Palm Sunday by Fr Jack

Holy Week 2026 sermon series

Holy Week and our day to day life now:

The events of salvation,
the font of Grace,
the sacramental life of the Church today.

Palm Sunday readings:
The Palm Gospel according to St Matthew
The sung Passion according to St John

Laying out the week

So, we have begun. And already we have heard where we are headed (the whole passion laid out before us, sung so movingly by our choir). As it is every day of the year in our East Window - there is the Lord and his Mother and Beloved Disciple. Just as we heard that heart wrenching conversation in St John’s own account today. And above them in the smaller lights are the tools of the passion - ladder, nails, sponge and spear. Come and meditate on/with this window this week.

So, for us today the jollity of donkeys and palms, for us reliving Jerusalem this week, as for those who were there on the first Palm Sunday and saw Jesus arrive: that jollity is soon lost. ‘Hosanna!’ Cries of joy and hope - ‘Hosanna’, after all, means ‘save us’.

But those same voices, ours and theirs will soon cry for his death: ‘crucify!’.

We have begun. As we keep Holy Week in communion with Christians across the world, there is a good degree of drama in the liturgy of this week. But it is not a play or re-enactment of events. It is a participation, a participation in these events at the heart of the history of the universe. And this week I have taken a theme, a hook, for my sermons in the hope that it will help unpack these events and connect them with our lives here and now. The theme or title of the sermons that will land each day is:

The events of salvation, the font of Grace and the sacramental life of the Church today.

It seemed helpful to ask: so what? what difference do these events that we will live together for the next seven days actually make to our lives? How does the realities, and the Scripture readings that go with them, find their expression in how we actually live as Christians?

A few months ago I saw the Humber Bridge up close and personal when visiting a friend near Hull. That great expanse of the bridge held up in the river by huge concrete pillars. It’s the same for Gilbert Bridge Highwalk here in the Barbican beside St Giles’. Our walkway is held up by pillars plunging deep into the water and earth, and rising up to carry us along.

So it is for us and life and the sacraments. Over the centuries the Church of Jesus Christ has discerned God’s gift in these pillars. Our life is the bridge or the road, these pillars hold us up, carry us through life, and keep us on our journey home towards heaven. Some, like Holy Communion, we come to again and again. Others (like Confirmation) are once and for life. All are gifts of God with us, holding us, sharing life with us, carrying us along.

So this week, we’ll pay particular attention to the sacraments, and how they are theologically reflected and resonant in the events of Holy Week. Each day I’ll take the Holy Week events, the Scripture readings for the day and a sacrament or two, and weave them together and see how they illuminate each other.

Two things to notice before we do.

First, that this may be your hundredth Holy Week. You may be thinking, ‘well, I do actually know what happened on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday, and I don’t need to be here on Good Friday or the night of Easter, because I did that last year, and the year before that. It’s not new, and no need to repeat.’

Forgive me, I’m not being difficult or domineering, but that would be a mistake. The great liturgical scholar and Benedictine Monk Odo Casel (1886-1948, who actually dropped dead during the Easter Vigil rather appropriately) wants to remind us that the liturgical year and Holy Week at its heart is not a merry-go-round, a carousel. It isn’t repetition of the same loop, again and again. Holy Week and the whole liturgical year is actually a screw-thread. With each turn we are drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery of God, into life, into who we are. And we plunge nearer and nearer towards Christ’s coming again, and His Kingdom. A screw thread. We can’t skip turns, we must be in this.

And the (second) final thing I want to notice today is the Holy Spirit.

Eastertide will begin when night falls next Saturday night - the Eve of Easter. And we will be there, at darkness, beginning the Easter Vigil, gathered around the New Fire in the ruins of St Alphage London Wall, just over there. Eastertide will end fifty days later at Pentecost.

Everything we do as Christians is a fruit of the life of the Holy Spirit. It is because of the presence and life and power of the Holy Spirit that you and I are being held even in our very existence right now.

It is because of the Spirit in us, that we are able to pray and think and belief and hope and love.

It is because of the Spirit that, at Her gift, bread and wine will become the Body and Blood, the life, of Jesus for us at every Eucharist.

Every Sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace.

Be it the people who get married, the water, oil, and light of baptism, bread and wine, oil in anointing the sick, the person offering their life in ordination and the bishop laying her hands. All these are outward and visible signs, of something that the Holy Spirit is doing.

God gave these sacramental gifts to God’s people so that He might use them to love us, to free us, to transform us and bring us into His life. Sacraments, these pillars that hold up our journey through life, are God’s way of loving us, sharing life with us.

And that is why God has given us this week too.

Holy Week and the sacraments we will consider together this week are pillars by which God holds us in life, and searching screws by which we plunge into the mystery and love at the heart of life. All we need to do is come on the journey. From today to Maundy Thursday, to Good Friday and Easter Eve and Easter Day. God’s Holy Spirit is waiting for us, all we have to do is turn up.