The donkey plays a surprisingly significant role in the history of Israel’s kingdom. Entering into Jerusalem on the back of a colt, Jesus performs a symbolic action that manifests his true identity and the character of his kingdom.
Jesus bears God’s seal of origin, the sign that he is God’s message to humanity. Yet this seal often remains unbroken, the message unreceived.
Jesus’s example in resisting the crowd’s desire to make him a king following his feeding of the five thousand is a challenge to a Church that so often pursues political power. It presents us with a vision of a Church characterized by ‘downward mobility’.
Israel’s experience of thirst in the wilderness should draw our attention to the experience of those for whom thirst and lack of water is a reality of life in our own day. We must identify and address some of the ways in which we are complicit in the forms of injustice that produce such a situation.
In likening kingdoms lacking justice to criminal syndicates, Augustine invokes the story of a confrontation between Alexander the Great and a pirate. Indeed, Augustine judges “that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor’” (De civ. Dei 4.4.1).
For the family of the late Trayvon Martin, Saturday’s ruling – that George Zimmerman was found not guilty of any wrongdoing in his shooting of Trayvon – is a terrible tragedy, and a miscarrying of justice, compounding an already vast sea of grief.
Jesus presents himself as a physician, and offers one of his most programmatic statements of ethics. The sick need a doctor, not the healthy. Why then does church seem designed for the already well?
Those of us who weep with Mary also hear the assignment she was given–to turn to her community and remind them of the unconquerable truth of God’s love.
Our dear brother Pete calls himself a “Christian” and is titled the “secretary of war” today. But when it comes to real faith and realist politics, he is woefully adolescent.