Today is a very different Sunday from all of the Sundays of the year, for it is the Sunday on which we recall Jesus’ journey to the cross. It is almost Good Friday on a Sunday. It is also the first day of the one week in the year in which we experience again those events through which we are saved. Of course, at every mass we recall the sacrifice of Christ, but on this day and in this week, we relive those events in great detail.
Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all make it clear that it is the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that illuminate his entire earthly life. Indeed, Jesus’ birth, his baptism, his teachings and miracles, and his journey to Jerusalem are one long death march to the cross.
This is the most important of weeks because it illustrates that Jesus’ work cannot be separated from, cannot even be understood apart from, the cross. He is more than a great teacher, more than a prophet, more than a holy man. He is God himself, who took flesh, “humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”
As we recall the events of Holy Week, God makes them present for us here and now. It is we who in one breath proclaim, “Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord,” and in another shout, “Crucify him!” It is we who journey with him, see his agony, experience his forgiveness, witness his obedience. And it is only as his passion and death are made present for us here and now that we receive the benefits of his passion and death.
It is not enough, however, merely to take part in the liturgies of Holy Week. We must “inwardly digest” the reality that Jesus died for our sins. And then we must be even more specific than that: “He died for my sins. He died because of me.” By sins I don’t mean specifically little peccadilloes, or even greater acts of disobedience. He died for us, for me, because in our fallen nature we live only for ourselves. The self is the idol that we are inclined to worship and that idolatry, taking us far from our loving God, is what made it necessary for Jesus to die in order to reconcile us to the Father.
Thus, first of all each of us must come to this realization: “He died for me.” And the corollary to that realization is: He died for you. That husband, that wife, that employee, that crook, that saint, that prostitute, that college professor, that jerk, that young man, that old woman—he died for us all.