Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

In Matthew's version of the Easter story, symbols of novelty and transformation abound: it is the first day of the week, light is dawning, a stone has been rolled back, the very earth shakes, and an angel, a bearer of light, comes and speaks a word of hope. Easter is the day when everything changed, when God's mercy turned the world as we know it upside-down. We Christians are the proclaimers of this reversal.

On Palm Sunday, we are privileged to listen to one of the great passion narratives. In Matthew's account, we see Jesus as a still-point in the maelstrom, as God's fidelity amidst a cocaphony of sin. In the course of the passion, Jesus confronts betrayal, laziness, violence, untruth, abuse of power, self-destruction, and wanton cruelty--the whole panoply of human dysfunction. And he takes away this sin precisely by his obedience and his mercy.

Blindness is a great Biblical symbol of spiritual blindness, the darkening and distortion of our vision. Jesus salves and washes the blind man in John's Gospel in order to restore his sight. In the same way, he washes us (in Baptism) and salves us (in the other sacraments) so that we might see with his eyes.