Sermon
Palm Sunday
Sunday, March 29, 2026
And thus begins the great solemnity and the celebration of the passion of Christ. As we enter today with this liturgy, we enter into that sacredness of we call Holy Week. Now this is a strange way of saying it, isn’t it? outside of our Christian tradition. If we really were able to look at it without our comfort level of our Christian lexicon, we would say, “What are you talking about?” When you say we want to celebrate the passion, it’s like saying, “I want to celebrate pain.” Why would we want to celebrate such a thing? Why do we why did we come up with this kind of a language? Because we are called to celebrate the passion of Christ. We use it, we say it. But when you break it down,
it seems counterintuitive unless we enter into the theology deeper meaning of what we’re actually called to do.
So many people say, “Well, if I were there, when all these events happened, wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t it be interesting if I could be there to see what Jesus Christ went through?” But we have to remember that being there does not necessarily mean that we would have noticed anything different. After all, most people who were there missed it. They missed it. Whether they saw Jesus carrying the cross, whether they saw all the things that happened to him, even if they felt sorry for him for going through all of that passion, they may still have missed it, missed the point of it all.
To me, the celebrations of this Holy Week have to do with one word specifically, and that’s the word presence. To be present, not to miss it. Not to miss the greatest mysteries happening in front of us.
Father Neil was an older priest when I got to know him. He was in his late 80s, early 90s. I don’t know for sure because he never wanted to talk about his age, but he was an interesting character. When I worked at the bishop’s office, he would come by and he would visit me and he would walk with his cane and he would tell stories. And they were interesting stories from his time as a pastor in a little town called Blind River in northern Labrador when he was a pastor there of a very small community. And I would ask him, “Well, how was it? You must have had so little to do in that little community.”
And he said, “Well, I was actually quite busy. You were busy. You had maybe 20, 30 people in that little town. What were you busy with?” And he would tell me stories. He would say, “Well, one day a person became ill to the point of dying.” And so I would go and I would sit with that person. And I would sit with them until they died. How long was that?
Two weeks for two weeks. I would sit with them and I would ask, “What did you talk about? What did that look like?” He said, “We didn’t talk much. I was just present.” And then he said one time he found out that one of his parishioners had had fallen into a depression state and wouldn’t come out of her house, little house. So what he did is he would go and he would knock on the door at 9:00 in the morning and he would say, “I have come here to take you out for tea.” And she would say, “Well, I’m not ready.” That’s okay. I’ll be back tomorrow at 9:00. So, he’d come back the next day and she still wasn’t ready until every day coming back until finally she was ready. And they’d go out for tea. And I said, “What did you talk about?” He said, “Not much. I was just present to whatever she was going through until she felt better.” It’s interesting that being present to whatever was happening in his community made his ministry meaningful and beautiful.
He didn’t miss anything because he was present. Maybe even to things that most people would dismiss as unimportant. And so back to the passion of Christ, the celebration of the passion of Christ. How many people will miss it again this year? Maybe we too can miss it if we simply look at the externals.
But this week, I believe, calls us in a specific way to slow down and be present. present to what happened 2,000 years ago and present to what is happening today. When we say we celebrate the passion of Christ, what we are really saying is we are celebrating Christ. We are celebrating the love of God. We are celebrating the fact that God is present to us. that God cares for us. We are not insignificant. Every feeling of negativity and challenge and depression and struggle we feel, God feels and God cares. So I invite all of us as we enter into this holy season, especially as we enter into being present to the passion and love of Christ that we may truly experience the love of God, love of Christ, and love that we are all called to share.
Amen.
Father Wojtek Kuzma