Palm Sunday

[Mary Naeem]

Palm Sunday

(John 12: 1-18)

To be there with the Lord

As the Lord goes up to Jerusalem sitting on an ass, an uproar begins. A great crowd—young and elder—appears with palms, everyone singing and covering the path, even with their garments, as though it is a festival.
This does not at all mean that the people desire to follow Christ, to go where He is going, and to where He is taking them. Ultimately, man does not have the desire to live as Christ wants, to deny himself and his passions, and to have obedience, to be apprenticed to Christ, to escape from sin, and to be saved.
A person may run after Christ. He may be close, may be near to Christ, but only in order to get something, to enjoy a handful of fleeting, earthly, things.
How many times even in church during a festal service does our entire devotion, our entire faith, our entire relationship with God become completely exhausted through our celebrations—celebrations that we make in exactly the way we want? So often it is not that we find that we love Christ within all this, not that we desire to live in Christ, for sin to die within us, to deny ourselves and for Christ to live within us.
Since today, my brothers, we have arrived at Palm Sunday and from the afternoon we are already entering into Holy Week, let us take what we have just said into consideration, so that, with the Grace and help of God, this time we may truly be there with the Lord. Truly, that is, that we die to sin and that we resurrect with the Lord into a new life.

(From Opos fotise o Theos, “Just as God has illumined”)

Holy Hesychasterion “The Nativity of Theotokos” Publications.

Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos