My dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. From today we enter Holy Week. The first part of today's Mass is the celebration of Palm Sunday, where we celebrate the event of Jesus being welcomed as a King in Jerusalem.
Most of us have seen this scene in a movie: There’s a person who is strapped on an electric chair about to die. The police are just waiting for 3pm on the clock before pulling down the lever to deliver thousand of volts of electricity so that the prisoner who is condemned to die will be killed. And with just a few seconds before 3pm, the phone rings, the President is on the line and orders the police to give the prisoner a reprieve.
As this edition of In the Word reaches you, we are about to embark on the Easter Triduum, those blessed days of entering into the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s a busy time for many of us, with all the liturgies to attend and be part of. But on the flip-side, it is also, for Christians, a time of profound un-busyness, of deep quiet, of fasting, prayer and reflection.
This is the only Sunday in Lent that has two names: Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday. This is because the liturgy celebrates two aspects of the mystery of our redemption that we are to keep in mind during Holy Week.
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