The liturgy for Palm Sunday is always a study in contrasts. We begin with palms, a procession, and joyful hosannas and we end with the silence of the tomb. And it is precisely there that the Church wants us to situate ourselves as we enter into Holy Week.
Palm Sunday is unique among the Church’s liturgies in that it features two gospel readings: the story of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and the account of the Passion (this year from St. Luke). In between these we hear that plaintive cry, which we will hear again on Good Friday, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Thus, we enter into the most holy of weeks by immersing ourselves into the very real, very human reality of suffering. The whole mystery of the incarnation culminates in this moment where God, who in His divine nature could never know pain, takes upon Himself the most excruciating of suffering, even to the point of facing the cold finality of death. Now, no longer can we, who cannot avoid the reality of suffering and death, imagine that God doesn’t know what we go through. No human misery—not even the soul-rending misery of feeling totally abandoned and isolated—goes beyond the “lived experience” of God.
And yet precisely because of this, we are told by St. Paul, God the Father lifted up the Son, “greatly exalted him, and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.” The way of the cross, horrible as it is, is the way to glory, the only way to glory. Christ goes before us to blaze a path from life filled with pain to death to life immortal. In a world so filled with darkness and trouble, where uncertainty abounds, the one sure thing we can know and can cling to is the Way of our salvation, Jesus Christ Himself.