Palm Sunday 2025

 
 
Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles
 
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
April 13, 2025
 
My brothers and sisters in Christ,^[1]
 
We have entered now, into this holiest of weeks, the week of our hope, the week of redemption.
 
These days we are accompanying Our Lord as he walks the path of his passion, this way of sorrow and suffering.
 
And we want to stay very close to him as he makes his way to the Cross. We know that his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary walked with him every step of the way.
 
So we want to stay close to her, too. We want to console her in her sorrows, and we want to reflect on Our Lord’s passion through her eyes.
 
We know that Jesus Christ suffered and died for our sins.
 
This week we want to move from “knowing” this, to “feeling” this. We want to allow his sufferings to speak to us, to stir our hearts from indifference and move us to a deeper conversion.
 
This week we are remembering the mystery of Our Lord’s love for us. It’s a love that we could never imagine, it’s a love so profound that he is willing to give his life for us, for each one of us.
 
Jesus is speaking to you and to me in that first reading this morning: “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.”

He suffers these terrible things for us, he pays the price that we could never pay for our sins.
 
As St. Paul says today in the second reading: “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave … becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
 
There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another. And today, we are humbled to reflect that the Son of God loves us so much that he made himself a slave so that we could be free, so that we could live in what Paul once called “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”^[2]
 
We witness in these events today the truth that we are precious to God and that we have a place in his purposes. Not just some of us, but every one of us.
 
It’s very personal. Jesus dies for us, because it is so important that we live! Again, not just some of us, but all of us.
 
So this week, let us make time to just be quiet with the Lord and reflect that Almighty God knows your name and that he created you to know the greatest happiness.
 
By his cross, Jesus sets us free so that we can truly know happiness, so that we can truly live an authentic life, as a child of God. He sets us free so that we can walk with him and glorify him by the way we live our lives, and one day live forever with him in heaven.
 
This is the great hope that we have as Christians, as Catholics! The hope for holiness, happiness, and heaven!
 
And that is why this is a very special Holy Week, as we celebrate during this Jubilee Year, this Year of Hope.
 
The saints teach us that this world is not our true home, that we are just passing through, that we are on our way to a better home, a heavenly home.^[3]
 
Our hope is in heaven, that’s where our pilgrimage leads us. It’s our destiny to join the saints there and live forever with God in the love that never ends.
 
So, this is the promise that we remember in this week of our redemption, this holy week.
 
And may our Blessed Mother Mary, who is the mother of our hope, be our witness and guide as we follow the path of her Son this week and always.
 
May we never leave her side, and may she help us to continue on our journey to Easter, to our true home, the better home, where we will live forever with her Son, in Paradise.

^[1] Readings: Isa. 50:4–7; Ps. 22:8–9, 17–20, 23–24; Phil. 2:6–11; Luke 22:14–23:56.
^[2] Rom. 8:21. 
^[3] Heb. 11:13–16; Phil. 3:20.