Palm Sunday Reflection

Acts 13:26-30

Beth McCormick, OP

These few verses comprise the Scripture reading for Vespers on Palm Sunday. They are taken from one of the speeches (discourses) of Paul, this one delivered in the synagogue at Antioch. In the verses preceding these, Paul has traced the story of how the message of salvation preached by the patriarchs and Moses in the Old Testament led up to their fulfillment in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Having traced that story, he then says: "My brothers and sisters, it was to us that this message of salvation was sent forth." Yes, to us: those in the synagogue that day and us in our churches and synagogues, in our world, today. This message of salvation is meant for US.

What is the message? Simply this: We have been saved by the Word-made-flesh, by Jesus, who in his human flesh suffered, died on a cross and was buried in a tomb. And, Jesus, whom God raised from the dead. It's all one mystery, death and resurrection. That's the good news of salvation.

One day, at the Newburgh Ministry, a community center for poor people of the city where I frequently work, an old man came in the door. He was bent over completely with arthritis, used a cane, and he called out to all who were there: "Good morning! 'This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it!'" To me, that man would seem to understand the meaning for us of what Paul is talking about in Acts 13. Clearly, he knows suffering. He is in serious pain. But clearly, also, he knows the meaning of resurrection - of joy out of pain, of life out of the kind of death that suffering is. He is an image of hope. That body, doubled over from disease, is obviously enlivened by a spirit that believes there is more to life than pain, a spirit that hopes in the ultimate healing of resurrection. By his way of being he invites us all to the same sort of hope.

I read an extraordinary comment on the mystery of suffering, excruciating suffering. It's in the book, An Interrupted Life: the Diaries of Etty Hillesum. Etty was a Dutch Jewish woman who died at Auschvitz in 1943 at the age of 29. She was Jewish, but she was "accused" of being Christian in some of the sentiments she expressed. She did not seem to be bothered by the accusations. In one passage she writes:

"All I wanted to say is this: The misery here is quite terrible, and yet, late at night, ...I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire, and then time and again it soars straight from my heart ... like some elementary force - the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world. Against every new outrage and every fresh horror we shall put up on more piece of love and goodness...."

Are there not outrages and fresh horrors in our time, too? We ask ourselves, do we have that hope of Etty, to triumph over the death-dealing behaviors that we meet by putting up "one more piece of love and goodness"? It's the only way to announce authentically the Good News.