Palm Sunday

I just want to quote the Pope in his new book as a form of Meditation.

“No; violent revolution, killing others in God’s name, was not his way. His Zeal for the Kingdom of God took quite a different form. We do not know exactly what the pilgrims had in mind when they spoke, while enthroning Jesus of the coming kingdom of our father David. But what Jesus himself thought and intended he made very clear by his gestures and by the prophetic words that formed the context for his actions.

At the time of David,, the donkey had been a sign of kingship, and so Zechariah, basing himself on this tradition, depicts the new king of peace riding into the Holy City on a donkey. But even in Zechariah’s day and still more by the time of Jesus, it was the horse that had come to signify the might of the mighty, while the donkey had become the animal of the poor, and so served to express an entirely different image of Kingship.

It is true that Zechariah proclaims a Kingdom that extends from sea to sea. Yet precisely in this way he distance himself from any national frame of reference and points towards a new universality, in which the worlds finds God’s  peace and is untied beyond borders of any kind in the worship of one God. In the Kingdom of which he speaks, the weapons of war are destroyed”

So today we rejoice at the entrance of a new King."

 We start a week that celebrates and changes the course of human history and so we need to engage and enter fully into the mystery. So I like to see this week as a retreat an opportunity to enter fully into the mystery of God’s love for us. So that together we can enter into the mystery of God’s love in the Easter Triduum.