Maggie's Farm

We will try to do a Holy Week post daily. I remembered yesterday why Christ rode a donkey into Jerusalem for Passover. A horse meant war - a donkey meant humility. A quote from David Warren's Palm Sunday post:

...Which is not to present Christ as the gliberals paint him today -- as some kind of fatuous pacifist preaching tolerance and multiculturalism. He was the one who said, in the Gospel of Matthew, “I bring not peace but a sword,” and that he would “set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother.” In Luke: “Do you think I come to bring peace on earth? I tell you, no.”

Upon entering Jerusalem through St Stephen’s Gate, he turned left and into the Temple -- to do what? He pushed over the tables of the money changers, made a whip to scourge the sellers of sacrificial cattle and sheep, told the dove-sellers to (euphemism) “get out of here”.

This is the Christ that Western man has deleted from his collective memory. The Christ who was not, incidentally, making some effete protest against the commercialization of religion. Rather, the one who, as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos before him, was denouncing the cult of animal sacrifice -- the reduction of religion to cheap acts of propitiation; the violence done to God. And the remark he makes about the “den of robbers” is quoted from Jeremiah, who had stood at the same spot, making the same point, six centuries before.