Accompanying Christ On Palm Sunday — Let us go together to meet Christ on the Mount of Olives. Today He returns from Bethany and proceeds of His own free will toward His holy and blessed passion, to consummate the mystery of our salvation.
He who came down from heaven to raise us from the depths of sin, to raise us with Himself, we are told in Scripture, above every sovereignty, authority and power, and every other name that can be named, now comes of His own free will to make His journey to Jerusalem.
Let us run to accompany Him as He hastens toward His passion, and imitate those who met Him then, not by covering His path with garments, olive branches or palms, but by doing what we can to prostrate ourselves before Him by being humble and by trying to live as He would wish.
Then we shall be able to receive the Word at His coming and God, whom no limits can contain, will be within us.
In His humility Christ entered the dark regions of our fallen world and He is glad that He became so humble for our sake, glad that He came and lived among us and shared in our nature in order raise us up again to Himself.
And even though we are told that He has now ascended above the highest heavens — the proof, surely, of His power and godhead — His love for man will never rest until He has raised our earthbound nature from glory to glory, and made it one with His own in heaven.
So let us spread before His feet, not garments or soulless olive branches, which delight the eye for a few hours and then wither, bur ourselves, clothed in His grace, or rather, clothed completely in Him.
We who are baptized into Christ must ourselves be the garments that we spread before Him. Now that the crimson stains of our sins have been washed away in the saving waters of baptism and we have become white as pure wool, let us present the conqueror of death, not with mere branches of palms but with the real rewards of His victory. Let our souls take the place of he welcoming branches as we join today in the children’s holy song: Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the king of Israel.
Saint Andrew of Crete who was the bishop of Gortineia in Crete from the late 600s to his death in the early 700s.
