Palm Sunday, ca. 33 AD

I came to Jerusalem for Passover. I came wearing my threadbare robe, my feet dusty and bare and raw from the road. I walked the sixty stadia from Herodium, left my work as a stonecutter erecting further glories to the Herods and Caesars. I walked from the shadow of that monstrous hill that my grandfather and his neighbors raised with bucketfuls of dirt mortared with weeping, and as I shuffled along, the pilgrim throngs—the shouting, singing, weeping, laughing, weary masses—stirred themselves to a half-forgotten dance as the memory of freedom, of the great exodus, of the terrible spirit that passed over the crimson lintels rose hazily before them. Yes, and as the memory rose, so did the faint outlines of Jerusalem on its hill, changed through our psalms and our boasts into Zion the glorious, Zion of the glad-hearted; I stumbled mutely, half-mumbling along with the choruses, but in my heart of hearts, I felt the wondrous thrill of possibility—might we at last see the promised Root striking the earth with the rod of his mouth?

The city roiled and churned, an overfull pot; it swelled like a lump of dough, and the leaven that coursed through it was a whisper, a drunken shout, a sullen glare cast at passing legionnaires: Might this Nazarene be Messiah? Might we see him trampling kings underfoot, and making them as dust with his sword?

The news came first in isolated trickles, then in dancing streams, but finally as a riotous torrent of disembodied shouting—“Jesus comes to Jerusalem, triumphant! The King rides upon the Mount of Olives!”

The crowd snaked through the streets, as boys perched clamorously in the city’s palms like so many starlings, tearing and slashing at fronds, and throwing them down to outstretched arms below. Straining, I caught a branch, and waved it high overhead, rejoicing before the Lord as I clutched the flag of our ambition, the sign of the promise that the Lord's wrathful anger would one day fall on the oppressor.

We flooded out the Golden Gate, lining the road that dipped out of the west. I fought through the wild, expectant crowd for a view of the road, clawing and snatching joyously, catching a stray elbow with my right temple, so that for a moment it seemed to me the heavens were shaken, and the stars danced and fell before my eyes.

When my vision cleared, I looked down the right, and saw the party creep into view over a rise. First came his disciples, a shabby honor guard—unarmed, unwashed, unsure of themselves, some cringing before the throngs, some preening nervously. They pressed close to the Master, who sat astride a scrawny donkey that tossed its head and rolled its eyes fearfully, but never faltered in its steady plod. When they drew near enough for me to study the promised King from behind my cries, I noticed first his robe, stained and mended, then his hair ragged and short, and his features, broad, flat, and framed with a scraggly beard. I considered the fierce descriptions I had heard of Theudas and Judas the Galilean, and he seemed a frail thing by comparison.

He met my gaze, and I saw that he was weeping silently. He wept, and suddenly I was naked before him in all my anger, my vain clutching, my despair. His visage was sorrow, but glimmering beneath it like jewels at the bottom of a stream was mirth, and even as he wept for me, he mocked me for my foolishness, scoffed at my grave pretensions to conquer and rule. His expression was sorrow and mirth, but I remembered it in the weeks that followed as patience, as though he bore within him a burden too heavy to express, except in a slow, silent weeping.

He met my gaze, and I felt that he knew me, but this eternal moment was quickly gone; I saw that all around the crowd cast its cloaks and branches into the road, welcoming a triumphant conqueror, shouting their Hosannas!, quoting the psalms. I saw them, and a sudden despair welled within me, so that my legs wobbled, and brought me to my knees. I too laid my frond down, but not as to a general—I laid it down as a drunkard casts away his empty glass, as a bully casts away his stones. They shouted their Hosannas, but I could only mouth, “Forgive me. Forgive me, I knew not what I did.” The weeping prophet passed, and I knew that he was no King I had watched to herald. He passed, and it seemed that his tears welled within my eyes, and I wept for Jerusalem, bloody, boisterous, blindly jubilant Jerusalem, and for that weeping and mirthful prophet, who would do nothing for us but die, and by hands such as mine.