Palm Sunday Year C - Gospel Reflection

Luke 22:14--23:56

            In today’s Gospel, we hear the dramatic unfolding of our Lord’s Passion and Death. There is far too much to be condensed into one reflection. A thousand reflections could never be enough to cover this great sacrifice that Jesus offered on our behalf. Thus, I will focus on just one part for now, one verse in particular: “When he arose from prayer and returned to his disciples, he found them sleeping from grief.”

            For three years now, the apostles have been following Christ. They gave up everything to become His disciples: their jobs, their families, their whole livelihood. While Jesus called them, it was a twofold choice. While He chose them to be His most intimate friends, they also had to choose Him as He would not have forced them into anything. In those three years, every moment they spent with Christ was a result of their continuous choice to follow Him. While they did not yet fully understand all that He had told them, the very fact that the apostles abandoned their previous lives to follow Jesus is enough to show that they were not just mindless creatures, unable to make decisions on their own. During the time in between the glimpses we get of Christ’s public ministry in the Gospels, a deep friendship must have been growing.

            With this in mind, we can see a sad failure on their part. The apostles had the great privilege of knowing Jesus Christ as His close friends and disciples during the last three years of His life on earth. Every day, they walked beside God, in a physical, tangible way! They spoke to Him and heard His voice directly. They could hear His laughter and join it. They could see His tears and shed their own…

            Now, in the garden, as their beloved teacher undergoes such agony that we cannot even begin to imagine…they sleep. Would they not have been obliged by their loyal friendship to compassionate Him in this moment of ineffable suffering? While the apostles may have been unable to ease even the least of His sorrows, could they not at least share in the least of these in their love for Christ? Instead, they sleep, perhaps escaping from their own griefs, leaving Him alone in His anguish.

            Do we not also have this same obligation to Christ that the apostles failed to meet on that most sorrowful evening? Have we not also chosen to follow Christ? Have we not also accepted His friendship and offered Him our own? While we are not with Him in the Agony in the Garden, we are always by His side in the agony of the world, in the agony of our own hearts. So, as we near the end of Lent and the beginning of the Easter Triduum, let us not succumb to sleep. Let us stay awake and alert, that we might take our place beside the suffering Christ. Compassionate with Him; suffer with Him. In dying with Christ, we will rise with Christ.