Devotion
Palm Sunday
"Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey." — Zechariah 9:9
Nobody asked the donkey.
The disciples were sent ahead to untie it — a creature that had never been ridden, standing in the ordinary dust of an ordinary village — and just like that, its entire life was interrupted by a king. It carried no sword, bore no banner, had no idea what the shouting was about. And yet the weight it carried that day was unlike anything the world had ever placed on an animal’s back.
In G.K. Chesterton’s poem The Donkey, the donkey speaks in the first person, recalling its ugliness and the ages of mockery it endured — before arriving at its singular moment: “I also had my hour / One far fierce hour and sweet.” Chesterton understood what the crowds perhaps did not - that God has a habit of choosing the despised thing as his vehicle.
The crowds saw a king and threw down their cloaks. The Pharisees saw a provocateur and began plotting. The disciples saw their hope made visible and waved palm branches. But the donkey? The donkey simply walked - it placed one unsteady hoof after another on a road carpeted with other people’s coats, surrounded by noise it couldn’t interpret, carrying a burden it hadn’t chosen, going wherever it was led.
The prophecy in Zechariah required a donkey, and so a donkey there would be. Not a war horse, glossy and trained for triumph. Not a gilded chariot. A young donkey, borrowed from a stranger, ridden once and returned. The King of Kings arrived in Jerusalem the way most grace arrives in our lives: quietly, on something humble, without the fanfare we had imagined.
We see that God does not requisition the 'impressive'. He requisitions the available. The donkey was there. It was untied. It was led. That was enough.
The crowds, of course, were looking for something grander. They spread their cloaks and waved their palms and saw in Jesus the kind of king they had always wanted. When he rode past, the whole city was stirred. But stirred is not the same as transformed. Within days, many of the same voices would be calling for his crucifixion.
The donkey, meanwhile, simply walked.
Martin Luther recognised exactly what was happening here. Luther drew a sharp line between two ways of knowing God. The theology of glory, he argued, looks for God in power, triumph, and majesty — in the things that look like God ought to look. The theology of the cross learns to find God precisely where he seems most absent: in weakness, in suffering, in the hidden and the humiliated. Palm Sunday is the theology of the cross in procession. The King rides in not despite the donkey, but through it. The humility is not incidental to the revelation — it is the revelation.
The crowds could not read this. They were theologians of glory to the last, still hoping the palm branches would become spears before the week was out. They wanted a king who looked like a king. What they got was a king who looked like a servant — and would, within days, look like a criminal nailed to a cross. Luther would say that is precisely where you find him: not in the throne room, but in the place of abandonment. Not in the war horse, but in the borrowed donkey.
There is much worth reflecting on in this image. The donkey did not understand the procession. It could not read the prophecy it was fulfilling. It felt the weight on its back and heard the noise on all sides and kept moving — not because it was brave, but because it was obedient to the hand that led it. Chesterton’s donkey, looking back on that hour, does not claim to have grasped its significance. It only knows that it was chosen, and that the choosing was enough.
How often does grace work exactly like this? We are untied from our ordinary places, asked to carry something we didn’t plan for, surrounded by noise we don’t fully understand — and the invitation is simply to keep walking. Not to comprehend the procession, but to trust the one directing it. The theologian of glory wants to understand before they obey. The theologian of the cross learns to obey in the dark.
Chesterton’s donkey had its hour. The question the passage leaves with us is whether we are willing to be untied for ours.
Dear God,
You came on a donkey when the world expected a warhorse. You revealed your glory in the very places we would have looked away. Forgive us for seeking you only where you seem impressive. Train us instead in the way of the cross — to find you in the lowly, the borrowed, and the broken, and to keep walking faithfully even when we cannot see where the road is leading. Amen.
Blessings!
Will Wallace
Principal