Geste of the Great King

 Palm Sunday sets the stage for the most magnificent Theo-drama found in the liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Great Easter Vigil. In the Palm Sunday Service, we are struck with Jesus riding the colt and people honoring the king of kings.  The image depicts God is with us, among us and in solidarity with us.  This passage certainly gives us enough to reflect on, but it does not stop there. The transition in the Palm Sunday liturgy goes from a celebrations into the Passion--a deep sense of remorse, of emptiness.  Only after the Son of God gets wrongly convicted as a criminal and crucified, we begin to understand how God is not only with us, but God is for us.  God is the only one who can truly bring life and our true purpose through the frightening and exposing reality of death.  God by taking on the form of our frail humanness banishes our sins so that we can continue our love relationship with God now and within God's Kindgom....

My sisters and brothers in Christ, today’s gospel paints an unfriendly picture of Jesus. It is disturbing, and quite frankly contrasts the hippy folk hero that we often attribute to Christ. It is a gospel that is found in all four books of the New Testament and it signals the seriousness of Jesus’ mission. Jesus’ consuming zeal was a statement about the faith and about the religion. This a story about how Jesus begins his mission to reform a religion that was exploiting the common people who were seeking to find God. John makes a clever connection with Jesus coming to the temple for Passover. Jesus becomes the new Moses, who will lead the people to a new Passover, from death to life, to be truly redeemed. He must first purify the temple which was selling goods that were plundered and resold for sacrifice. It was stolen goods and clearly unworthy for an offering to God because it broke the Mosaic law, put the consumers into sin and, thus, these shady money changers did not bel...