The grace of Holy Week as a way of life
March 24—Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion
Readings: at the Procession with Palms Gospel—Mark 11:1-10
First Reading—Isaiah 50:4-7; Psalm 22, R. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Philippians 2:6-11; Gospel—Mark 14:1-15:47As we enter Holy Week today, I would like to invite you to pray for and reflect on two graces this coming week. Then our third point for reflection is our commemoration of the 49th Alay Kapwa Sunday.
The whole of Lent we prepared for our observance of Holy Week, which culminates with what is the high point of our celebrations throughout the liturgical year, The Solemn Easter Triduum.
The Solemn Easter Triduum celebrates the Passion, Cross and Resurrection of Jesus, the Paschal Mystery, the central mystery of our faith.
In the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in the evening of Holy Thursday, the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday and the Easter Vigil on the eve of Easter Sunday, we remember and celebrate God’s saving act, His once and for all, definitive revelation.
To prepare ourselves for the greatest festival of our faith, let us ask for these graces: first, to enter the core of our relationship with Jesus, and second, to celebrate God’s unconditional love in the Cross and Resurrection.Fundamental choice
To enter the core of our relationship with Jesus is a fundamental choice we need to make in our journey of faith. This was the synthesis grace my spiritual director presented to me as I ended my journey through midlife crisis almost 25 years ago.
I need to choose between entering the core of this relationship or staying in the periphery. After he told me this, I realized the core is the Cross and Resurrection.This is the focus of our prayer and reflection, worship and celebration this Holy Week, renewing and deepening our choice to enter this core of our relationship with Jesus. This is where all our prayers, fasting and penance and works of charity this past Lenten season was leading us to.
The other grace to pray for is to root and ground our life in the love of God that comes to us through Our Lord Jesus.
St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians (2:20) so aptly and eloquently expressed this.
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
In another letter, Ephesians 3:17-19, St. Paul wrote: “… and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
This is the fullness and power of the grace we pray for, with Jesus at the center of our life, we are rooted and grounded in love that is ours in all its unconditional perfection in the Cross and Resurrection.
This is the canticle of our faith: “[He] loved me and gave himself for me.” This is the love in which we are to be “rooted and grounded in … so that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Giving of self
Finally, a brief reflection on Alay Kapwa Sunday. Established 49 years ago, this Sunday is dedicated to almsgiving for the Philippine Church’s social action work for the poor and marginalized.
I invite you to reflect on its two component parts, namely, alay and kapwa.
Alay represents the offering part of our tradition, the works of charity. This lies at the heart of our social action work.
More and more, however, we realize the offering component, the alay, goes beyond works of charity or service. It is a total giving of self, being men/women-for/and/with-others.
Then there is the kapwa component. This focuses on solidarity and fraternity that leads to discovering our shared humanity and living as a human family.In Caritas Philippines’ effort to carry out this mission, the Alay Kapwa Expanded Fund Campaign was started last year, with the goal, hope and prayer to make the social action programs of the Philippine Church sustainable, replicable and scalable.While this is an annual-giving fund campaign that aims to reach one million people who will commit an amount of their choice yearly, the hope and grace that runs beneath this is the goal to build networks of compassion.
These networks of compassion are what will help us build a better world.
This is the grace of Holy Week translated into a way of life, a life of service and mission, a life of alay kapwa.
I end with this prayer, paraphrasing Fr. Horacio dela Costa, S.J.: May we know and accept that we are sinners, and in this experience discover that we, too, are called to be companions of Jesus in His mission to overcome the injustices of this world under the standard of His Cross and Resurrection. —Contributed INQ
