Office of Communications > Weekly Reflection >March 14, 2008

Palm Sunday is a train wreck.  Fronds and scented smoke enact a giddy welcome to Jerusalem, but it doesn’t last.  Crowds shouting their plaudits and hosannas would soon demand the head of their fair-haired savior.  The boisterous hope of those wanting to be free turned into the spit and whip of those who knew the cost of the transaction.

We get an unintended sense of this in Matthew. He quotes a prophecy of Zechariah, but looks as if he skipped that class.  The oracle speaks of an ass and a colt, but they are poetic parallels, one in the same, the second reinforcing the first.  But Matthew, a city boy lost in the barn, thought they were two and had Jesus “sit upon them.” 

He conjures a comical picture of this holy man and acclaimed king trying to straddle the donkey and her colt at once.  Shifting his weight from one to the other, it had to be uncomfortable, but maybe it is the best clue to what Jesus was experiencing in those Jerusalem days.

It was paradox and tension, answer followed by question.  Riding down the hill, he had to be of mixed mind, had to know the parade was headed for rain.  By Thursday night, all the yea-sayers would be gone.  He could already feel the fear and loneliness of one caught between a father who could not answer and friends who could not stay awake.  He may have been already weighing his prayers.  “Let this cup pass” or “Thy will be done.”  “Why have you forsaken me/” or “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Maybe Matthew was right.  It is in the plural that Jesus enters the city, but by the end of the week, the either/ors of his dilemma are replaced by the both/ands of his action.  Beaten, naked and crucified, he was an unclean sacrifice, a threat to power, the shame of all held dear.  But, beaten, naked, and crucified, he was also God, promising once and for all to be with us always, to go where we go, even to the darkest depths.  So maybe the extra colt was brought for us.