Palm Sunday Images

Forsaken: Pope Francis looks at so many situations where we live abandonment: the unborn who are aborted, those who are alone in illness, the abandoned ...

He became one with each of us in order to be completely and definitively one with us to the very end. Brothers and sisters, today let us implore this grace: to love Jesus in his abandonment and to love Jesus in the abandoned all around us. In the hour of his abandonment, Jesus continued to trust. At the hour of abandonment, he continued to love his disciples who had fled, leaving him alone. Let us remember that the rejected and the excluded are living icons of Christ: they remind us of his reckless love, his forsakenness that delivers us from every form of loneliness and isolation. He cried out his “why?” in the words of the Psalm (22:2), and commended himself into the hands of the Father, despite how distant he felt him to be (cf. This is the most searing of all sufferings, the suffering of the spirit. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the Bible, the word “forsake” is powerful. The procession with the palms led to the obelisk in the middle of St. There, this word is spoken: “abandonment.” Christ brought all of this to the cross; upon his shoulders, he bore the sins of the world. There were sufferings of the body: let us think of the slaps and beatings, the flogging and the crowning with thorns, and in the end, the cruelty of the crucifixion. There were also sufferings of the soul: the betrayal of Judas, the denials of Peter, the condemnation of the religious and civil authorities, the mockery of the guards, the jeering at the foot of the cross, the rejection of the crowd, utter failure and the flight of the disciples.