Palm Sunday Ferverino

As we join this narrative of the Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, it can be noted that the passage follows His last Sabbath observance in Bethany with Martha, Mary and Lazarus. Now He makes the two-mile trek to Jerusalem where He will have His Last Supper with His Apostles.

 

But, as several people had come to Bethany following the Raising of Lazarus, so a crowd awaits to welcome Jesus to Jerusalem. The Lord had shown His divinity in the miraculous Raising of Lazarus, but now He will demonstrate His humility in the manner in which He enters Jerusalem.

 

Though He is greeted royally, and with great admiration, later in the week the enthusiasm will be more sinister. This combination of divinity and humility… of possession and poverty, demonstrates the loving and saving condescension of God-made-man in Christ.

 

Present at the act of Creation, all was created in and through Him, and, therefore belongs, in a sense, to Him. But now, as He inaugurates the Act of Redemption, nothing, it seems, belongs to Him:

 

He had borrowed a boat from a fisherman from which to preach…

He had borrowed loaves and fishes from a boy with which to feed the multitudes…

He would soon borrow a tomb in which to be buried.

 

And, at this moment, He borrows a donkey upon which to ride into Jerusalem. Thirty-three years previous, His Mother had ridden a donkey into Bethlehem for His humble birth in a donkey stall. Now, with the same humility, He proceeds to Jerusalem upon a donkey, to His redemptive Passion and Death.

 

Today the crowds would welcome Him as king; later in the week they would claim, “We have no king but Caesar!” Today, they shout, “Hosanna!”… soon they will shout, “Crucify!” Looking out his window, Pontius Pilate must have been quite amused at the sight of Jesus: Here was a man being welcomed as king, but kings rode horses, not donkeys, the beast of burden of the lower classes.

 

And now, as we are presented with the sight of the Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, it is up to us to continue the story as we walk with Him into the Church to celebrate Holy Mass and listen to the story of His Passion.