THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

Her Doctrine and Morals

Palm Sunday

2 April 2023

[Image]

The Sunday

Sermon

Click the button on the right to be told about updates. Your address will be kept strictly private.

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today we are reminded of our human fickleness. The people in today's Gospel reading (St. Matthew 21:1-9) are a reflection of us. How often do we come to Holy Mass on Sunday to praise and worship God, but then on Monday turn against Him by our negligence and sins?

We do well when we call out to Jesus, praising Him as our Savior and Redeemer. We do poorly when we reject Him through our evils and sins. It is relatively easy to convict the people of Jerusalem in the Gospel reading of great wickedness and offenses. This, however, does not make us good simply because they were bad. We do well when we consider ourselves as the fickle people of Jerusalem. We welcome Jesus and sing His praise, only to later cry out for His death by our sins.

Jesus has come to us in meekness and humility. It requires an act of faith on our part to recognize His dignity as God. He is the Son of David who comes in the Lord's Name. He is the King of kings. We can approach Him without fear and full of confidence when we consider Jesus in His Humanity. We are confounded and filled with fear when we consider His Divinity, power, and glory. Our unworthiness places a barrier between Him and us. This barrier is easily manipulated to become hatred of the good (God) because we ourselves are evil.

Jerusalem readily welcomed Jesus in His humanity and even as a King. They observed the many miracles that Jesus worked for their bodies and, with a materialistic mentality, readily got behind Jesus and offered all their encouragement and support. When God blesses us with material things for our bodies, we become filled with love and gratitude. We cannot sing the praises of Jesus loud enough. However, these times of good health, abundance, and joy are not the end for which God created us. He asks us to look beyond the material things and into spiritual ones.

When He takes the material blessings away so that we can focus on the spiritual treasures, we turn away from Him. When we focus our attention on the Divinity of Jesus and not His Humanity, we become instantly aware of our unworthiness. We pull away from Him. Rather than acknowledge that it is because of our own evil, we accuse Jesus of being the evil one. How often do we hear the Pagan argument that if God is good, there should not be any suffering, sickness, or death in this world? The illogical conclusion is that God is evil because there is evil in this world, and we are the ones who are good and holy and suffer unjustly.

How quickly we go from loving and praising the Son of God when we think of the many material blessings He gives us to calling for His death on the Cross when we find restraints against our unbridled passions and lusts! How far men will go in pursuing greater power, wealth, and pleasure in this world! We will exploit our neighbors and even cry out for the Blood of Jesus!

We love Him when He multiplies bread and fish, cures our diseases, and returns us to this physical life from death. We cry out with Jerusalem: "Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest."

The moment He tells us to deny ourselves and take up our daily cross to follow Him, we cry out with Jerusalem, "Away with Him! Crucify Him!"

This fickleness and inconstancy are a great fault of all of us. Today's world is actively reinterpreting Jesus, His Words, and His Church to become more acceptable of our material wants and desires and less condemning of our spiritual sins and evils. Rather than conform ourselves to Jesus, we boldly crucify Him anew by trying to conform Him to ourselves!

God came to us — not to be conformed to our sinful natures. He came to show us how to conform to Him and turn us away from our sinful hearts. The world needs to stop reinterpreting and reinventing Jesus and Christianity and begin reinventing ourselves. It is we who need to change. And Jesus has made it painfully clear the only way that we can do this. We must follow Him in self-denial and embrace our crosses to truly die to this world. Only in this way can we be born into eternal life.

May the Immaculate Heart of Mary inspire, guide, and protect us!