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