Palm Sunday – 29 March 2026
Today we commemorate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, the place from which he will be arrested, tired and crucified. Yet there is something unsettling about the way Jesus enters Jerusalem. He does not slip quietly into the city. He does not avoid attention. Rather, he chooses this moment. He sends for the donkey. He rides into the city as the crowd cries out “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” This is not accidental. This is Jesus intentionally laying claim to his city. And yet, everything about it feels wrong. Because if a king comes to claim his city, we expect strength, control, stability, visible power But Jesus comes on a donkey. Not a war horse. Not a symbol of dominance. But a poor animal of burden.
This is exactly what makes this Gospel so difficult for us to hear today. Because we are living in a moment where the world feels increasingly fragile. We see war widening in the Middle East. We are told of oil supplies disrupted, of shipping routes threatened, of energy markets shaken. And we feel the consequences much closer to home: rising fuel prices; increasing cost of living. pressure on families; the quiet fear that what has felt stable may not remain so. Even economists now speak of the risk of prolonged inflation and economic slowdown if the conflict continues. Like the crowds in Jerusalem, we long for a kind of salvation that looks like control. We want stability restored, systems secured, uncertainty removed. We want a king who will fix things. But instead, we are given this king: a king on a donkey.
This is the great revelation of Palm Sunday: Jesus does not come to take control of the world’s instability. He comes to enter it. Indeed, what follows his entry into Jerusalem is not triumph in any worldly sense. Within days the crowd turns, power closes in around him, everything seems to collapse And he is led, not to a throne, but to a cross. But this is the mystery we are asked to see: This is not the failure of his kingship. This is its true form.
Jesus does not save the world by standing above its fear. He saves it by entering it completely. Into violence. Into uncertainty. Into suffering. Into all that we are now experiencing in our own way.
This why he rides a donkey. Because he is a king who does not dominate—but bears. He carries the weight of his people, the burden of their fear, the consequences of a broken world. He carries them all the way to the cross. And this means in a time when we feel the weight of global instability, when the future feels uncertain, when even the basic structures of life feel fragile— Christ is not absent from that experience. He is already within it.
Yet even further, Jesus shows us how to live within it. Not by grasping for control. Not by giving ourselves over to fear.But by a different kind of strength: the strength to remain; the strength to trust; the strength to walk forward, even when the road leads through suffering. Because the one who rides into Jerusalem on a donkey is already the one who will reign from the cross. And the cross is not the collapse of his power. It is the revelation of it.
This is the image we carry into this Holy Week: A world unsettled. A city filled with tension. A people longing for security. And into the midst of it— not above it, not outside it— a king comes riding on a donkey. Not to take the burden away, but to take it upon himself. And if we have the courage to follow him, we will discover that even now, in the uncertainty of our time, God is not losing hold of the world. He is drawing it—slowly, quietly, but decisively—toward a kingdom that does not pass away.
