Taking it Home: Our Lenten journey now enters its final days as we begin this holiest of weeks with the celebration this week of Passion/Palm Sunday. This Passion/Palm Sunday begins on a joyous note. We first process with Palm branches in worship of the Christ who would be king (although this year we will not be processing because all that is happening, we perhaps can imagine it). This procession with palms marks Jesus triumphal entrance into Jerusalem. It would appear that Jesus is getting his just due as the holy one of God, the Messiah and Lord. But our joy this day is quickly overshadowed as we immerse ourselves in the Passion narrative of Matthew and as Matthew recounts the events of Jesus' eventual suffering and death. 
   It is important for us to note this transition from joy to suffering because we cannot escape the notion that the glory of Easter cannot come without first realizing the reality of Christ's suffering and death. We have no Easter celebration that ignores the reality of the cross. The converse is also true; the Passion and death make no sense without the glory of the resurrection. The two need to be put in balance lest we get a distorted view of our faith. 
   For, in fact, what we celebrate in this holiest of weeks is the total event of Christ's Paschal Mystery - his life, passion, death and resurrection. Because it was not just the death of Jesus, but also his committed life, which becomes the symbol of our faith. This was the committed life, which went unflinching to the cross that makes the cross no longer a symbol of shame, but a symbol of new life. For through Jesus the cross is now the ultimate symbol of self-giving love of a God who loved to the point of death. And because the cross becomes the symbol of such real committed love, we can say that those who risk giving their lives for others are not fools, but lovers; lovers who follow the master and make life where none existed. And so power no longer comes in the form of the brute force of authority, but in those who would risk giving their lives in order that the world might be made whole once again. God as it were carrying God's suffering people in God's womb with the same intimacy as a caring mother; such is the power of divine compassion. Wendy Farley says this of God's compassion: "Compassion does not overcome the power of destruction (such as the destruction from the virus) any more than Jesus came down from the cross. The power of destruction is real; the lives, hope, sanity and goodness that are maimed by cruelty can never be replaced or atoned for. But it is the power of divine compassion to endure, to be deathless, to be reusrrected even from the ashes of despair and death. There is a resilience to divine compassion that the superior strength of evil connot finally overcome, however, real its victories. Compassion remains the ground and power of resistance, of hope, of a transformation of the future and a recovery of the past...divine compassion is the power of redemption."                                                                                                                                Deacon John