Passion or Palm Sunday asks us to contemplate a fundamental question. Why does God love us so extravagantly? The readings today explicitly state that God loves us so much that Jesus was willing to set aside the privileges of his deity to become one like us. He emptied himself of all he possessed as God for the sake of God’s love of us. Why?
The easy answer is that Jesus did this out of a sense of obedience to God’s will in his life. Not only is this the easy answer, it is the correct answer. However, that truth does not really get us any closer to God’s motivation for loving us.
Many of you here today are sitting next to a loved one. Why do you love that person? I am sure that you could tell us several different versions of how and why you fell in love. However none of that motivation explains God’s love, God’s desire to be in relationship with us. By and large, each and every one of us has to admit that we have strayed from God’s love on more than one occasion. For most of us, this kind of infidelity would bring any relationship to an end.
Since we are not able to really understand God’s motivation, let us focus on a different question. How much does God love us?
At the beginning of St. Mark’s passion narrative, he includes the story of a woman who anoints Jesus with a jar of costly ointment. She breaks the bottle and pours the costly ointment over Jesus’ head. Those who witnessed this act were horrified. “This is too much? You go too far? You have wasted 300 days wages. Why have you done this?” She is chided for her extravagance. The act is even denigrated by saying that the money could have been put to a much more appropriate use.
This little story stands before the Passion to remind us that no one, not one single person, said to Jesus as he gave up his life for us: “This is too much? You go too far? You have poured out your divine life for us. What do you hope to get in return? Why have you done this?”
The answer is that we will never know the “why” of God’s love, but the “how much” of God’s love is visible in the home of every Catholic. We only need to look at a crucifix to realize just how much God loves us. We have been loved by God who allowed human beings to brutalize and execute him to save us from eternal death.
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator