“And a sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
And so it begins and ends, in the ending that never ends. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week yet looks to the end or purpose of the journey in Christ’s Resurrection but only through the Cross and Passion of Christ. It is really a week-long liturgy. We greet Christ as he enters Jerusalem with cries of “Hosanna”. But our cries of rejoicing quickly turn to shouts of “Let him be crucified”. Yet the shouts of violence give place to sorrow and sadness. Are we to be left simply in the sorrows of our hearts? Or does sorrow or contrition lead to the possibilities of repentance? Holy Week takes us from the cries of rejoicing to the sorrows of our hearts but then to the glorious songs of Alleluias. Such is the pageant and wonder of Holy Week, if we have the hearts and minds to think and feel; in short, to be pierced.
It has been my custom to take a Scriptural passage as the matrix for all our Holy Week and Easter meditations. Simeon’s prophecy, which we heard at Candlemas, anticipates the Passion and its meaning. He says to Mary, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;” then to her he says, that “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Mary, as the Annunciation this past week shows, is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As Augustine teaches, she is the symbol of the Church. Her vocation is the vocation of our humanity in its purity and truth: “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That means our complete attention to all of the words of the Passion as indicated in Simeon’s prophecy. Only so can we feel the thought of the deep meaning of Christ’s Passion; in an image it means being pierced.
There are, the poet George Herbert says, “two vast spacious things” that we are meant to learn and contemplate, “yet few there are that sound them.” What are they? “Sinne and Love”. The challenge of Holy Week for us is to sound the depths of sin and love in our own hearts as revealed through Christ’s Passion. Holy Week is the spectacle of our betrayals, on the one hand, and the spectacle of the redemptive love of Christ, on the other hand. We are bidden to contemplate the dialectical motions, the to-and-fro of our hearts, in going from joy to sorrow and then to glory. Hosanna, Crucify, Alleluia.
We are much on display in these events, caught in the conflicting storms and emotions of our hearts and in the vain imaginations and confusions of our minds in myriads of ways. We are in the story. We discover the disorders of our lives individually and collectively. Somehow it belongs to our good to contemplate the destructive force of human folly and foolishness, for only so can we participate in the serious joy of our redemption. In other words, the events of this week, liturgically and sacramentally re-enacted and re-presented, recall us to a joy that is greater than the ups and downs of our hearts and the destructive follies of our vanities and pretensions. We are recalled to a joy that is deep and abiding, holy and true, precisely because there is something beyond ourselves which redeems us from ourselves. Contemplating our betrayals of the journey to Jerusalem belongs to the journey. In other words, it belongs to our good.
In contemplating sin and love, we are to be doubly pierced; pierced in sorrow and pierced in joy. They are the necessary conditions of our coming to glory, the glory of Christ’s Resurrection, but only through the Passion in the intensity of all four Gospel accounts of the Passion of Christ. We immerse ourselves in the fullness of the Passion: Matthew today, Mark on Holy Monday & Holy Tuesday, Luke on Holy Wednesday & Maundy Thursday, John on Good Friday. The pageant of the Passion in all its fullness reveals us to ourselves in all our shortcomings and follies but only so as to gather us into the love of Christ that redeems us. That is to know ourselves even as we are known in the greater love of Christ. We only learn the lessons of sin through the love of God.
This is Herbert’s point. We can only learn sin and love through the Passion of Christ which reveals those “two vast spacious things” in their intensity and fullness. He points to Christ’s agony in Gethsemane which shows the reality of sin as felt and experienced inwardly in Christ’s soul even as it will be felt and experienced outwardly in his body on the Cross. The Crucifixion makes visible, he suggests, not only the vicious and destructive nature of our disordered humanity but also the greater depth and wonder of divine love. Love is the total self-giving nature of God given to us precisely through the effects of our sins made visible on the Cross.
“Love,” he says in a moving image, “is that liquor sweet, and most divine,/which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.” The image belongs exactly to what we behold in the figure of Christ crucified. For out of his Passion and Death flows life and the means of our abiding in that everlasting life. Christ is pierced on the Cross by the soldier’s spear to confirm his death, yet out of his side flows water and blood, symbolic of the sacraments of baptism and communion. They are the means of our participation in the work of human regeneration and redemption accomplished in Christ’s Passion.
Throughout this week, “[we] shall look on him whom [we] pierced,” as John notes in his Passion read on Good Friday, quoting Zechariah. The thoughts of our hearts shall be revealed through the spectacle of Mary pierced in her soul with sorrow and with love at the sufferings of Christ. May our souls pierced in sorrow for our sins be also pierced in joy for Christ’s love. That, I pray, shall be our holy week.
“And a sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, 2026