First Question: CAN I USE OLD PALMS?
Answer: NO. You should not even have those anymore. You should have returned them to your parish in order to be turned into ashes for Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent—our spiritual quarantine (cuaresma). Part of the ritual for today is to bring fresh palms that will also be prepared to become ashes for next year. Meaning, we have to be always ready for that scenario: that there might be no more next year for us. That like our palms, we will turn into ashes, into dust. It is a bit morbid, but it is part of the realism of Christian tradition. (This speaks a lot to us especially now that we do not even have the time to mourn our dead. They have to be buried without the usual long wakes and elaborate funerals. Those who died of COVID are even turned into ashes within eight hours.)
Second Question: What do I do if I don’t have the usual decorated palm fronds—like the Pinoy palms na nakatirintas at may ribbon pa. This year, during our ECQ, many of us will have no access to the usual decorated palms.
Answer: Any leafy branch would do. Think about it also as a ritual reenactment of the biblical quarantine. Yes, there is such a story in the Bible: remember the story of Noah’s ark in Genesis 7-9? Noah, his family and his animals stayed inside the ark for forty days, waiting for the floodwaters to settle down. We too have turned our homes into little Noah’s arks for the past few days of our ECQ. The biblical story says, at the end of forty days, Noah opened a window and let out a dove. The dove came back with a fresh twig of olive in its beak. It became the symbol of new life, new creation, a new humanity, the end of the quarantine. (It cannot be back to the same after Covid19.) I hope I answered the question. Any leafy branch will do. Put it in a jar of water to keep it green for as long as possible. Then before it withers, put it on your door or your window. Let it be a statement of hope: there is going to be new life, new creation after Covid 19.
Third Question: What is the meaning of the palms for palm Sunday?
Answer: it is obvious what they mean for us Christians: the triumphant entry of Jesus to Jerusalem. But did it also mean something for the Jewish people? Of course. The Gospel for the blessing of palms says “many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others their leafy branches. “. Were they doing this to welcome Jesus? The Gospel of John says a few days before he was arrested, Jesus attended a Jewish fiesta called SUKKOTH, meaning “feast of the tents or booths”. It is still being done by Jewish people up to now. Once a year, they reenact the forty years in the desert, their longer quarantine—not forty days but forty years! A symbolic commemoration of their desert experience. You see, Moses was a good strategist. In Exodus, we are told that when he led the Israelite people out of their slavery in Egypt, they passed by Midian, the place of his father-in-law, Jethro. There he hired the services of his wife’s brother, Hobab as desert guide, meaning, a navigator. They had no GPS or Waze yet back then. A navigator was supposed to know all the resting stations in the desert, on their way to Canaan. These were little patches of green called OASES in the middle of a dry desert. There they could rest from the journey for a while, refill their water bags, let their camels drink water, before the next leg of the journey. The palms symbolized the stopover, so they reenacted this experience once a year by spreading cloaks, mats, palm branches and staying in makeshift tents with only some basic amenities, parang bahay-bahayan. A bit like our ECQ again, no? We’re getting used to building tents again because our hospitals are full, tents as field hospitals and places of isolation for PUIs and PUMs.
Palms in the middle of a dry desert symbolized hope, something green, a temporary stopover in the journey. Palms were supposed to remind the Jewish people of those difficult times, that challenging journey through the desert to the Promised land. They still mean the same thing for us today. We are all travelers, pilgrims on a journey in this world. This is not yet the ultimate destination, we’re only passing through. We must learn to travel light, get rid of the overload of baggages, bring only the essentials. I hope our ECQ has taught us to return to the essentials of life. There is a promised land awaiting us. And we won’t get there if we get lost in the non-essential.
Fourth and final question: Why is Palm Sunday also called Passion Sunday?
Answer: Obviously, because it begins the commemoration of the final week before Jesus was arrested and sentenced to a death penalty through crucifixion, and resurrected. Although Passion means suffering (We even chant it in the Philippines and still call it the “Pasyon”.), PASSION also means drive, motivation, or sense of mission.
Jesus was not entering Jerusalem like a helpless victim of circumstances. He was aware of what was going to happen, but he went on with the journey anyway. People would usually back out if they knew that the journey could mean suffering and dying. So Passion is about asking: what drove him from within? What pushed him to carry on anyway?
The answer is: A MISSION not impossible but possible—namely, to defeat EVIL. To prove that good has greater power than evil. And that good is best expressed by UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. The Gospel of John says, “Jesus loved them to the very end.” He faced the cruelty, insults and inhumanity, not just of his enemies but also the treachery, denial, and betrayal by his own friends. He never gave up on any one of them, not even on Judas Iscariot. He turned a meal of betrayal into a meal of forgiveness. This is the PASSION that we now need in the middle of our quarantine. Yes, this lockdown will bring out the WORST in us, but it can also bring out THE BEST in us. The compassion, the solidarity, the sacrifice, the boldness for mission, redeeming love, the nobility of the human spirit.
The cross is about martyrdom, not victimhood. Victimhood is about having no choice, you’re a victim of circumstances. Martyrdom is about making a choice, to do witnessing, to witness to what is true and noble.
And so, let us wave our palms, our green leaves and make our statement of hope, as we go through this lockdown and quarantine not defeated but with passion within us to allow good to triumph over evil. Amen?
From the post of Pablo Virgilio David
https://www.facebook.com/pablovirgilio.david/posts/10216364345558301
