The King who smells of Death and Life

 Reflection on the Holy Gospel reading for Palm Sunday (St. John 12:12–19)

“The crowd that had been with Him when He called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead bore witness.” (St. John 12:17)

The Gospel of St. John does not allow us to separate Palm Sunday (St. John 12) from Lazarus’ Saturday (St. John 11).

Before Jesus makes His triumphant entry to Jerusalem, He stages resurrection outside its walls. In Bethany, at the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus does not merely comfort mourners; He reveals the end of death itself. Lazarus, four days in the tomb, is raised beyond all doubt. Jesus proceeds to Jerusalem and Bethany follows Him. What the prophet Ezekiel saw in vision is now made visible in history: “I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, O My people, and bring you into the land of Israel.” (Ezekiel 37:12). Palm Sunday, then, is not merely a celebration of kingship. It is a public response to the resurrection.

As Jesus approaches the city, Jerusalem does not yet understand what kind of King is coming. But the Scriptures do. Long before the palms were cut and the road was prepared, the prophet had already seen this day: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9)

The King comes, not in chariots, not on a warhorse, but in humility and peace. And as He enters the city in this unexpected manner, the crowd begins with a cry that is older than the city itself: “Hosanna! ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’ The King of Israel!” (St. John 12:13).

“Hosanna” is often treated as praise alone. Yet in Hebrew it is first a plea: “Save us, we beg You.” It is the cry of a people who know salvation must come from God, even if they do not yet understand how that salvation will arrive. They imagine deliverance through power, victory through force, peace through domination. But the One who answers their Hosanna does not arrive as expected.

Long before Jerusalem saw the donkey’s colt, Jacob had already spoken its meaning: “Binding his donkey to the vine, and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes.” (Genesis 49:11)

The King of Judah comes not riding free but bound. The colt that carries Him is already tethered to sacrifice. His garments are already marked by wine that looks disturbingly like blood. Palm Sunday is not an interruption of this ancient blessing, but its unveiling. The road of palms quietly leads to the place where garments will indeed be washed in blood.

Christ does not avoid the city’s hostility; He walks straight into it. The Light of the world enters the place where shadows gather; religious hypocrisy, political fear, betrayal, and death itself. What begins as procession is already Passion. The King who enters in meekness does so bearing the sign that His reign will not be seized but given, and that the vine to which He is bound will bear fruit only through the wood of the Cross.

When we cry Hosanna today, we do not cry it from a place of comfort. We cry it from a world wounded by war, from cities reduced to rubble, from the grief of mothers who bury children, from refugees with no safe road home, from nations trapped in cycles of retaliation, from hearts numbed by dehumanization and fear. And it is precisely here that Hosanna regains its true meaning.

Hosanna is not the shout of the victorious. It is the prayer of the desperate. The Church does not cry Hosanna because she denies suffering, but because she knows it intimately. In a world convinced that power must be answered with power, Jesus reveals a deeper truth: salvation does not come through escalation, but through self-giving love that refuses to mirror hatred.

The Church does not wave palms because the world is healed. She waves them because the Healer has entered it. We follow a King who carries the grief of Bethany into the streets of Jerusalem, who smells of burial spices even as He is hailed as King, and who allows the cheers of the crowd to fade into the silence of the Cross, so that silence itself may be broken on the third day.

In Christ,

Rincy

 

 

 

 

THEOLOGY FROM THE MARGINS

 

Reflection on the Holy Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of the Great Lent (Canaanite Woman)- St. Matthew 15:21–31.

St. Matthew 15:21–31 stands among the most radical Gospel texts, not because it explicitly speaks about women, but because it allows a woman, foreign, unnamed, and marginalized, to shape the very direction of Jesus’ ministry. The Gospel portion leads us away from familiar religious territory and toward the borders that are geographical, social, and spiritual.

Jesus withdraws to the region of Tyre and Sidon, and there, from the margins, a voice cries out: “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed.”(v.22). It is the cry of a woman. A Canaanite woman. St. Matthew names her deliberately. This is not a neutral label.  It shows her marginalized state on at least three counts: gender, ethnicity (being the “other” in Israel’s history), religious exclusion. She comes with no privilege and no authority but only anguish and faith. She is a mother carrying the pain of her child.

And Jesus is silent.

That silence unsettles us; and it should. For in that silence, the Gospel holds up a mirror to us. It reflects the lived experience of countless women whose cries for justice, dignity, and healing are ignored even within religious spaces.

The disciples, too, are uncomfortable, not with the woman’s suffering, but with her voice. Her pain is inconvenient. Her persistence is disturbing. They say- “Send her away, for she cries out after us.”(v.23)

And this discomfort is painfully familiar. Even today, when women ask for accountability, the response often echoes the same refrain: send her away, why does she cry why does she question, earlier generations of women were innocent… they endured silently… they did not question.”. As long as a woman keeps silent, the system functions smoothly; unchallenged and unexposed. Expecting those who are hurt or vulnerable to remain silent so that your life goes on smoothly; and then remaining silent yourself in the face of that injustice, is not neutrality; rather, it amounts to complicity in injustice and protecting those in power.

Jesus allows her cry to linger, not to dismiss it, but to expose what silence does to the wounded and what it reveals in those who hear but refuse to respond. When Jesus finally speaks, He does not shut her down; He draws her into dialogue. Jesus never tells her to be quiet. He never questions her emotions. He never diminishes her pain.

Nobody cared for women the way Jesus did. Again and again, the Gospels show Jesus turning toward women’s suffering, not away from it. The Fourth Gospel preserves His tender words to Mary Magdalene in her darkest grief: “Woman, why do you weep?” This is not an interrogation. It is an invitation to share pain. It is God making space for grief. Jesus asks women to speak, not because He does not know their pain, but because love listens.

Then Jesus articulates the traditional boundary: “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (v.24)

The woman does not withdraw. She persists. And the discourse descends to the language society uses for the “other”: “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”(v.26)

And then comes one of the most daring theological responses in all of Scripture: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”(v.27)

This is theology spoken from the margins.
This is faith with agency. The Canaanite woman refuses a theology that excludes. She trusts that God’s mercy cannot be confined by borders, ethnicity, or gender. She believes in abundance when the world insists on scarcity.

And Jesus responds with one of the highest affirmations of faith in the Gospel: “Woman, great is your faith!” These words are spoken to a woman. A foreigner. A mother.

The pericope does not end with the Canaanite woman. St. Matthew immediately narrates Jesus healing the lame, blind, mute, and maimed, culminating in the feeding of the multitude. The movement is deliberate: from one excluded woman to an inclusive community of healing. When boundaries are crossed in one courageous encounter, the effects ripple outward. The liberation of one marginalized voice opens space for the healing of many wounded bodies.

For the crumbs that fell from the table became a feast for the world, because one woman dared to believe that God’s mercy could not be contained.

To follow Jesus, then, is to stand beside those who grieve, it is to listen where others turn away, it is to speak where silence wounds. May the Lord grant us ears that truly hear,
hearts that are moved, and voices that speak.

In Christ,

Rincy