Beyond the palm fronds

What do those palms we heft this Sunday mean?  Young and old (like us) lift them up for blessing after the mass where the story of the Passion is read.

Our Spanish-speaking forbears knew this as “Domingo de Ramos”. They call this “bendita sa lukay” in Visayan speaking areas. Back in 1589, Fray Juan De Plasencia, in 1589, noted Filipinos even then used palms for feasts.

The palms recall the entry of Christ into Jerusalem. “Teacher, rebuke your disciples,” furious Pharisees demanded. “If they keep silent, the stones will cry out!” Jesus responded.  

In the Old Testament, palm branches symbolize joy. They’re associated with Succoth or the harvest feast. Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans used them as part of triumphant processions.

Today, we need those palms as a reminder—and a challenge, writes Deacon Gerg Kundra. They remind us to celebrate as that day in Jerusalem, even when it is easier to drift and choose Barabbas (a.k.a pork barrel?)  The palms remind us what Christ did for us.

After the blessing, people return to their mansions or lowly barong-barongs. They tuck the blessed fronds—formed into intricate designs—on to walls or doors. This Sunday, many then flick TV on to watch the grudge brawl between Manny Pacquiao versus Timothy Bradley. 

Are you looking for a book that will resonate for Holy Week and beyond? Try “Good Friday People.” The author is Shiela Cassidy, a British doctor tortured by Chilean military, for treating rebels.

“Good Friday people is a phrase I coined, for those called to powerlessness and suffering,” she writes. “(Men and women), broken in body and assaulted in mind... God calls them to walk the same road His Son trod.... I have no clever answer to the eternal 'Why' of suffering. But whatever its cause and outcome, it is never without meaning."

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel captures this “sense of the absence of God”, Cassidy notes. Then 14-years old, Weisel was forced, along with other Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz, to watch the Gestapo execute a child.

"Where is God now?’ someone asked, Weisel recalls in his book: Night "And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Here He is—hanging on the gallows’. Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and turned my dreams into dust.”   

Weisel had the look of a “Lazarus, risen from the dead yet still a prisoner… stumbling among corpses,” recalled philosopher Francois Mauriac.  In his foreword to the book “Night, Mauriac wrote: "And I, who believed that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner whose dark eyes still reflected of that angelic sadness of the hanged child’s face?

"Did I speak to him of that other Israeli, his brother—the Crucified, whose cross conquered the world? Did I affirm that conformity to the Cross and suffering was, in my eyes, the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished?

"We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child," Mauriac adds. "But I could only embrace him weeping."

There is rare beauty in selflessness of this kind,” Cassidy writes. “Some go to their deaths grasping everything. These are people who will call you away from another patient’s deathbed to adjust their television.”

Jesuit priest Rutilo Grande insisted his El Salvador seminarians live among slum dwellers and landless peasants. “However much one may know about poverty and oppression at an intellectual level, meeting the poor themselves is something quite other.”

Like that of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Father Grande’s efforts, helped the poor "rediscover the Old Testament concept of God as liberator of his oppressed people." It was the poor who showed Grande and Romero “what they required of their church,” Cassidy notes. “Not just the catechism and the sacraments but something much harder: to speak out against injustice”.

The military junta goons killed both of them. Of course.

"(Yet), we are all potentially Good Friday people. We are all frail earthen vessels who, should the potter choose, be fashioned in His image and for his own mysterious purposes….And we tremble because we too may be called to powerlessness....

There’s a little known study on ‘The Scandal of Palm Sunday. In William Stringfellow’s book “Free in Obedience” he argues that Palm Sunday is not a day of triumph but of temptation for Christ, and ‘profound frustration’ for the disciples.

For us moderns, the palms are a ‘symbol of the terrific confusion which burdens the Church as to the meaning and manner of the Christian witness in society “If only Palm Sunday were the outcome of Christ’s ministry, Christians would be rid of the gospel. That’d jettison what   distinguishes from the rest of the world’.

If Christ’s work ended among palm branches and civic celebration, we’d been spared the embarrassment of Judas’ betrayal, cowardice of the remaining eleven. We’d never have known the mystery of the Last Supper, Gethsemane’s agony, the accusations of the authorities

Scrub the crowd’s jeers, the cross and borrowed, the embarrassment of the resurrection and the ‘awful gift of Pentecost’ ‘Thus, Palm Sunday’ for Christians it is a day of profound humiliation.