fool ourselves into thing that this material world is all there is, and that heaven, if there is a heaven, is just a continuation of this world.

ITS NOT!

Heaven is about a perfection that none of us can ever image a joy beyond all telling. As Dr. Peter Kreft noted the other day if we made a list of all the things we like most about the world and another of all the things we like least.
If we had everything we liked most in heaven and nothing we didn't like we would still become bored with heaven in the first second of eternity.

God's way is better than ours, it full of the mystery and surprise that cause true joy and happiness. The bloody cross and grotesque passion, which become the source of eternal life is just a taste of God's imagination and His goodness.

Each day the contrast we see today between the way of the World and God's way is set before us as a choice... ?

Until we start to choose to live God's way our Catholic faith will mean nothing, and remain powerless, because our faith separated from God's way of total Love is impotent; a silly moral code based on a sad story of a failed revolutionary.

God sets before us today and every day a choice, The triumph of worldly power or the sorrow of Calvary, which will you choose?