Today, on Palm Sunday and just a week before Easter Sunday, usually no sermon is delivered during Mass. After all, what more convincing sermon could be possibly heard than the account of Our Lord's Passion and Death?
St Mark, no less than the other three Evangelists, presents us today with a moving account of this most important event in Our Lord's life among us. Although we are used to hearing it read from the lectern year in and year out on the Sunday before Easter, there is always some detail or other which strikes us more than others. There is no doubt, however, that what moves us most is that here we have Jesus, a man who has done nothing but good to his people, being beaten up and then hanged to death on a cross.
For our meditation today I think it might help if we just set three questions to ourselves and then try to answer them, as sincerely as possible, with special reference to ourselves. Who is the one who is suffering? What is he suffenng? And why?
The Person who suffered is none other than Jesus Christ, the son of Mary of Nazareth, who did absolutely nothing wrong during the 30 years of his private life, and who on the contrary went all out to do good among his fellow countrymen during the last three years of his adult life.
Besides healing the sick and restoring life to the dead, he divulged the Good News that God was the loving Father of all and wanted to save every human being, past, present and future, and show them the true and only way to heaven. All He demanded was that they should believe in Him as the one sent by God and allow their lives to be transformed by love.
What Jesus was made to suffer is almost incredible, even though we have heard and read it many times. He was insulted, beaten up, spat upon, betrayed by one of his friends, and then condemned to death just as if he were the worst criminal. Death on the cross in those times was the punishment reserved for murderers.
While he stood before Pilate, the Roman governor of the time, he remained silent instead of rebutting the many false accusations which were being levelled against him by the very people whom he had benefited, whose sick he had cured and whose dead he had even brought back to life.
But why had Jesus to suffer so much and be condemned to death, to the most humiliating kind of death? That is the hardest question we could possibly answer. Or maybe, if we look at the other side of the medal, it is also the easiest one.
The answer is love, and love explains everything. "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them unto the end," writes St John in his account of the Passion. Because he loved us, he was prepared to undergo all sufferings to give us proof of his infinite love for us, but also to teach us what true love really is: that it consists more in deeds than in words, more in giving than in taking, and that there is a blessing in suffering for the love of others.
No other lesson is more timely and necessary today than the one Our Lord gives us from the chair of his Cross. As we adore Jesus, Our Lord and Saviour, hanging on the Cross, let us place our own crosses, some light ones and some heavy ones, at the foot of the Cross of Jesus, while renewing our faith in him as our Lord and Saviour and waiting for the superb brightness of Easter Sunday.