Palm Sunday, known also as Passion Sunday, is a time to reflect on the momentous events of Holy Week, the Paschal Mystery.

What is most jarring about Holy Week is the abruptness that we shift from the triumph of Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem on Sunday to his absolute abandonment, arrest and Death on Friday. As we live it liturgically each year, we cannot really imagine the emotional toll it took on his disciples, and his family. Although Jesus knew what would occur, we sense through his agony at Gethsemane, that Jesus was shaken to his very core.

We enter Holy Week this year in a deep sense of uncertainty. The events of the past month have been unsettling and disruptive, throwing all of us into one state of panic or another. All of our usual routines are gone; some of our most significant support systems and familiar places are closed. We are uncertain about how all of this will play out in real life.  We know that it will be quite a while before we can return to any semblance of normal, whatever that will mean.

It wasn’t that way just two months ago. We began 2020 on a high note. The market was good, unemployment was at a record lows and life seemed easy enough for most of us. And then it hit. The strike was sudden and mysterious. A single virus, emerging from a city which most of us never heard of and so small that it was visible only under a microscope, changed everything.

The image of Pope Francis, frail and alone in the front of the massive St. Peter’s Basilica was both striking and frightening. It offered a powerful sense of just how alone Jesus must have felt during those fateful hours as he approached the Cross. Betrayed, abandoned, mocked, denied, scourged and sentenced to death in a matter of several hours, Jesus stumbled as he carried the Cross through the crowded streets of Jerusalem to Calvary. As Francis seemed to struggle under the weight of the Monstrance, and at one point, looked like he was about to fall, there was no Simon of Cyrene to assist him. His physical frailty, balanced by his spiritual strength and courage, was the gift of hope that we all need.

We have all been reminded of our own human frailty and weakness. We have seen a glimpse of the unimaginable. We have been locked down and locked in. In a sense, the Lord has provided the entire world with a desert experience; our own global Lent.

In his message to the City and the World, Pope Francis said: “Embracing his cross means finding the courage to embrace all the hardships of the present time, abandoning for a moment our eagerness for power and possessions in order to make room for the creativity that only the Spirit is capable of inspiring. It means finding the courage to create spaces where everyone can recognize that they are called, and to allow new forms of hospitality, fraternity and solidarity. By his cross we have been saved in order to embrace hope and let it strengthen and sustain all measures and all possible avenues for helping us protect ourselves and others. Embracing the Lord in order to embrace hope: that is the strength of faith, which frees us from fear and gives us hope.

As we approach the Passion of Jesus Christ, we should do so with a new sense of our own suffering. While we do not want to confuse or conflate inconvenience with suffering, we know that individuals, families, communities, parishes and entire countries are awash with the coronavirus, that has brought untold suffering and death to tens of thousands.

We take this week – as we hope that we have been taking each week of this crisis – as an opportunity for a deepened prayer, and a renewed experience of the Way of the Cross. The Lord invites us to share in his suffering and Death through the sacrifices of our own lives, and by linking our suffering to his. May this Holy Week bring a deeper meaning to this suffering so that, as we approach Easter, we can do so anticipating the new life that is to come.

Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.