Homily for Palm Sunday
The long story we hear today of the suffering and death of Jesus (Luke 22:14-23:56) should help us, especially when we hit hard and painful times in our life, to pray when prayer becomes agonisingly difficult. You can hear and see me giving this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQjPFScQQk8 At least twice in my life I have found myself unable to pray. The first, and most traumatic, was when my mother died some 50 years ago. I was devastated, and every time I tried to pray, I began to weep.
Two things helped me then. The first was to remember that when I wept with God I was actually praying, or more correctly God was praying in me. St Paul says in Romans Chapter 8 when we cannot pray “God’s Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words”. So today we look at the Cross and remember that whenever we weep, whenever we suffer, Jesus is alongside us and within us, weeping and suffering with us and for us
The second way I found to pray when in distress, was to do what Jesus did in his agony and pain on the cross. In such times, when words fail us, then like Jesus we can simply use familiar words to stand for the words we cannot say. Jesus used the psalms, for they were his hymn book, and he knew them by heart. “My God. my God why have you forsaken me” … “Into your hands I commend my spirit”
We too can use such words, either reading them from the Psalms as I did, or using a favourite hymn or a bible passage. Whatever we choose to say when we do not feel like saying anything at all, even simply the Our Father or the Rosary, will be taken by God and accepted with our tears within the one sacrificial offering of Jesus.
But there is one more way that we are taught to pray today as we stand at the foot of the cross. It is the prayer of silence. Although at this time we think a lot about how Jesus suffered as a man, it is important to remember that in Jesus we also meet Almighty God. God is not like us, so God does not suffer as we do, which is why he chooses to become human, or as our 2nd Reading says, he “Emptied himself.” (Philippians 2:6-11) Think of that great modern Hymn, “Be still for the presence of God the Holy One is here.” It’s words remind us of the stillness of God, that God exists for us beyond the turmoils and tussles of life, beyond the horrors of war and violence, beyond the pain of suffering and death. When Jesus says from the cross “Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing”, he represents two things. First, he represents all of us, sad struggling people, reaching out to God, but he also is God there for us responding with a love and a mercy that enfolds us in his peace.
In the end, the most powerful prayer that Jesus utters has no words at all. The Bible cannot really record the silence. It speaks of the three hours that Jesus hung on the cross, and we hear the few words that he said… But in the end, most of his time on the cross would have been a long drawn out silent agony of suffering - and then finally the silence of death itself. Maybe in the silence, Jesus remembered the words from Lamentations (3:22-26) for I am sure he knew them well:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly: for the salvation of the Lord.
We need to remind ourselves today of the power of that silence. His dying and his death defeat death and save the world, and they take place in silence.
So when words fail us, when we try to pray but there are just tears, and when even familiar words fail us, we can be assured that the offering of our silent agony to God is more powerful than any words. For in the silence, we are joined by Jesus. He joins his silence to ours and that is how he holds us in his arms and saves the world.
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