Homily at Our Lady of the Valleys for Palm Sunday 2024.
Consider the humble donkey.
Jesus rode into Jerusalem, we are told, on a colt – a young male donkey which no-one had ever ridden. And this donkey is important – so much so that St Mark stresses how it was brought because the Master needed it. Just as Our Lord’s mission began in the wilderness, with the ‘wild beasts’ so here it concludes with an untamed donkey.
This is not the first donkey we’ve met this Lent. When Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed on Mount Moriah, he rode on a donkey – but the first-born son was saved by the sacrifice of the ram provided by God.
Donkeys themselves were unique in Jewish law. They were not considered “clean” animals so they could not be eaten or offered in sacrifice. Yet if a donkey bore a colt, the owner was obliged to redeem it by offering a lamb in sacrifice.
The prophet Zechariah declared that Jerusalem’s King would come in humility, not riding on a great war horse like other kings, but on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
And so Christ comes, riding on a donkey. He accepts the crowds shouting “Hosanna!” for yes, he is the true King, entering Jerusalem. But he enters in humility, riding a donkey. And when the crowd tuns against him, and shouts “Crucify Him!” he submits. He does not resist.
Any Jewish farmer with a newborn colt must make a decision. Which is worth more to him – the donkey, or one of his lambs? For the Jewish Law required that he must either redeem the donkey by offering a lamb at the temple, or else destroy the donkey.
Our Lord Jesus is the Lamb of sacrifice. And the donkey that must be redeemed? The donkey which is not, of itself, clean and yet is precious to God? That donkey which is worth the blood of the most precious of Lambs? That donkey is you.
He did it for you.
In a longer reflection, I might have noted that a donkey can be redeemed not only with a lamb, but also with a goat. Yet the offering of a goat might itself remind us of the scapegoat, loaded with all the people’s sins and sent outside the city to die.
Matthew tells us Jesus rode on a (she)-donkey and on its colt. Obviously you cannot ride both at the same time, so he may have used the older donkey for part of his journey and then ridden the smaller colt only for the trumphal entrance. This gives us the image of the “mother and son” sharing a mission, which echoes in a small way Mary’s presence at the foot of the Cross.
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