Palm Sunday is an exuberant day. At least the first one was. After Jesus's entrance into Jerusalem the crowd shouted, "Hosanna!" I secretly always wanted my little kids to be unruly just this once, because they were allowed to be. When the disciples were too jubilant the Pharisees baited Jesus to rebuke them. He refused.
"If they are silent the very stones would shout."
There is often a donkey at this festival service, which is marvelous, but one year there was her colt as well. The crowd waved their branches and laid them down, just as the mama was being led on a harness. Her baby trotted at her left flank trying to keep up, but he had no lead rope. He was untethered.
Which brought a lump to my throat.
Of course there was no need to coerce the colt to follow his mother. You would be hard pressed to get him not to. Mama meant safety. Warm milk. Soft fur. Yet seeing the colt walking freely struck me as immensely tender.
Back when I had chickens I would try to herd eight chicks into their pen, knowing that I could do it the hard way or the easy way. The hard way was trying to catch them, which is worse than playing croquet without a mallet. Stooping over, missing, standing up and running again was a wild goose chase, only it was a wild chicks chase. The easy way was to toss bread into the pen which lured mama in, and her chicks scampered after her, not so much for the bread as to
avoid being left behind.
God seems heavily invested in keeping us free. The Creator of heaven and earth could probably have concocted a strategy for harnessing each of us and yanking us into compliance. Yet our freedom is even higher on His wish list than us being kind. Which is saying something.
I want to be like that colt. I want to follow the One leading me not because there is a noose around my neck but because it feels like home. Plus I don't want to be left behind.
People have free choice because they feel life within themselves just as if it were their own. God allows people to feel this so that He can be conjoined with them, for He cannot be conjoined with them unless it is reciprocal, and it becomes reciprocal only when they act in freedom altogether as from themselves.
True Christian Religion 504:7 Emanuel Swedenborg
