We know much about how early Christians in the Holy Land commemorated the final days of Jesus’s earthly life from the fourth-century pilgrim Egeria. She wrote movingly about her experience there. And from her, we also get a glimpse of the patience and stamina of early Christians, who only recently could practice their religion openly and who had not yet lost the rigor of spiritual discipline.
Egeria tells us that over the course of Holy Week, they fasted and prayed, traveling to various sites that were associated with Jesus’s last days. Children and adults journeyed together, along with the bishop. They walked up and down hills. They waited and listened to readings from Scripture. And by Maundy Thursday, as Egeria recounts, the crowd was exhausted from keeping vigil and weak from fasting each day. They went “very slowly with hymns to Gethsemane,” and when the passage about Jesus’s arrest in the garden was read, there was “such groaning and moaning from all the people, with weeping, that the lamentation of all the people [was] heard about as far away as the city.”[1] The crowd was not yet finished. They would continue to fast and pray and walk until Easter Day.
This must seem like a strange thing to us who live in an age of immediacy, who are unwilling to wait for answers, who are uncomfortable waiting with those who suffer, who would prefer to avoid any talk of death. It must seem strange to those of us who would prefer not to wait through Palm Sunday and certainly not through the rest of Holy Week, who would rather skip ahead to the egg hunt and festivities of Easter Day.
I have recently been reminded of the impatience of our culture as I grieved the death of my mother. Well-meaning people have been quick to assure me that my mom is in a better place. I do believe that is true, but some people have also been unable to wait with me in my grief and suffering. On the other side of her death, some people treated me differently but were at the same time uncomfortable acknowledging my mother’s death. Nevertheless, a week that I will never forget because of its difficulty and many blessings was the week between my mother’s death and her funeral. I waited with my father, sharing in the joys of remembering my mother’s beautiful smile but also mourning her death far too young and sitting with the painful realization of her suffering before her death. My dad and I waited together, knowing that we could not rush to her funeral, and that at the end of the week, we would come face to face with the real loss that death brings.
On this first day of Holy Week, we are forced to wait. We wait through the charade of the Palm procession, knowing that the acclamations will soon morph into jeers. We wait through the long chanting of the Passion Gospel. We end the liturgy knowing that we will need to wait through the pain, silence, and discomfort of this week before Easter arrives.
Perhaps because of my own impatience, I had never noticed a detail in Matthew’s account of Jesus’s passion. After Judas has betrayed Jesus and after Jesus has been condemned, Judas is apparently cut to the heart. He repents and returns the thirty pieces of silver with which he had betrayed his Lord to the chief priests and elders. He acknowledges his sin. Somehow, I hadn’t paid much attention to Judas’s repentance. But even though he repents, something utterly tragic happens. He hangs himself. He gives up. He is too ashamed to wait through Jesus’s passion and death to see how forgiveness emerges from the grave.
Judas like us, is the product of an impatient and unforgiving society. This impatience plays out vividly on the pages of the Passion Gospel. The disciples can’t stay awake with Jesus in the garden because they are too bored to pray. Those who put Jesus on trial are impatient, too, impatient with Jesus’s challenges to the political and religious systems of his day. Peter is impatient with the discomfort of being associated with Jesus and denies him three times. Those who confront Jesus as he is tried want quick and easy answers to their questions. But Jesus remains silent, refusing to stoop to their superficial requests and demanding patience from those who are willing to learn what his kingship really means. Even those cruel words as Jesus hangs on the cross are impatient. If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross. They want Jesus to prove his divinity in that moment. But the perfectly patient one will not do so. He will linger patiently until death, uttering the words of suffering and abandonment from Psalm 22.
The whole trial is a charade, just like our Palm procession is. The people who supposedly want justice, but only want it on their own terms, put Jesus through a sham trial. The release of Barabbas is no real act of mercy but simply a way to ensure that Jesus dies. And surely this impatience resonates with us as we see hasty entries into violence and war, of superficial gestures at justice, at an intolerance with mercy and forgiveness.
Maybe I never noticed that Judas repented because it is an amazingly easy detail to ignore. Do any of us really want to accept that Judas was genuinely sorry for what he had done? Would we prefer quick retribution by knowing that he ended his life, deprived of God’s mercy? But is that really true? What if we sat with the painful tragedy of Judas’s despair and of waiting for a final answer from God?
If we take anything away from this day, it’s the undeniable tension of two stubborn strands in the Passion story: the violence of humanity and the mercy of God. On Palm Sunday, it appears that the violence of humanity wins out, the vengefulness of humanity wins out, the despair of humanity wins out. But patience defies that simple conclusion. Even today, as we enter into a week that demands our patience, we already see hints of that other strand, which can’t be separated from the sinfulness of humanity. Humanity’s stubbornness is matched by God’s merciful stubbornness. At the conclusion of Matthew’s passion, the graves are opened and the dead are raised, a foreshadowing of what is to come. Judas repents without waiting long enough to understand that God will forgive him. But patience proves that the stubbornness of God’s mercy really means something because God doesn’t flippantly forgive from afar but forgives even after enduring the depths of hell.
And it is so with those who keep watch with Jesus on the cross through his agony and who at the bitter end see what God is doing. After Jesus has given up his spirit, the earth shakes and the rocks are split and the tombs are opened and the dead are raised. It’s the patient centurion and those with him who understand just what is taking place, who see a vivid glimpse of God’s love and mercy. Truly this man was the Son of God. This is no mockery or charade. This is the stone-cold truth, a truth that could only come by waiting.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
March 29, 2026
[1] Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw, The Pilgrimage of Egeria, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018), p. 174.