By Eduardo Magaña
My Easter thoughts do not arrive as certainties. They come instead like a conversation that returns each year with the steady cadence of church bells, yet always carrying new questions. The story of Jesus does not change, of course. I am the one who does.
This year, I found myself lingering on the donkey.
Not the crucifixion, not yet, but that image from Palm Sunday that years of Christian tradition have rendered so familiar we sometimes stop seeing it: Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey, palms and garments laid along the road, the crowd shouting his name.
For someone who knew how the week would end, and there is something in the Gospels that suggests Jesus knew it with a clarity I can hardly imagine, the choice of that animal carries a weight that extends beyond symbolism. He could have arrived differently. He chose not to.
He chose the humble. He chose the ordinary. He chose, in a way, the manner in which the things that truly matter tend to arrive.
The kingdom of God, I have learned over the years, does not operate by the logic of human understanding. Where we imagine power, He introduces humility. Where we expect visible grandeur, He leans into the ordinary. I know this. I have always believed it. And yet every Holy Week I find myself having to learn it again.
Because at our core, we keep asking for the same things, no matter how many times we experience otherwise: visible success, external validation, a life that fits our own definitions of victory. We want God to bless our plans, but rarely do we pause to discern His. We ask for outcomes; He shapes character. We ask for answers; He offers processes.
And the process, almost always, looks far more like a donkey than a throne.
That crowd shouting “Hosanna” was made up of very different people, united by a shared expectation, and also by a shared confusion. They expected a political liberator and received something infinitely deeper: a king who came not to conquer territories, but hearts.
I think of them without judgment. The confusion between what we ask for and what we actually need may be one of the most persistent conditions of being human.
Jesus knew all of this. He knew that the same city welcoming Him with palms would hand Him over days later. And still, He moved forward. He did not negotiate His mission. He did not search for a more comfortable exit.
Every time I think about that, something in me fractures. He knew, and continued. Why, then, do I stop when fear begins to close in?
Between Sunday and Thursday, the Gospels leave us with silences. And then comes the Last Supper, that moment when Jesus breaks bread, looks at those closest to Him, and says something that has not lost a single ounce of its weight in two thousand years: I am the way, the truth, and the life.
Not one option among many. Not a suggestion for those inclined to take it. The way.
There are nights when that statement holds me without effort. And there are nights when I have to choose it again, consciously, deliberately, because the immediate evidence does not seem to confirm it. Faith, I have come to understand, lives in that tension. Not in the absence of doubt, but in the decision to keep walking despite it.
Good Friday dismantles any romantic notion of what it means to follow Jesus. There are no soft metaphors: there is betrayal, abandonment, violence. Peter denies. Judas betrays. The others scatter. And Jesus, alone, walks through what He must walk through.
What stops me each year, more than the magnitude of the narrative, are the seven phrases the Bible distributes across the hours on the cross. Read together, they do not form a speech so much as a map: seven openings from the darkest place toward something not yet fully visible, but already unfolding.
They begin with forgiveness toward those executing Him and end with total surrender to the Father. In between, there is everything: a promise to a dying thief, care for His mother, a cry of abandonment, a physical need, a declaration of completion. In other words, there is full humanity.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” It unsettles me that this is the first. Not a defense of His innocence, not a protest. Forgiveness. Even in agony, Jesus breaks the cycle not with anger but with grace, and in doing so reveals that forgiveness is not sentimental, it is liberating, for the one who offers it as much as for the one who receives it.
“Today you will be with me in paradise.” There is no extended process, no requirements to fulfill. Only a man beside Him, in his final moment, who recognizes Him. And Jesus opens the door. Grace here is not a reward for consistency; it is a gift, undeserved, always undeserved.
“Woman, behold your son.” Even as the world collapses, Jesus pauses to order what is essential: care, relationship, community. As if to say, without saying it, that no mission is complete if it neglects the people within its reach.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is the phrase that moves me most, and perhaps the one I need most. Because Jesus does not hide the feeling of absence; He speaks it. In doing so, He legitimizes something many of us try to conceal, the experience of feeling alone in the midst of life and faith. He passed through that darkness before us. Not so we would never feel it, but so we would not carry it alone.
“I thirst.” Two words that bring the entire scene back into the body. Not only the Son of God, but a man, exhausted, vulnerable, physically in need. Spirituality does not cancel the human; it includes it.
“It is finished.” Not the end of His life, but the completion of a purpose embraced with full awareness. There is a kind of freedom in that statement for those of us who are constantly beginning things and rarely bringing them to their end.
“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” No resistance. No attempt at control. Only trust, a surrender that does not read as defeat, but as rest. As if, in the end, faith were exactly this: to do what is yours to do, and then to let go. Not because you understand every part of the path, but because you trust the One who drew it.
This week, I caught myself measuring my actions with a standard I had built myself. “A follower of Jesus would not do this.” “Would not say that.” “Would not fail this way.” A faith turned into an unreachable benchmark becomes a burden, and I have carried that version longer than I would like to admit.
But Easter, in its purest essence, says otherwise.
It says that weakness is not the end of the story. That failure does not cancel the calling. That grace does not run out because of our mistakes. If the cross proves anything, it is precisely this: that the love of God is not conditioned by our performance.
And then Sunday arrives.
Resurrection Sunday is not merely the closing of a story; it is the complete reversal of human logic. Where there was death, there is life. Where there was defeat, there is victory. The tomb is empty, and in that absence, that stone rolled away, that body no longer there, emerges one of the most radical truths of the Christian faith: it is always possible to begin again.
Every morning is, in a sense, a small resurrection. A chance to return. To recalibrate. To attempt, even if only slightly more, to live like the one who chose the donkey over the horse, the cross over the throne, and sacrifice over power.
Jesus could have asked for anything. He asked for a donkey. Salvation did not arrive wrapped in gold; it came in a manger, grew up in Nazareth, and entered Jerusalem on a beast of burden. At every stage, God chose what we would have overlooked.
And at every stage, He asks the same of us: to trust even when the plan seems insufficient. To believe even when the form does not match the promise. The donkey was never the problem. It never was. The problem was us, waiting for something more impressive, failing to see that glory was already passing before our eyes.
God does not ask for perfection.
He asks us to return.
Eduardo Magaña 
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