A foretaste of victory: sermon on Palm Sunday

By a Dominican Friar   |   9 April 2025

“And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way, and others cut down boughs from the trees and strewed them in the way; and the multitude that went before and that followed, cried, saying: Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.”

Palm Sunday is like a patch or burst of glory in the midst of the darkness that attacked our Lord Jesus Christ at the end of His earthly life. That’s why we celebrate it where possible with a procession; when that’s not possible, we can at least take the blessed palms home with us and put them behind our crucifixes to mark the victory of the Cross.

Palm Sunday, then, is a day of triumph. You are all familiar with some words in the prologue of St John’s Gospel: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” While those words of St John well summarise our Lord’s life as a whole, this Sunday we could say, “He came unto His own, and His own did receive Him.” For it was not just a handful of disciples but, St Matthew tells us, “a very great multitude” who welcomed Him as He rode into the city. And they did not just welcome Him with cheering or songs, but actually took off their cloaks and laid them down on the road for the donkey to walk over, and went to the trouble of cutting down branches from the trees, perhaps because they knew that “Branch” was one of the titles the prophets had given to the Messiah, and they called him “Son of David”, that is, the king who was to come.

Why was it that our Lord enjoyed this brief day of triumph before entering on the way of the Cross? I think first it was because His Father wished to grant it to Him, as a reward for His Son’s fidelity throughout His short life. The great reward, of course, will come on Easter Day. But it was not fitting that even in His mortal life, the Father should leave His Son wholly unrewarded for His labours. Nor should it be allowed to seem that this world, which God in the beginning had made very good, was so far under the control of the evil one as that. And hence the Pharisees are obliged against their will to see all the people welcoming Jesus into the holy city as their king, and they can do nothing about it. Bitterly they say one to another, “Do you see that we prevail nothing? Behold, the whole world is gone after him.”

I think also the Lord wanted to show that when His hour came, He would enter into His passion freely. Last week we heard that some of His enemies wanted to stone Him to death, after He had said, “Before Abraham was made, I am.” By a miracle, He prevented them from doing so, apparently by taking from their eyes the power to see Him. Likewise, on Palm Sunday, He allows this great multitude to acclaim Him in order to show that the chief priests and Pharisees will be able to arrest Him so easily a few days later only because He has permitted it. He could have raised Jerusalem against them, as He could have asked His Father, who would instantly have sent Him “more than twelve legions of angels”. But then how would our salvation have been accomplished?

His death, after all, was not a disaster; it was the crowning of His life. Our Lord’s death was the setting-up of a Sacrifice of infinite merit, a sacrifice whose power will continue to flow down upon our altars and into our sacraments until the end of time.

And finally, Palm Sunday was willed in order to foreshadow a still greater triumph. Our Lord Jesus Christ will come again at the end of time. And just as neither the Sanhedrin nor Pontius Pilate could obstruct Palm Sunday, so none of the great ones of this world will be able to do anything to prevent His return.