Today is Palm Sunday, the start of Holy Week. Lent is almost over.
At Mass this morning, we walked through our Lord’s last days in Jerusalem, starting with the first century equivalent of a ticker tape parade.
Jesus was top of the charts, wildly popular.
Many folks apparently thought they’d finally met their messianic king. And they had, although Jesus wasn’t the secular messiah they’d been expecting.
Grass roots opinion apparently was that Jesus looked like someone who’d finally end the Roman occupation.
The powers that be had the same idea. And it scared them.
I can see their viewpoint. If this Jesus person said ‘I’m the king,’ and made it stick, then they’d be out of a job. After that, the Roman governor would send in troops and they’d lose everything else.
So they arrested Jesus, tried and convicted him in a kangaroo court and pressured the Roman governor to enforce the death penalty.
Then, after a really bad night, our Lord was nailed to a cross and died.
One Apostle committed suicide.
The rest kept a low profile.
If our Lord was the national hero that folks had been expecting, then that first Holy Week would have ended in a tragic fiasco. But Jesus wasn’t, and it didn’t.
Two millennia later, we’re still celebrating. That sounds crazy, at best.
But it’s not.
A few days after his messy death, Jesus stopped being dead. And that’s another topic.
It’s been one of those weeks, so today’s post is a slightly-abbreviated version of what I did for Palm Sunday, 2021:
- “Holy Week: Top of the Charts to Lethal Fiasco“
(March 28, 2021) - “Something Wonderful“
(April 9, 2020) - “Good Friday“
(April 19, 2019) - “Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem“
(April 14, 2019) - “The Eighth Day: Two Millennia and Counting“
(April 16, 2017)
