Entering Holy Week with the Donkey-King Matthew 21:1-11
Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF Claretian Missionaries
Palm Sunday is a threshold. We stand at the gate of Jerusalem with the crowd, palms in hand, hosannas on our lips. But if we enter this week too quickly—if we rush from the triumphal entry to the Last Supper to the cross without lingering here—we risk missing what this day is meant to do in us.
For the faithful, Palm Sunday is not a celebration of a victory already won. It is an invitation to follow a King who refuses to be the king we want.
I think about the donkey. How easily we wave our branches and forget the animal. A warhorse would have made sense. A chariot with iron wheels would have satisfied the crowd’s hunger for spectacle. But Jesus chooses the beast of peasants, the animal that carries burdens, the creature of peace. He is making a statement not only to Jerusalem but to every generation of disciples: My kingship is not of this world. I do not conquer by the sword. I conquer by letting myself be broken.
And yet the crowd does not see this. They see what they want to see. They spread their cloaks—an act of royal homage—and they shout “Son of David,” a title thick with military and political hope. They have followed him from Galilee, witnessed healings, eaten multiplied bread. Now they believe the moment has come for him to seize power. They are sincere in their hosannas, but their sincerity is blind. They are cheering for a revolution that Jesus has no intention of leading.
I recognize myself in that crowd. How often I come to God with my own agenda dressed up as faith. I want a Messiah who will fix my problems on my timeline, who will defeat the people who trouble me, who will establish my comfort and vindicate my cause. I want a stallion. I want power dressed in religious language. And Jesus, patient and unyielding, offers me a donkey.
Then the city shakes.
Matthew tells us that when Jesus entered Jerusalem, “the whole city was shaken.” Not the crowds outside the gates—they are already cheering. The city itself, the center of religious and political power, trembles. The chief priests, the scribes, the elders, the Sadducees—they look at this procession and feel the ground move beneath their feet. They have spent years constructing a fragile peace with Rome, negotiating a modus vivendi with Herod, managing the temple as a source of control and revenue. A Galilean prophet riding into the city with messianic shouts threatens to undo it all.
Their question—“Who is this?”—is not innocent wonder. It is fear. They know who he is. They have heard the reports. Their question is a defensive reflex: What do we do with this man who disrupts our careful arrangements?
I recognize myself in the city, too. There is a Jerusalem within me—a part of my life where I have arranged things just so, balancing my compromises, my unspoken bargains, my quiet accommodations with powers I dare not confront. I have learned to live with the Romans in my own soul: the pressures to conform, the fear of losing status, the need to keep things stable. When Jesus approaches that part of me, riding on a donkey, I feel the tremor. His gentleness is threatening because it asks me to surrender the control I have so carefully maintained.
This is what Palm Sunday does. It exposes the gap between what I say I want from God and what I am actually willing to receive. It shows me that I often want a Messiah who fits into my world, not one who turns it upside down. And this is precisely why Palm Sunday is essential preparation for Holy Week.
If I enter Holy Week still thinking that Jesus is the conquering hero who will make all my troubles go away, then Good Friday will be nothing but confusion and disappointment. I will be like the disciples who scattered in the garden, unable to understand why the King did not fight. But if I let Palm Sunday teach me—if I sit with the donkey until I understand that Jesus reigns through self-emptying love—then I am ready to walk the rest of the week.
The donkey leads to the cross. The meekness that unsettles Jerusalem is the same meekness that will not call down angels from the cross. The King who refuses to ride a stallion is the King who refuses to save himself. Palm Sunday trains my eyes to see glory in humility, victory in surrender, kingship in suffering.
As I begin Holy Week, I am invited to let my hosannas be purified. I am invited to stop asking Jesus to be the king of my fantasies and to accept him as the King he is: the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. I am invited to let my Jerusalem—my carefully managed life—be shaken, so that what is built on fear can crumble and make room for what is built on love.
The branches I carry today will wither by Friday. But if I follow this King on his donkey through the gates, if I stay with him through the shaking and the silence and the cross, I will find myself on the other side of the tomb. And there, the hosanna will mean something it could never mean on this day.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Not as I imagined him, but as he is.
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