Martin Luther King staged a march from Selma to Montgomery on March 21-25, 1965. The demonstrators marched for voting rights in a state where a bomb had killed four little African American girls in Sunday school. The idea of the walk was simple: a crowd of people would walk from the segregated town of Selma to the state’s capitol together. But the walk was earth-shattering because of all it symbolized and the history behind it.

Jesus marched, too. His travel was also simple — from Bethany to Jerusalem on a donkey. It was a common journey, walked by Jesus many times before.

The difference this time was the symbolism. Jesus was a Jewish man who knew scripture. He knew what the prophet Zechariah had written hundreds of years before. And he realized that everyone around him would know it, too. So Jesus rode into Jerusalem, “humble and riding on an ass, on a colt, the offspring of a donkey,” and by doing so he inspired all to see that he was the king that Zechariah anticipated.

Jane Hartwell