Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - Palm Sunday 2020

Apr 4th, 2020

We aren't going anywhere in procession with our palms this year, lockdown all over the UK means no organized services except through the medium of remote camera, Face time, Zoom and other worthy methods.

The Church seems to have been very proactive in this, but try as I may, I cannot find that the remote participation helps me over much, I was moved by the Pope's Urbi et Orbi, and I am one of the telespectateurs for Notre Dame de Paris' broadcast Vespers and Sunday Evening Mass on KTO, (that because I love the preaching style of Archbishop Michel Aupetit!) But something in me just does not totally click with too much televisual worship! Many find these important connections, the virtual Church coming together, and I would always encourage this, but as a priest of 41 years and somebody who was also in Monastic life, this period for me is something else, what I can describe as the long Holy Saturday moment of my present life! I feel called to a different experience, of having what was essential taken away, so that I have to explore my own inner relationship with God a bit more. So I have chosen to write, but not to film, to be quiet in solitude! More of that at another time!

So having set the scene, how can we enter into the ceremonies of Palm Sunday and make the scriptures our own? One is by seeing an immediate contrast to our own present experience, that most of what we hear is very much in the context of community, people, crowds with of course one or two exceptions when Jesus is wrestling with his thoughts, such as in Gethsemane. The triumphant entry of Jesus as Messiah into Jerusalem ticks all the boxes of prophecy, the humble one, riding on that most domestic beast of burden humankind has got, acclaimed by the bottom end of a structured religious society proclaims the lot of God who has taken a gamble to be in the midst of the 'have not's of life! Perhaps that echo of an entry into a city of the 'humble one' and his subsequent rejection and death, is mirrored in the entry into our cities and country places of a sickness that shows an equality of infection. Here is our Holy Week, alive, enacted out in the lives of all of us now! We can use our experiences to travel Holy Week in a very real way, but it is not my experience, it has to be ours, and how do we retain a sense of community? Well the words of common prayers, the reading of scripture, our thoughts with God in prayer, for the moment it is all about different methods of communication. In our hearts we can pray with others that verse from the Psalm and know it to be true in the holy places of our homes: 'Then I will proclaim your name to my brethren;

in the assembly I will praise you' (Ps 22:23)

It is in lockdown and hospital ward, that the entry of Jesus makes its mark, for he comes to all of us wherever we are. If you move your reading of the hymn of emptying, that second reading from Philippians in the Mass, to a few verses immediately after, we change from a reflective hymn of how Jesus has come amongst us in utter lowliness, even to sharing our death, to exaltation of his name, to this sane advice: "Do everything without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine like lights in the world".(Phil 2:14-15)

That to me sums up our response to Palm Sunday with its opening procession, acclaiming Jesus as Lord and Messiah, to the narrative of his betrayal, passion and death and that underlying sense of desolation, that Holy Saturday moment of death, utter death in the tomb!

We have in a very real sense, been placed outside of Holy Week and into the emptiness of the desert lands of faith! Yes we can share in meditation each day of the meaning of the great liturgies of Holy Week and the splendour of that great Vigil, but we cannot share it with others in person, and that is the problem. No amount of media involvement can replace the personal encounter with Christ in our brothers and sisters. Yet nothing is lost, for though we might be alone, we are linked to a greater community, that hymn of Philippians urges us to look again at who we are, trace a mirror image of ourselves in the cadences of that hymn of emptying (kenosis) and know something else, that we belong to the Kingdom, from where Christ came back there do we return! Palm Sunday is not a story; it is the reality of Jesus coming to us wherever we may be. May our prayer be that of Isaiah who says this to us:

"The Lord GOD has given me

a well-trained tongue,

That I might know how to answer the weary

a word that will waken them.

Morning after morning

he wakens my ear to hear as disciples do

( Is 50:4)

May it be so, may it be so!

Lecto Divina

St Isaac the Syrian

"God permits tribulations and adversities to befall people - even the saintly - so that they may persist in humility. But if we harden our hearts against adversities and tribulations, he also hardens these tribulations against us. On the other hand if we accept them in humility and with a contrite heart, God will mingle tribulation with mercy."

From Teilhard de Chardin SJ

Hymn of the Universe

Let us ponder over this basic truth till we are steeped in it, till it becomes as familiar to us as our awareness of shapes or our reading of words: God, at the most vitally active and most incarnate, is not remote from us, wholly apart from the sphere of the tangible; on the contrary, at every moment God awaits us in the activity, the work to be done, which every moment brings. God is, in a sense, at the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my needle - and my heart and my thought. It is by carrying to its natural completion the stroke, the line, the stitch I am working on that I shall lay hold on that ultimate end towards which my will at its deepest levels tends.

The Song of the Donkey

Is it because one of us had the human God upon our back,

That we have been so badly treated all our days,

Is it that? Can it be we have to give such sacrifice,

Because so many cannot follow in his ways?

I don't know, all I understand is that the Son of God

Rode on a donkey's back, and crowds then trod

Not in his footsteps-but in those we made.

Humble he, who made the moon and stars and sky,

Whose love was painful in its poured out care,

Who loved the mother-hen and watched the sparrow fly-

A king, but one who had no gold to wear!