From Celebration to Silence
(Is.50:4-7; Phil.2:6-11; Mt.26:14-27:66)
Palm Sunday is designed to challenge us.
We begin Mass by walking, singing, waving palm leaves and chanting: ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ Then we find ourselves standing still, reliving the tragic story of Jesus’ Passion, his betrayal, suffering and death.
The Church deliberately links these two experiences because Palm Sunday is not about how well we celebrate, but how deeply we are prepared to respond.
There’s an old story that captures this tension well.
One day, three young men wandered into Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, seeking mischievous fun. One of them made a bet that he could pretend to worship and no-one would ever know he was faking it.
He watched and copied what everyone else did. He crossed himself, knelt, mouthed the prayers and went to communion. He looked just like a Catholic.
Then he went to confession. In those days that’s what people did after Mass.
He overheard someone else’s confession and made up his own list of sins. Then he ‘confessed’ them to the priest. For penance, the priest told him to return alone that night, to stand before the large crucifix and say three times, ‘You did all this for me, but I don’t care.’
This young man was determined to win his bet. That night he returned to the darkened church and stood before the crucifix. Looking up at Jesus hanging on the Cross, he said, ‘Jesus, you did all this for me, but I don’t care.’
He said this twice, and then the reality of Jesus’ sacrifice hit him with full force. He was never the same again. He lost his bet. That day that young man became a disciple of Jesus, and later he became the Archbishop of Paris.
Is this story historically true? I don’t know, however it’s certainly spiritually true. And it’s a truth we all encounter every time we enter Holy Week.
When Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the crowd does everything right, externally. They say the right words and they honour Jesus as their king. But when they realise that he’s a humble and gentle king, rather than a mighty warrior, they fall silent and many turn away.
Palm Sunday asks us: Are we disciples of the celebration, or disciples of the Cross? This question has unsettled some of the world’s greatest minds.
Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and one of the world’s greatest scientists, spent much of his life wrestling with faith. But it wasn’t an argument or an equation that brought him to Jesus, but contemplating Christ on the Cross. Seeing Jesus on the Cross profoundly moved his heart.
He had a note sewn into the lining of his coat: ‘Jesus in agony until the end of the world.’ He came to realise that there’s a huge distance between knowing and loving God, for love ultimately cannot be analysed, but only received.
Blaise Pascal reminds us that faith does not begin where reason ends, but where the heart recognises what reason alone cannot grasp.
André Frossard was a French journalist and an avowed atheist. His father was a founder of the French Communist Party. In 1935, aged twenty, he entered a Paris chapel looking for a friend. Two minutes later, he was a changed man. Standing before the crucified Jesus present in Eucharist Adoration, he later wrote, ‘I entered an atheist. I left a believer.’
In his book, God Exists: I Have Met Him, Frossard writes, ‘I have learned that all converts have this in common: they have met Somebody, not an idea or a system… They have with wonder, and sometimes with astonishment, discovered a person … the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus.’ [i]
Like that young man at Notre Dame, he didn’t go looking for conversion. He simply stood before the Crucified Jesus and could not stay unchanged.
Palm Sunday is designed to bring us to that same threshold.
The Church does not let us linger with palms in our hands. She deliberately leads us to the Passion, placing us before the Cross, and quietly asks: is Jesus an idea you admire, or the Lord you will follow?
Holy Week is not about observing Christ’s suffering from a distance. It’s about allowing his self-giving love to seep deeply, profoundly into our hearts, and then to set us free.
As we enter this most solemn week of the Church’s year, let us pray:
‘Lord, do not let my faith remain an imitation.
Take me beyond words and gestures,
to the silence of the Cross,
And teach me how to stay there. Amen.'
[i] André Frossard, God Exists: I Have Met Him, 1970. https://www.basicincome.com/bp/godexistsbook1970.htm