Palm Sunday: The Master Has Need of You
Laura DeMaria
Last year Bishop Robert Barron’s Palm Sunday homily was called “The Master Has Need of You.” It is arguably the best homily I have ever heard him preach, and I have thought about it often over the past year. I highly recommend a listen.
What I love about it is the emphasis on your life is not your own. In the homily Bishop Barron asks us to review the special gift or talents God has provided for each of us, and what would happen if we turned those gifts into His service: a passion for the poor, an outgoing personality, a desire for justice. The title of the sermon comes from the scripture passage wherein Jesus asks the disciples to untether a donkey so that he may ride into Jerusalem (Mark 11:3):
When they drew near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately on entering it, you will find a colt tethered on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone should say to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ reply, ‘The Master has need of it and will send it back here at once.’”
We are the “it.” We are the being of which the Master has need, to bring Him into the world. Barron emphasizes the fact of it being a donkey, too - not a marvelous, majestic creature, but an ordinary one.
How did you spend your Palm Sunday? I got dressed up and #BYOB (“bring your own branch”) for CIC’s noon Mass. That meant I ran outside and plucked a couple berry-laden branches off a tree (thank you, tree). I though it fitting that the leaves themselves are thorny: red berries and spiky leaves - blood and a crown of thorns. I have some palms left over from last year’s Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew, which I keep in front of my images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. So, I took them from their altar and held them with the branch. I didn’t feel silly. It felt like exactly what one should do at this time: adapt and persevere.
A note from Fr. Charles’s homily: he reminded us that people threw their cloaks on the ground in front of Jesus as he passed. The donkey walked across them. Fr. Charles said we ought to have the same attitude: to give generously to God without fear of losing whatever we’re giving.