Every Crucifixion Has a Crowd
Our vanity tells us we would have been different. The Gospel challenges us to consider otherwise.
Dear friends,
Letters from Leo is publishing daily Lenten reflections through Easter, available exclusively to paid subscribers.
This series is a journey of repentance, renewal, and resolve — a sustained encounter between the day’s scripture readings and the demands of the Gospel in our time.
Each reflection invites you into prayer, confronting the idols we carry and the mercy that waits on the other side.
Holy Week begins today. It’s not too late to join us.
I promise you it’s a journey you won’t regret.
“Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; hosanna in the highest.” — Matthew 21:9
The palms go up so easily. That is what strikes me every year about this Sunday — how natural it feels to wave them, to sing Hosanna, to join the procession as though we already know how the story ends. We do know. And yet we still wave.
What we rarely acknowledge is how quickly those same hands drop the palms and reach for something else. Matthew’s Gospel today covers the entire distance from triumphal entry to “Crucify him!” in a single liturgy.
The Church forces us to hold both scenes at once because she knows something about us that we would rather not admit: the people who welcomed Jesus and the people who condemned him were largely the same.
Romano Guardini, in his masterwork The Lord, captures the strange electricity of that first Palm Sunday.
The common people — “the little ones,” as Jesus called them — saw what the powerful could not see. Their eyes were open to the Spirit moving through the streets of Jerusalem. Guardini writes that in these ordinary people, the Spirit could operate “untrammelled by the consciousness of their own human value.” The elites missed Jesus because their self-importance blinded them. The poor saw him because they had nothing to protect.
But Guardini asks the question that still burns across the centuries: “Will those seized by its power also find the strength to act according to the Spirit?”
By Friday, we had our answer.
That failure was not unique to first-century Jerusalem. We rehearse it constantly today in 2026.
