Palm Sunday: Glory Flows From the Obedience of Selfless Love, by Carl E. Olson 

By Carl E. Olson, Catholic World Report, March 23, 2024 

Carl E. Olson is editor of Catholic World Report and Ignatius Insight. He is the author of Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?, Will Catholics Be “Left Behind”?, co-editor/contributor to Called To Be the Children of God, co-author of The Da Vinci Hoax (Ignatius), and author of the “Catholicism” and “Priest Prophet King” Study Guides for Bishop Robert Barron/Word on Fire.

On the Readings for Sunday, March 24, 2024, Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion

Readings:
• Mk 11:1-10 or Jn 12:12-16
• Psa 22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 23-24
• Phil 2:6-11
• Mk 14:1—15:47

The readings for Palm Sunday, or Passion Sunday, are dramatic and demanding. They are excruciating in their raw depictions of violence and suffering. They also, as in the case of the great Christological hymn in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, are marked by exultation in the glory streaming forth from the pain and sacrifice of the Suffering Servant. Glory comes not from the power to suppress and enslave, but from the freely chosen obedience of selfless love.

St. Mark’s account of the Passion is terse and vivid; it is replete with unsparing descriptions of sort of sin, viciousness, and evil. “The behavior of men in the Passion account,” noted Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “is portrayed with a realism bordering on gruesomeness. Any and all sins are committed against God himself in the person of Jesus.” And that inescapable fact, of course, is true today, for us. …

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