Palm Sunday – the silence, stillness and gratitude for the love of God

Palm Sunday and Good Friday are the only two occasions when the Passion is read in its entirety.

On both, the usual introductory dialogue and conclusion are omitted: it begins with the stark statement: “The Passion of our Lord, Jesus Christ”, and ends, appropriately, in silence. How could it not? That silence, however, is not self-imposed: we are silenced by the Passion. And this silence is infinitely deeper than speechlessness: it is the silence and stillness of sorrow and sadness.

But it is also the silence and stillness of overwhelming gratitude for “the love of God”, as St Paul has it, that “has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:5) by the Cross of Christ. Crux stat dum volvitur orbis is the Carthusian motto, hinted at in T S Eliot’s words in Burnt Norton: “The still point of the turning world”.

It has been said of the gospels that they are four accounts of the Passion preceded by an extended preface.

At the heart of each is an account of how Jesus, the Lord of all creation, the first human being to have no fear of love, no fear, that is, of being human (McCabe), took upon Himself all the sin, anguish and pain of our world. The Passion lays bare the ‘sin of the world’ that Jesus takes away, the fratricidal violence that has infected all human societies since Cain and Abel. God entered his creation in an act of selfless love and we human beings, ill at ease with our humanity and fearful of love, crucified him so as to rid ourselves of the one who showed us what we have made of 2 ourselves, who revealed how alienated we have become from our true nature.

But it’s also in the Passion more than anywhere else that God manifests the inconceivably immense love that he has for each of us. In an act of madness, we rejected our salvation, but he saved us all the same. “Father, forgive them, for they know now what they do.” In that sense, the Cross of Christ is both the ultimate sin and the ultimate act of forgiving love. That’s why the liturgy of Holy Week, beginning today and culminating in the Resurrection, is the template for our living here and now, however long or short our lives may be. Jesus is the first fully human being, the first whose living and dying were rooted in and moved by love alone. As St Paul says, “If we have died with him, we will live with him” (Romans 6:8), sharing his risen life even now. All we need do, in every waking moment and at the moment of our death, is “Let him Easter in us.” (G M Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland)