A WORD TO ROUSE THE WEARY
Palm Sunday (A) April 17, 2011 Back in the day when I was a very young priest and formator at the College-Seminary, when seminarians used to do a lot of “manualia” (manual jobs), when they were not in class, we had a water buffalo, a beast of burden known as carabao in the Philippines. That carabao was a little unwieldy and hard-headed. He refused to be tethered. He kept on tugging at the leash that was connected to his nose, until it tore his nose muscles. He wriggled himself free one day, but in exchange, he had a torn and, I imagined, a sore and ugly swollen nose! That carabao was the exact opposite of what Isaiah in today’s first reading extols. Isaiah speaks of docility, obedience, and humility. He seems to extol powerlessness and apparent inutility and downright weakness. But his last line turns the table on what the world considers as futility and seeming irrelevance. “The Lord God,” he says, “is my help. Therefore, I am not disgraced!” Everything in today’s ...