Edna Ninsiima On a donkey he came riding, his followers walking closely behind. The town went into a frenzy. Palm leaves were waved in excitement with energy so excessive you’d think they were heavy to carry. The people removed their clothes and lay them on the ground like a red carpet on which a VIP must walk onto. “The Messiah is here!” They shouted. This is the fairly accurate, at least according to the Bible, description of the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.
Now, sitting here reading about this day again, I can’t help but wonder how it’d be like had it happened today. Another thought I fail to resist, as is with every scene in every book anyway, is a close contemporary comparison to the situation. Luckily for me today I don’t have to search my mind for long as it almost immediately brings me to the recent events in that glorious town whose setting I know too well.
A town so beautiful, peaceful and often enviably referred too as that town of two most delicious and highly nourishing foods. It is the Zion, I daresay. “Town of Peace” like Jerusalem is/was so admirable referred to. This town whose streets until then I’d never seen as crowded as they were. Sure, the town has over the years become busier, what with the rapid both population and economic growth. However, on that day of one man’s visit of the town, it suddenly looked like the entire population of the country was gathered here. The not-so-wide streets which I’m very familiar with seemed to be, even in near oblivion, silently suffocating beneath this mammoth crowd that now completely overshadowed them.
The man, visibly elated and overwhelmed, instead of on a colt, rode in his famous or infamous depending on how you look at it, automobile that some have argued; should it breathe its last, must be preserved in a museum as an important piece of the puzzle of our country’s history. The people were in place of palm leaves, waving fingers symbolic of peace. They instead of laying down their clothes, went into their farms and picked as gifts for him, their finest animals. This man who is on a road that a brilliant journalist-cum-author described to be “long, bumpy and often bloody,” and said that he had long began a war, “from which there is neither retreat nor surrender,” is the closest I’ve seen in comparison to the Messiah who decades and decades ago triumphantly walked or rather rode into Jerusalem.
Now, whether he is indeed our present day Messiah who might one day “save us all,” that I guess we shall find out……..but close enough, don’t you think?
Happy Palm Sunday!
