Palm Sunday was yesterday, Good Friday is on April 3 and Easter is on April 5 so Happy Easter in advance, dear readers. I know that Christmas and Easter are the most important Christian festivals, but I also have a soft corner for Palm Sunday. It marks the day when Jesus entered Jerusalem to observe the Jewish festival of Passover, humbly riding on a donkey, fulfilling the prophecy in Zechariah 9:9-10, “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey”.
Jesus radiated the lustre of a chosen being, which powerfully affected those blessed to see him that day. He was welcomed into the city to happy cries of ‘Hosanna!’, a Jewish phrase of adoration and praise, and ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’. They threw palm leaves at his feet to cover his path, just as we in India strew flowers on the path of those we wish to ceremonially welcome.
The descriptions I read of Palm Sunday painted a vivid picture in my mind, and my fondness for it was sealed when I read a poem by the early 20th-century English writer G K Chesterton. I had already read and enjoyed his books on priest-detective Father Brown, which I devoured from my father’s bookshelves. And one day, I came upon Chesterton’s poem The Donkey, in which a donkey representing all donkeyhood, says how they are ‘the tattered outlaw of the earth’, scorned and abused by all as ‘the devil’s walking parody of all four-footed things’. But the last, climactic verse is positively incandescent: ‘Fools! For I also had my hour; one far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears; and palms before my feet.’
That last verse is about Palm Sunday from the donkey’s point of view, and the poem lodged straight away with me as a favourite, both out of sympathy for the donkey and the thrill that the last verse conveyed of that sunny, festive morning long ago in ancient Jerusalem. As to which, baby donkeys were apparently the equivalent of cuddly teddy bears in ancient India. A person conversant with Sanskrit also told me that baby donkeys were called ‘priyadarshi’, meaning ‘dear to behold’.
But why did Jesus go to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover? Of course, because he was Jewish, and also sensed he would die there, but what was the significance of that festival? It falls this year from the evening of Wednesday, April 1 to Thursday, April 9 which lets me convey warm Passover greetings to all Jewish readers.
Passover, called Pesach in Hebrew, commemorates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, where they were enslaved by the Pharaohs. They were so crushed and exhausted by their daily forced labour and whippings that they were in no mental state to seek their god Yahweh, or think spiritual thoughts. So, Yahweh sought them out and came to their rescue. He told Moses to lead his people out of exile. Before that, he sent ten plagues to Egypt.
According to the Shemot or Book of Exodus in the Torah, Yahweh commanded Moses to tell the Israelites to slaughter a lamb and mark their door frames with its blood, and eat the lamb for dinner. For that night, he would send the Angel of Death to execute the tenth plague, in which he would smite all the firstborn in Egypt. But when the angel saw the blood on the Israelites' doorframes, he would pass over their homes to spare them the plague. Hence, the name Passover.
This resonates with Indian belief, as in the idea that god himself comes to save us from age to age. The Passover gathering, called Seder, which I have attended in Delhi, involves retelling the story of the exodus and eating special foods that evoke it. A Seder plate usually has six items, including boiled eggs, symbolising revival and zeroa, a roasted lamb shank or chicken wing. It is the only meat on the Seder plate, symbolising the Paschal Lamb or Korban Pesach, as the Passover sacrifice is called in Hebrew. This meat symbolises the sacrifice of the lamb whose blood was painted on the doorway of the Israelite slaves' houses to deflect the Angel of Death. Thus, Jesus himself came to be called the Paschal Lamb or sacrificial Lamb of God, for dying on the cross.
The chief Seder items, which Jesus, too, would have eaten, are maror or bitter herbs, recalling the suffering of the Jews in Egypt. Their word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, ‘the narrow place’, from which Hindi gets the word ‘Misr’ for Egypt.
The second must-have on the Seder plate is charoset, a sweet, brown mixture symbolising the brick and mortar enslaved Jews used to construct buildings in Egypt. Charoset is made of chopped nuts, apples, dates or figs, cinnamon and sweet red wine.
Moses says in Deuteronomy 24:18-19: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this. When you are harvesting in your field, and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands”—the compassion that is also at the heart of the Gospel of Christ.
One cannot think of Palm Sunday without recalling Passover and the divine assurance they both seek to convey.
Renuka Narayanan | FAITHLINE | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
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