LETTING GO
INTRODUCTION
Today we celebrate Palm Sunday.
Today we cross over the threshold of the most important week of the Christian year: Holy Week.
Today we cross over the threshold of the most important week of the Christian year: Holy Week.
And if there is any time of the whole year that we feel the
need to get closer to God, it’s this week. The Christmas Season gets us in
touch with family and gift giving. Lent, Holy Week and Easter get us in touch
with our need for the gift of God.
All year we are filled up with so much clutter and business
that we tend to neglect and forget God, so this week is a chance to LET GO
and make the journey with Christ through Holy Week to Easter!
HOMILETIC REFLECTIONS
In today’s gospel, we hear the great passion story of how
Jesus crossed the threshold of the gates of Jerusalem and let go of his life.
Letting go.
Passion!
Today I’d like to preach with passion on two words that
bring us into the mystery of Christ and Holy Week: LETTING GO! Aren’t
they the basic words in every love story -- especially love stories whose whole
theme is passion?
When we love another, don’t we let go of everything because
of the passion we feel for the other?
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:
16). He let go of his Son out of his passionate love for us.
And as Paul tells us in today’s second reading: Christ
emptied himself. He let go of being equal to god to be human like us. More than
that, he humbled himself by becoming our servant — a suffering servant—and then
this week, he went even further, he let go and accepted death, death on a
cross. (Phil. 2: 5-8)
Letting go! Passion! Becoming a servant and slave of all!
Dying! Isn’t all this the crux and heart of every love story?
Every Sunday we hear the Word of God and how Jesus is the
servant of others: teaching, healing, forgiving, touching, feeding, caring for
others. But this Sunday, and this special holy week, we experience even more.
We experience Palm Sunday, now called Passion Sunday, because of its dramatic
reading of the Passion Story of Christ. On this Thursday, Holy Thursday, we
experience the Last Supper. On Friday, Good Friday, we journey the Way of the
Cross and experience Jesus’ final letting go, his death on the Cross. On
Saturday, Holy Saturday, we feel the silence and loneliness of the tomb. And
finally on Sunday, the 8th day, we experience Easter and
Resurrection.
This week then, is a week for slowing down, becoming
quieter, and entering into deeper prayer and meditation. This week is a week
for getting to church for the Holy Week services.
As we hear the readings this week we are called like Moses
and the Chosen People, the Israelites, to let go, to leave Egypt, to make an
exit, an Exodus, and move from where we are now, “away from the fleshpots”, out
into the desert, heading towards the Promised Land, the Kingdom of God. We are
called to climb the mountain of the Lord and renew our covenants with the Lord
and each other, to sit down to table with the Lord, to let him wash our feet,
to let him feed us with his body, the Bread of Life, to pray with him in the
garden, to walk with him to Calvary, to go down into the waters of the Jordan,
to die to ourselves, and to come up on the other side of the river, changed,
converted, more alive, resurrected, more filled with charity after renewing our
baptismal vows.
Letting go!
This whole week then can be summed up with those two simple
words: LETTING GO! Somehow those two words touch the mystery and the passion of
God as seen in Jesus Christ.
Letting go!
The words are simple, but the letting go is the whole
difficult mystery of life.
Down deep when we become quiet and serious and closer to God
we all know that we have to let go of so much in order for the Kingdom of God
to break forth in our lives. And we know that the letting go is a lifetime
difficulty and a lifetime of dying.
PRACTICAL APPLICATION
For the sake of clarity and understanding of all that is
involved in this letting go, let me divide the “letting go” into three degrees
of difficulty.
First of all, there is the letting go of things outside of
us: the stuff of life that holds us back from loving God, neighbor and self.
Obviously, everything created is good, but when the goods of life and the
pursuit of money and the things money can buy begin to swallow us up, then we
have to learn to let go and change our life style and life attitudes.
We have to let go of all those riches that prevent us from
fitting through the eye of the needle and entering the Kingdom of God. If we
stuff ourselves with food or T.V. or junk and neglect our family and friends,
then aren’t we blocking the Kingdom of God? We need to change. We need to let
go and let God heal our situation. It might mean letting go of a second job or
even a first one or overtime because we aren’t spending enough time with our
family. It might mean dropping out of three organizations we belong to, because
we are out 4 or 5 nights a week and our marriage is suffering.
Next there is the letting go of inner “stuff”: feelings,
hurts, resentments, bad memories. Compared to the letting go of things, this
second degree of letting go is much more difficult. All of us sit parked here
like a tractor trailer truck with a trailer full of bad memories and hurts
which we drag around behind us. We find it difficult to forgive parents for past
hurts. We still remember being dropped by friends or people we loved or who we
thought loved us. We all remember teachers or bosses or Little League coaches
who had favorites and we weren’t one of them and as a result we were passed
over.
Letting go of all those past hurts, especially from the
early years of our life is so hard to do. If we were a tractor trailer truck,
wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply unhitch the trailer full of bad feelings
and drive off without them light as a feather without all those hurts? But no,
we’re more like a garbage truck filled with the hurts and bangs and stains and
garbage of our life still sticking to our insides and always stinking up our
life.
Letting go!
But letting go of feelings is easy compared to the third
degree of letting go: the letting go of our very self—the dying to self that
Jesus often talked about.
“Unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it
remains just a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it produces much fruit. The
person who loves his life loses it, while the person who hates his life in this
world preserves it to life eternal” (John 12: 24 - 25).
Holy Week is all about Jesus’ letting go of his very life.
Up to that moment on Palm Sunday when Jesus passed over — crossed
over the threshold of the gates of Jerusalem, he had some control over his
life. But on Palm Sunday he made a dramatic step. He freely let go of his life
and entered Jerusalem. The Good Shepherd became a sheep. He let go and became a
sheep led to the slaughter.
Letting go!
Isn’t that the hardest thing in life, to let go not only of
things, not only of feelings, but of our very self?
Letting go!
Isn’t that what keeps some people from getting married?
Isn’t that what keeps some married people from being happily married? Isn’t
that what keeps some married people from having children? Isn’t that what kills
marriages—keeping people from really giving their bodies and their whole selves
to the other and to the family?
Isn’t that the world’s problem: selfishness, individualism,
cliques, groups, peoples, races, nations, unable to let go not only of their
possessions, lands, surplus, but also of their feelings of superiority or past
hurts, but also of their very selves, unable to share life together?
Letting go!
CONCLUSIONS
So this week, we hear the passion story of Jesus — how he
gave himself openly to the people of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. We hear him say
on Holy Thursday night, “This is my body to be given for you.” “This cup is the
new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you.” We hear on Good Friday,
the final words of Jesus on the cross as found in today’s Passion Story by
Luke, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Letting go!
Good Friday!
But guess what? We will never let go if we stop at Good Friday.
No, we have to see beyond Good Friday to Easter Sunday. We have to see beyond
the cross, beyond death, beyond the letting go, to the results of letting go:
resurrection, the Kingdom.
Only when we have that vision—the vision of a new life—a new
way of doing things — an improved family — an improved world — only then will we let
go.
Only when we see ourselves as Easter People, the Risen
Christ’s People, Christians, can we let go of:
- things that clutter our life and should be in the hands of the poor and the have not’s;
- feelings that wear us down and wear us out;
- selfishness that prevents us from giving of our very selves to God and others.
This week then is obviously a serious week and a Holy Week.
It is a letting go and an emptying week so that we will have room for deep
prayer and deeper union with Christ.
With Christ let go. Follow him. Die with him. Rise with him
to new life for you and your family and your world.
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