A homily for Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, April 10, 2022
Lk 19:28-40, Is 50:4-7, Phil 2:6-11, Lk 22:14—23:56
They’re a pair of questions posed in movies, in literature, and in deep conversations over coffee, tea or something stronger:
Would you want to know when you’re going to die? Would you want to know how?
And then, the follow-up:
If you did know, what would you do with the time you have left?
Two dark comedies — “Don’t Look Up” and “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” — assert pretty firmly that if people know precisely when it’s all over, they act badly.
Drinking and drugging. Orgies and other hookups. Angry looting and even angrier riots.
As if any of those things would change the inevitable outcome. As if anything they stole would have any value once the asteroid wiped out the Earth.
Yet amid all that mindlessness, some of the movies’ characters chose to use what time they had left to be positive, to bond or re-bond with family and friends, to console people in their saddest moments, to show that love would conquer all.
How Christlike!
Each of us knows, deep down, that we won’t live forever. Each of us remembers that in several places in the Gospels Jesus reminds us that we know neither the date nor the time of our passing out of this life into the next one.
And even with a dire diagnosis of some terminal condition, we can’t be sure of the when or even the how.
So we live in hope.
We live in the hope that springs from faith that what Jesus did on Calvary and especially what he did on the third day have opened the way home to our eternal reward.
That his brutal, bloody torture and crucifixion conquered sin and death for all of humankind past, present and future.
That he has prepared a place for us in his Father’s house, as he assured his Apostles.
Jesus knew his time was short. Throughout his three-year ministry, he told his disciples that he would suffer and die to atone for the sinful nature of humanity. He told the Twelve time and again, and time and again various members of the Twelve scoffed.
We’ll never know at what point in his life Jesus knew his fate, or if he knew with precision the time, place and other particulars.
The Passion Gospel does let us know that Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem was about to take a 180-degree turn, and that he knew the sands were slipping through the hourglass.
Jesus did not turn away.
Like the man he was, Jesus asked for a reprieve — “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me” — but as the Savior of every person who ever lived or ever would live, he heroically put others ahead of himself — “still, not my will but yours be done.”
We have no concrete knowledge about how much time we have left on Earth. We can’t know with pinpoint precision when or how we will die.
But by obeying the Two Great Commandments
“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
we know with utter clarity how we always must live.
