“As I pressed against the amassed bodies of the crowd that bright spring morning outside Jerusalem, the dust rose in golden clouds beneath a thousand stamping feet. Palm branches snapped from the trees and waved overhead like green banners of triumph, while men flung their cloaks into the road until the path became a living carpet. I had come with the rest—curious, hopeful, hearts pounding—for word had spread that the prophet from Nazareth was riding in at last. Then He appeared, seated not upon a warhorse but upon a young colt, the foal of an ass, moving with quiet dignity through the shouting throng."

"All around me the cry swelled until it shook the very air: “Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.” My neighbors roared it with clenched fists and flashing eyes, seeing in this man the deliverer who would shatter Rome’s yoke, crown Himself king in David’s palace, and drive the legions into the sea. Their faces burned with the same fierce dream that had kept us alive under Caesar’s heel. Yet even as my own voice joined theirs, something deeper stirred within me. I watched His eyes—steady, sorrow-ful, knowing—and understood what the others could not. This was no earthly conqueror."

"While they cheered a political Messiah who would make Israel great again by the sword, I saw the true King foretold by the prophets: meek, riding upon an ass, come not to take a throne but to give His life. The same hands that steadied a colt would soon be nailed to a cross for the sins of the very crowd now shouting His praise. In that moment, amid the palms and the wild Hosannas, almost alone I felt in my glimpse of who He truly was—the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world—while all the rest cheered a king who would never be in my present lifetime, but surely one of a nobler kind in my next.”