Palm Sunday (Year A)

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Sunday 29 March, 2026
St Mary’s Cathedral, Perth

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Gathering together to celebrate Palm Sunday we are, as a community of sisters and brothers, entering into a journey together with Jesus as we accompany Him in His final days leading up to His passion, His death, and His resurrection.

We began our liturgy this morning by recalling his entry into Jerusalem when He is acclaimed as a king and as the Messiah.

The liturgy therefore begins on a note of joy, but it concludes with the sombre reality of the reading of the passion story.

Today we listened to that story as we find it in Saint Matthew’s Gospel. On Good Friday, we will listen to the story as it is told in St John’s Gospel.

Behind all four accounts of the passion found in the four Gospels there is the same basic truth being presented to us: that Jesus gave His life for us out of love for us so that through His death we might find forgiveness for our sins and even now enter into the new life of the risen Christ.

This new life became ours at the time of our baptism, it was strengthened through the gift of the Holy Spirit when we were confirmed, it is renewed - we might even say recreated - when we celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation and it is constantly deepened within us when we receive the Lord in the Eucharist.

The teachings of our Catholic faith and the way in which that faith comes to life in our celebration of the sacraments constantly reminds us that Jesus died to save us from our sins - to bring us the gift of forgiveness. Indeed, every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we hear the priest repeating the words of Christ who spoke, who speaks, of His blood being poured out for the forgiveness of sins.

This recognition that we are sinners in need of forgiveness is therefore one of the most fundamental truths of our faith, but strangely it is one that sometimes gets pushed to the margins of our spiritual lives. The whole journey of Lent, and particularly the journey of this week which lies before us, is designed to help us face the truth of our sinfulness, our infidelities, our sometimes petty and sometimes much more serious and damaging ill treatment of others, and our forgetfulness or neglect of the God who loves us so much.

But it is only the realisation of our need for God‘s mercy and healing which can ensure that we really do experience the joy of Easter, the joy of new life, the joy of healing, the joy of second chances, and the joy of the hope which Easter plants within us.

In the official Prayer of the Church which clergy, many religious sisters and brothers and  many lay people pray each day there is a beautiful Lenten hymn which contains the following words;

Forgive us all the wrong we do and purify each sinful soul. What we have darkened heal with light, and what we have destroyed make whole.

May our journey with Jesus this week help us to recognise that there are indeed many things, many situations, which we have darkened and there are perhaps also things which we have destroyed. We can pray this week in particular that the Lord will bring light into the darkness of our lives and the lives of those we have hurt; that the Lord will make whole anything in our lives or in the lives of others that we, through our cruelty or our indifference, have destroyed.