Palm Sunday 2010

Homily for Palm Sunday 28 March 2010

Today we commemorate in our Liturgy the Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem when he arrives in a sort of pageant that his disciples arrange for him, so that he enters the city that is to be the scene of his final struggle with the powers of evil and death in a triumphal procession. Now the evangelists as we know wrote their Gospels very carefully and wanted us to pick up from the way they described things all sorts of allusions and echoes from the Old Testament that would help us to give greater meaning to what they are relating for us. This morning I want to reflect with you on one of these echoes, which is the entry of Simon Macchabaeus into Jerusalem when this great military leader of the Jews had managed to regain control of Jerusalem after it had been in the hands of the Syrians and after the Temple had been desecrated and abandoned.
This is all recounted for us in the two books of Macchabees, very late additions to the Old Testament which were written only about 150 years before the birth of Jesus. We read that Simon expelled all the enemies from the Holy City and “cleansed the citadel from its pollutions” (I Macc 13:50) and then it says “the Jews entered it with praise and palm branches….and with hymns and songs because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel”. It seems impossible that the disciples did not have this passage in mind when they arranged for Jesus to come into Jerusalem with the crowds of his followers waving their palms – especially as the original event, the arrival of Simon Maccabaeus in triumph, was only 150 or so years before. Here, the evangelists seem to be saying, is another great leader, coming to put things right, coming to the Holy City, coming to the Temple to cleanse it, but coming unlike Simon fresh from his triumphs but in Jesus’s case ready to face his enemies and conquer them. It is interesting to see how, in Matthew Mark and Luke, the arrival of Jesus in this way, with the crowds singing hymns and waving palms, is immediately followed by the cleansing of the Temple: Mark says he went straight to the Temple “looked around at everything” but put off the cleansing of it until the next day “as it was already late” (Mk 11:11) but Matthew and Luke say he did it straightaway “And Jesus entered the Temple of God” says Matthew “and drove out all who sold and bought in the Temple” (Mt 21:12) while Luke says “and he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold” (Lk 19:45). The victor arrives in the Holy City which has been in the hands of the enemy and he cleanses it and makes it holy again.
Twenty years before this, in 165 BC, Simon’s brother Judas Macchabaeus had also managed to retake Jerusalem, although not permanently. The Jews were horrified when they recaptured the city and saw the state the Temple was in – there was an altar to the Greek God Zeus where the Holy of Holies had been and in chapter 4 of I Macchabees we read “they saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts they saw bushes sprung up as in a thicket….”(I Macc 4:38) And now it was that a miracle occurred, for when they tried to relight the sanctuary lamp that should always burn in the Temple, there was only enough oil to last one day, but in fact it lasted eight days – time enough for them to press some fresh olives and produce a new supply of the olive oil that they burned. Because of this, the Jews declared a new feast, the feast of the rededication of the Temple, to be held every year. This is the feast that Jewish people still keep today, it falls in December around Christmas time and it is called Channukah, and it lasts for eight days. Sometimes it is also called the Feast of Lights, because the way Jewish people celebrate it is to have a special eight-branched candlestick in their homes which they light more lights one every evening that the feast lasts. The rabbis say that these lights are not “for the house within” but should be put in the doorway or on the windowsill because they are “of the house without” – they are meant to give light to the outside, not the inside. And this aspect of the entry into Jerusalem, of the making holy again, of the miraculous light which God gave to make the rededication of the Temple possible, the whole festival of Lights that the Jews held to remind themselves of these events, has its echo I think in John’s Gospel. John as you know records things always a bit differently from the other three evangelists and he has already used the story of the cleansing of the Temple by the angry Jesus much earlier on in his Gospel. But in John, showing I think that he too is thinking of these same events in recent Jewish history, soon after his entry into Jerusalem Jesus starts talking about Light. John tells us that “Jesus said to them “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light….while you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light”.” (Jn 12:35-6).
Today we celebrate this solemn entry of Our Lord the victor, the cleanser, into Jerusalem. Let us welcome him to into our lives, let us ask him to make his solemn entry today into our hearts: let us ask him to expel from our hearts the enemies that lurk there – our selfishness and what our dear Holy Father calls “our mysterious complicity with sin” – let us allow him to cleanse the sanctuary of our hearts and rededicate it to God’s service. Heaven knows, the sanctuary of my heart is a bit overgrown, I have a few brambles and weeds growing there and maybe yours is in the same sad and neglected state. Now is the hour for the great cleansing of our hearts. Dear Jesus, as we rededicate ourselves to you today, give us that miraculous light that will shine into every corner of our lives to purify us, you are the Light of the World, help us to believe in the Light that we may become sons and daughters of light. Hosanna, come and save us! Amen.