Palm Sunday

The setting: Jesus riding in to Jerusalem on a donkey and the crowds loudly shouting their hosannas.
It is a time of rejoicing but at the same time, those of us who know the story realize that Jesus is on the way to his eventual execution.

The Pharisees, scandalized by the scene that Jesus’ disciples are creating, urge him to stifle their exuberance. In many passages we see the Pharisees wanting to silence Jesus and eventually to silence him permanently as they plotted his death with the religious and political authorities. In the popular sanitized Sunday School version of this account, the fact that Jesus is going to meet his death is downplayed or outright passed over.

Why are the Pharisees so eager to have Jesus silence the crowds?

It may at first appear that they just want the riffraff to calm, but we know there is much more to it. Jesus exposed the reality of his times, a reality that sadly prevails twenty centuries later: a world in which the rich and powerful live at the expense of the poor and defenseless. Jesus exposed the idolatry of the religious and political authorities of his day.

Monseñor Oscar Romero identified those idols specifically as wealth and the alter of national security. Like Jesus, Romero was killed for not only naming reality but also, in the words of the Spanish-Salvadoran theologian Ignacio Ellacuría, for bearing the burden of the reality of the people.

Like Jesus, Romero bore the burden of the reality of his people by walking with them, accompanying them in their darkest moments and by being their voice. And, like Jesus and Romero, Ellacuría would also join the list of martyrs who stood up for the truth.

What can move the stones to cry out in our current world context?

In a list that seems endless, we would have to include: human trafficking; the oppression against migrants; the silencing of women; the relentless plundering of the earth for its natural resources and the violent expulsion of people from their land so that corporations may have access to the land’s natural riches; child laborers harvesting minerals, working in life-threatening conditions so that we may have our computers and cell phones; corrupt governments that deny people basic services and that prevent nations from fully developing their potential….

Something else that hasn’t changed since Jesus’ times are the victims of the world’s injustices—those being overwhelmingly the poor people of this world. This is due to what has often been referred to as structural sin that is the result of the inequitable distribution of wealth and economic policies that keep marginalizing the poor and that drive more people into poverty. Our martyred sister Jean Donovan referred to this as the social sin of the First World.

Are we willing to walk with Jesus during this Lenten season and to bear the burden of the reality of his people?

Can we say with the prophet Isaiah that God has shown us “how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them” and that God “opens my ear that I may hear; and I have not rebelled, have not turned back?”