29 March 2026 – Palm and Passion Sunday
The Passion according to Matthew
H o m i l y
There is a time to listen and a time to speak. Jesus sets an example of both attitudes. Already, in the first reading, the prophet Isaiah, foreshadowing the Messiah, said: ‘The Word awakens me every morning… so that I may listen like one who is open to instruction.’
The Passion narrative according to Matthew is preceded by an introduction consisting of three brief dialogues. First, that of Judas with the chief priests, to whom he says: ‘What will you give me if I hand him over to you?’ Then the dialogue between the disciples and Jesus: ‘Where do you want us to prepare the Passover?’, and finally the dialogue that Jesus asks his disciples to have with one of his friends: ‘It is at your house that I wish to celebrate the Passover with my disciples’. This friend agreed to lend them the upper room for the celebration of the Last Supper, and the chief priests understood Judas’s message all too well.
In each of the moments that follow – the Last Supper, the agony in Gethsemane, the interrogation before the high priest and then before Pilate, as well as on Calvary – there is a striking alternation between silence and powerful words. Not a single word is wasted in these moments of great intensity! --- There are questions to which Jesus does not deign to reply. He prefers to refer his interlocutors to their own truth. Thus, when, at the start of the meal, he states that one of the Twelve will betray him and Judas hypocritically asks, ‘Is it I?’, he simply replies, ‘You have said so yourself.’ To the High Priest, who asks him—but only to have a reason to condemn him— ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of God?’, he replies in the same way: ‘You have said so yourself’; and to Pilate, who asks him if he is the King of the Jews, he gives the same enigmatic reply: ‘You have said so yourself!...’
In the Garden of Gethsemane, he confides in his three chosen disciples and in his Father, in phrases of unparalleled brevity and weight. To his disciples he confides: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”; and to his Father: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not my will, but yours be done.”
And, on Calvary, in this account by Matthew, there is only one utterance from Jesus: ‘My Father, my Father, why have you forsaken me?’, followed by a loud cry.
And that cry has continued to echo for over two thousand years.
Today, we hear this cry amid the clamor of all those who suffer, of all the victims of war, injustice and oppression. We hear it too in all other forms of pain and suffering, including our own. We hear it. -- But do we listen to it? Is it the Word that wakes us each morning to teach us to ‘in turn comfort those who can bear it no longer’?
If we examine our hearts and our lives, we will realize that, depending on the circumstances, we are, to some extent, each of the characters found in this story. Perhaps we are sometimes that poor soul who offers others a somewhat dubious deal, only to realize too late that it has had more serious consequences than we had imagined. At other times, we are those teachers of the Law and that high priest, firmly entrenched in our convictions – convictions that we must defend, whatever the consequences for others. At other times we are that poor Peter, full of good will, not at all malicious, but weak, who betrays – out of fear. At other times we are the centurion doing his dirty job who ends up saying: ‘Truly this man was the Son of God’. At other times, no doubt, we are also Jesus. -- But how often?
Armand VEILLEUX