Whenever I read the events of Holy Week, I often need to remind myself that the events of this week pertained not to a mere man, or even to an extraordinary man like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, but to God made flesh. The creator of the universe, of all being, the one in whom, as St. Paul writes, ‘we live, we move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), became a human being. Therefore, the actions taken, and all the actions suffered, by Jesus are the actions and events of the person of God walking upon the earth.
If this narrative was a Roman myth, we might expect Jesus, as God made man, to ride into Rome on a chariot accompanied by an army of angels ready to dethrone Caesar. In this light, it strikes me how relatively domestic are the events of palm Sunday. Cleary, they echo Zechariah’s prophecy, ‘tell the daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming to you, humble, mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey’ (Zech 9.9). But I also think that these events point to the paradoxical nature of truth we find in the Gospel of Christ. He was greeted not by saluting armies, but ordinary people waving palm leaves. In Jesus, we see that the divine presence dwelt in the ordinary, and the local. In his earthly life, God on earth lead a human life. Jesus was the son of a carpenter and it seems that He spent most of His life in one of the most obscure parts of the Roman Empire, Galilee. He laughed, he wept, he experienced a childhood, and the emotional life of a human being.
Yet for some this is something, prima facie, discomforting. In his work, The Prince, Machiavelli said by secular standards Jesus’ life was a not a kingly life but a failure, as his life was marked by a continual descent even to the point of being tried and executed as a lowly criminal.
The paradoxical glory shown in the story of Holy week is that in Jesus’ descent lies our ascent. Jesus’ humility by riding on a young donkey, indeed by dying on the cross, in fact exceeds any secular symbol of monarchy because in the person of Jesus lies our human ascent to glorification in God.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote that the ultimate goal of Jesus’ ascent into Jerusalem is the ascent to ‘his self-offering on the cross, which supplants the old sacrifices; it is the ascent that the Letter of the Hebrews describes as going up, not to a sanctuary made by human hands, but to heaven itself, into the presence of God. This ascent into God’s presence leads via the cross- it is the ascent toward ‘loving to the end’ which is the real mountain of God.’
As he participated in our life, endured our pains, our sufferings, may we participate in His life, and through His cross, resurrection and ascension may we be glorified and ascend with Him who became one of us.
The Fine Game of Nil 