We attend the 8:30 a.m. at St. Matt’s, avoiding our usual 10:00 a.m. It’s not going to be the usual Latin anyway; rather, it’s the Archbishop, in English. So 8:30’s fine.

The processional antiphon is Richard Proulx, as we’ve had all through Lent. Ah, but not Psalm 130. Today it’s Hosanna to the Son of David, chant, mode VII, choral setting, no less. The procession makes it’s way to the back of the nave, rather than forward to the sanctuary. This is per usual on Palm Sunday. We’ve got palms to bless and then a gospel reading first. From St. Matthew:

Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them,
“Go into the village opposite you,
and immediately you will find an ass tethered,
and a colt with her.”

and

This happened so that what had been spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled:
Say to daughter Zion,
“Behold, your king comes to you,
meek and riding on an ass,
and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.”

This confuses me every year. What’s the deal with riding on both animals at once?

In these things in the New Testament, when they say that such-and-such happened so that some particular thing might be fulfilled, the particular thing necessarily comes from the Old Testament. And here St. Matthew even tells us that it’s from one of the prophets. I assume immediately that it’s our man Isaiah. It’s always Isaiah, isn’t it?

Turns out I’m only half right. It’s a mixing of two passages, one from Isaiah, t’other from Zechariah. Isaiah’s just the “Say to daughter Zion” part. Zechariah’s the one with the livestock. Zechariah 9:9b says:

See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, Meek, and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass.

Goodness. It’s an ass, a colt, and a foal. Now there’s three animals!

Turns out I’m not the only one confused. Notice how Zechariah doesn’t ever use the word and. Apparently St. Matthew was himself somewhat confused. The annotation to the USCCB’s NAB says that the ass and the colt are the same animal, mentioned twice in a rather standard method of Hebrew parallelism. They go on to say that St. Matthew’s confusion leads scholars to believe that he was a Gentile rather than an originally Jewish Christian, mistaking the parallelism for two different animals.

The St. Matthew gospel reading ends with Jesus riding so provocatively into Jerusalem:

The crowds preceding him and those following
kept crying out and saying:
“Hosanna to the Son of David;
blessed is the he who comes in the name of the Lord;
hosanna in the highest.”

Hence the Proulx antiphon this morning. I love things like that. And we get to wave palms as well. Palm Sunday always starts out as a hooting good time.

But, of course, things turn deadly serious later. The gospel reading for the mass proper is again from St. Matthew, all but the first fourteen verses of chapter 26, followed by chapter 27 in full. It’s a solid twenty-five minutes. Two-thousand, six-hundred and seventy-nine words. The heart of the matter:

From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land
until three in the afternoon.
And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice,
“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”
which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Some of the bystanders who heard it said,
“This one is calling for Elijah.”
Immediately one of them ran to get a sponge;
he soaked it in wine, and putting it on a reed,
gave it to him to drink.
But the rest said,
“Wait, let us see if Elijah comes to save him.”
But Jesus cried out again in a loud voice,
and gave up his spirit.

Welcome to Holy Week, people.