Thought for the week - 29 March 2026

It is Holy Week, and we are called to be Holy, and over the course of the week there are all sorts of ways to grow in holiness, whether it be the plethora of services that we have on, or anointing with oils on Tuesday and Wednesday evening, or helping with the school easter play on Thursday, or cooking for the weekend and shopping without shouting at people, or avoiding eating your chocolate eggs yet, or just putting up with people in general – all these things can help us to increase in holiness if handled well.

If you have an idle moment in the next week, which is maybe unlikely (although it is exactly what we should all be doing!), you can wander the streets of Bethphage on Google Maps. It doesn’t seem particularly remarkable today and I doubt it did when Jesus arrived there on his way to Jerusalem. I mean no offence to Bethphageans when I say that it has the feel of a commuter town about it: most of the people there now probably work in Jerusalem, just a couple of miles away. But in Jesus’s time, things might have been the other way around. Many in Jerusalem would have had their eye on Bethphage, a place that had acquired an enormous significance in the expectations of the religious leaders and thinkers of Jesus’s day. Bethphage meant something unflattering like ‘house of the unripe figs’ but it was to be the place where the ripening took place, the scene of a great clash between good and evil, the stage where the Lord’s judgment would finally be pronounced. Bethphage, in all of its ordinariness, was a sign of an awaited liberation.

St Matthew’s Gospel assumes that we know all of that – and indeed we should, we have neglected our Bible studying for too long. St Matthew mostly seems concerned to show that Jesus, for all of his surprise and subversion, did precisely what the Messiah was supposed to do, in coming via Bethphage. It is important that we know that He went there. Matthew stresses that in the humility of the incarnate Son there is no loss of majesty. Nonetheless, we can see something of the otherness of Bethphage playing itself out in Jesus’s triumphal entry into the Holy City. By faith, we do indeed see God in Christ carving a new pathway into our world, a pathway that will lead onwards through the Lord’s death and into the glory of resurrection. We do indeed hear the city rumbling, not with the sound of earthquake but with the sound of exultation, the raucous singing of ‘Hosanna’, the bustle and movement of bodies as they gather themselves and others around the Messiah. We can easily sense the excitement, the feeling of fulfilment, the pulse that now is the favourable time, the intuition that something is indeed ripening in their midst. Here is the fulfilment of ancient prophecy, here is the King, here is the Messiah, exactly as He should be.

But not quite. We know—as the first readers of Matthew’s Gospel knew—that the crowds will turn on Jesus within a matter of hours. Things are not quite right; the signs and symbols are all out of joint. The victorious Christ does not arrive on the warhorse but on a donkey. Palm branches were liturgically suited to the celebration of Tabernacles rather than Passover. The greeting ‘Hosanna’ literally means ‘please save us’, but does it sound more like triumphalism or desperation?  Did they think ‘well, we were hoping for something else, but we can work with what we have got’? But it might also be that this is some kind of deconstruction of the rituals of power politics, the unmasking of their utter absurdity in their fulfilment by the living presence of divine power himself.

There is certainly something playful about this, but pantomime doesn’t quite capture it: Jesus is not mocking or jesting, or even simply pushing the boundaries; he is deadly serious. The crowd are swept up into his dramatic act of redemption, drawn to participate in the deconstruction of their own illusions and fantasies of political liberation. No longer mere observers, they are now participants in the process of ripening. This, of course, will have consequences that they cannot yet foresee. Who is this? What will happen now? Maybe Bethphage is far too dull a place for a messiah from dull Nazareth to come from, and what of the donkey anyway? And the palm branches? It’s all a bit wrong, and there is a fear that things are going to get worse, not better.

But reject your expectations, what we are going to get is what God gives us, and it will help us grow in holiness and hope, and it shows the sovereignty of God, on a donkey, in a dull suburb, with unexpected people, and the cries of ‘please save us’ will turn to the knowledge that we are saved, if we live this week with Him.