Most Reverend Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv DD STL, Bishop of Parramatta
Homily for Palm Sunday, Year C
Readings: Isaiah 50:4-7; Phil 2:6-11; Luke 23:1-49
In the Suffering Servant, we see hope at the margins.
Dear friends,
We have just listened to a very sombre account of the Passion which testifies to the kind of Messiah Jesus was. Against the popular expectation, he was not the triumphant ruler or the military strongman that many of his own Jewish contemporaries had hoped for. Instead, he identified with the Suffering Servant that Isaiah foretold. The Messiah that Jesus embodied also found resonance in the faithful remnants of Israel who lived in goodness and righteousness despite the trials and tribulations they had to endure.
Similarly, Paul describes Jesus in the second reading as humbling himself to the point of dying on the cross and embodying the self-emptying God. This path of kenosis or total giving of self for the sake of others characterises the life of the Saviour which in turn becomes the means of his vindication and glorification. He is raised on the highest for having lowered himself to the lowest.
This year, we hear the account of the Passion from the Gospel of St Luke who sees Jesus from the perspective of an outsider. He is at pains to point out that the way Jesus carried out his mission was fundamentally counter-cultural. He was a king who rode on the back of the donkey, who mixed with the outcasts and washed the feet of others. He was not a warrior but a peacemaker. He was not a conqueror through domination and violence but a humble servant through non-violence and justice. In Jesus who surrounds himself with the outcast, we see a God of solidarity and vulnerability.
In Jesus, we meet a God who is one with the people at the margins. This God disturbs our comfort and pushes us out to the periphery to be with the least of his brothers and sisters.
Our entrance into Holy Week calls us to renew our commitment to heal and transform our wounded humanity and broken earth. God is involved with the pain and suffering of our world. God is involved in our quest for justice, peace and the flourishing of all creation. The victory of shalom is won by the awesome power of compassionate love, in and through solidarity with those who suffer.
It is the precarious existence where we dare to accompany the Samaritans of our time, just like Jesus did before us. For the rough edges of life is where the God of surprises beckons us.
Dear friends,
Palm Sunday galvanises us to transformative action, for it gives us a glimpse of the victory of love over hatred and life over death. It was not evil that had the upper hand. It was not injustice, violence and death that had the last word. It was God’s unflinching fidelity, his unconditional love in Jesus that brought about the victory of shalom.
Jesus’ willingness to face death, specifically death on a cross, is truly the expression of the “wisdom of God”. God breaks the grip of scapegoating by stepping into the place of a victim. God is willing to die for us, to bear our sin because we desperately need deliverance from our propensity to violence. Jesus’ persecutors intend his death to be sacrificial business as usual. In other words, one can use violence in order to counter violence. But God means it to be the opposite. Jesus’ death and resurrection means that God has reset the cycle of human behaviour. We are empowered to turn the tide of hatred, violence and death that threatens to submerge the human family.
The work of the cross is the work of a transcendent God, breaking into a cycle we could not change alone. To believe in the crucified one is to want no other victims. To depend on the blood of Jesus is to refuse to depend on the sacrificial blood of anyone else. It is to refuse to play the mob that makes a scapegoat out of the victim who may be the weak, the marginal and the minority among us.
The Church, as a new community formed through identification with the crucified one, is dedicated both to the innocent victim whom God has vindicated by resurrection and to a new life in Christ that overcomes conflict.
We are living at a time when there is a sense of chaos, uncertainty and instability in the world. This global precariousness effects everyone, especially people on the margins. But let us take heart. Pope Francis has called this Jubilee Year ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. It is an invitation to renew our hope and to be the bearer of the hope we share. Only by caring for one another, for the most vulnerable and for all creation, can we harness the energy of love and embody the incarnate God.
May we follow the example of the Suffering Servant who shows us the way of disarming hatred with love, evil with goodness, indifference with compassion. May our commitment to heal and transform our wounded humanity and our broken earth be brought to fruition in accordance with God’s plan in Christ.
