OPENING PRAYER

Almighty God, you have given the human race Jesus Christ our Savior as a model of humility. He fulfilled your will by becoming human and giving his life on the cross. Help us to bear witness to you by following his example of suffering and make us worthy to share in his resurrection. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

READING I: Psalm 118:1-2,19-29

O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;

his steadfast love endures forever!

Let Israel say, “His steadfast love endures forever.”

Open to me the gates of righteousness,

that I may enter through them and give thanks to the LORD.

This is the gate of the LORD;

the righteous shall enter through it.

I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation.

The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

This is the LORD’s doing;

it is marvelous in our eyes.

This is the day that the LORD has made;

let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD.

We bless you from the house of the LORD.

The LORD is God, and he has given us light.

Bind the festal procession with branches, up to the horns of the altar.

You are my God, and I will give thanks to you;

you are my God, I will extol you.

O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,

for his steadfast love endures forever.

READING II:

THE PROCESSIONAL GOSPEL: Saint Matthew 21:1-11

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

READING III: Malcolm Muggeridge (1903 - 1990)

Bonhoeffer is then taken to Flossenburg, where he is given the death sentence. After it has been delivered, the prison doctor catches a glimpse of him through the half-opened door of one of the huts, still in his prison clothes, and kneeling in fervent prayer to the Lord his God. "The devotion and evident conviction of being heard that I saw in the prayer of this intensely captivating man," the doctor is subsequently to recall, "moved me to the depths." The next morning--in Mary Bosanquet's word--"naked under the scaffold in the sweet spring woods," Bonhoeffer kneels for the last time to pray. Five minutes later his life is ended.

As this happens, five years of the monstrous buffooneries of war are drawing to a close. Hitler's Reich, which was to last for a thousand years, will soon reach its ignominious and ruinous end; the liberators are moving in from the east and the west with bombs and tanks and guns and cigarettes and Spam; the air is thick with rhetoric and cant. Looking back now after twenty-four years, I ask myself where in that murky darkness any light shines; not among the Nazis, certainly, not among the liberators, who, as we know, were to liberate no one and nothing. The rhetoric and the cant have mercifully been forgotten; what lives on is the memory of a man who died, not on behalf of freedom or democracy or any of the twentieth century's counterfeit hopes and desires, but on behalf of a Cross on which another man had died two thousand years before. As on that previous occasion, on Golgotha, so amidst the rubble and desolation of liberated Europe, the only victor is the man who died, as the only hope for the future lies in his triumph over death. There never can be any other victory or any other hope. This is what I am trying, so inadequately, to say.

CLOSING PRAYER

O God,

early in the morning I cry to you.

Help me to pray,

and to concentrate my thoughts on you;

I cannot do this alone.

In me there is darkness

But with you there is light;

I am lonely, but you do not leave me;

I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help.

I am restless, but with you there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;

I do not understand your ways,

but you know the way for me...

Restore me to liberty,

And enable me so to live now

that I may answer before you and before me,

Lord, whatever this day may bring,

Your name be praised.

Amen.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)