Led Into the Truth Sweet Hosannas

Apr 6, 2009

Holy Week, the pinnacle of the Christian liturgical year, has begun.  I once again, through the grace of God, find myself in the Holy Land.  I arrived on Saturday morning before Palm Sunday, prepared to help with the various liturgies at the Pontifical Notre Dame Center as well as throughout the city.  I was also looking forward to participating in some of the more powerful events of Holy Week as it is celebrated here in Jerusalem.  In all, my expectations were high.  Holy Week has always been a powerful time for me, and I have been thirsting for the spiritual renewal that I knew would come from a generous participation in the Church’s liturgical commemoration of Christ’s final week in this world.

 

But then the events actually started, and I realized that I could not possibly have prepared myself.  Saturday afternoon after I arrived, I met with a very personable Indian priest—a man simply radiating happiness and holiness.  He was with five young seminarians.  He was planning to bring the Indian community in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Good Friday to celebrate the Passion of the Lord, and he was looking for a place big enough to accommodate 200 pilgrims.  Notre Dame’s chapel is just big enough to handle such a crowd.  As we finished our planning, just for the sake of completeness, we showed this priest the auditorium building, which has a seating capacity of 440.  The priest, upon seeing it, was overjoyed, and he immediately and excitedly asked if he could use that facility instead.  We replied that he would have no need, since the Chapel could easily accommodate his group.  A downcast look on his otherwise joyful face, he looked at the ground as if we had just broken his heart: “Actually, if we use this building, I can bring 440.”

 

We were taken aback.  How could a group go from 200 to 440 in thirty seconds?  It turns out that the Indian community in Tel Aviv is without a priest to celebrate in their native language, and visitor from India knew that if he could accommodate them, the entire Indian community would come, such is their love for Jesus and their desire to spend even some small part of Holy Week in the historical place of his Passion.  I thought of a passage from the Gospels: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Mt 9:36).

 

On Palm Sunday afternoon, I rode with a group of Puerto Rican pilgrims to Bethphage, the beginning of the Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem.  As we lined up, I found that I would be walking just in front of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.  In two and a half hours, we slowly traversed the mile from Bethphage down the Mount of Olives, past the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus would endure his agony, through the Kedron Valley and through St. Stephen’s Gate (the gate where St. Stephen was martyred), ending at the Church of St. Anne, located immediately adjacent to the Temple.

 

It is difficult to describe this procession.  It was utter chaos.  Thousands of people were packed dangerously into tiny streets, and I found myself after the first frustrating hour of stop-and-go processing regretting my decision to participate.  I found it remarkably un-prayerful and not at all what I expected.  I had, providentially, put a small bible in my back pocket under my cassock.  At one of the seemingly interminable delays that plagued our painstaking progress, I read these lines about Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem:

 

 

Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.  And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest!”  And when he entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, “Who is this?” (Mt 21: 8-10).

 

 

My attitude changed immediately!  This passage described exactly—I mean exactly—what was happening.  Sheets were laid haphazardly in front of us; people were waving palm and olive branches; they were throwing them from the sides of the street to be walked upon by the Patriarch.  The Patriarch smiled and humbly greeted his people.  Groups from all over the world sang hymns in their own tongues, but always with the same refrain: “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna!”  As we turned into the city, various onlookers—seemingly the whole city—were gathered to watch the spectacle.  I saw a woman point to the Patriarch, and literally ask her friend, “Who is this?”  She was not angry, disrespectful, or even cold; she was genuinely curious.  Other reactions were varied.  The Patriarch of Jerusalem was walking in the place of Jesus: he was freely choosing to imitate the life of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and he was having the same experience Jesus had.  I was for that moment walking with Christ, and the crowd was questioning him.  It was an unruly mob: some were pious onlookers, some were troublemakers, some were pilgrims in procession, and some were just there for the spectacle of it all.  And Jesus came to Jerusalem for all of them.

 

I thought back to the Indian community in Tel Aviv.  The crowd in Jerusalem is us—we are the ones upon whom Jesus had pity.  Before his sacrifice, his act of love for us, we were the ones without a shepherd.  I was walking in front of the shepherd-bishop that our Lord gave to the local Church of Jerusalem—the shepherd he gave to a people to be sure they would never be lost again.  I thought sadly about the Indian community without a shepherd in Tel Aviv, and I resolved to offer my Holy Week in thanksgiving for vocations to the priesthood all over the world, and to pray for an increase.

 

I wish you a blessed Triduum, and I sincerely hope that you will enter into the liturgies of Holy Week with a fervency and thirst to be with Jesus and to lovingly follow him as he, the Good Shepherd, leads us home.