Lent 2025 Day 40

Hildegard of Bingen, Mystic and Theologian
Luke 19:28–40 | Philippians 2:5–11
 
The branches shake. The donkey brays. The people cry out.

Palm Sunday is not a quiet procession. It is the stirring of earth, the rustling of palms, the sound of hooves against stone. Jesus rides into Jerusalem not on a steed of war, but on a donkey—humble, low to the ground, with fur bristling and voice loud and raw. It is a subversive arrival. The crowd expects a king. But the King they get is a servant, riding in on creation’s least glorious beast.

Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century mystic, saw God’s glory bursting through all of nature. She wrote of the viriditas, the greening force of life that pulses through leaves and blood, vines and souls. To Hildegard, creation was not a backdrop to the Gospel—it was its co-witness. She once wrote, “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity.”
 
On Palm Sunday, creation shimmers with divine anticipation. The palms, freshly cut and waving, are not ornamental—they are living praise. The stones beneath the crowd hold their breath. The donkey, misunderstood and ungainly, becomes a throne for the God who chose descent instead of domination. Christ’s entry is not only political theater—it is cosmic choreography. All of creation leans toward the city gate, watching.

Luke’s Gospel tells us that when the religious leaders tried to silence the crowd, Jesus replied that even the stones would cry out. Hildegard would say they already are. “Even in the stones there is a song,” she writes. The branches swaying, the donkey braying, the voices rising—this is the earth’s response to incarnation.

Palm Sunday often tempts us into easy dichotomies. Christ the King vs. Christ the Servant. Glory vs. Humility. Hosanna vs. Crucify. But Hildegard’s vision dissolves those binaries. In her cosmos, humility and glory are not opposites—they are intertwined. God’s grandeur is not in strength, but in surrender. Christ is most radiant when riding a donkey, most triumphant when refusing to grasp power.

Philippians 2 invites us to let the same mind be in us that was in Christ. Not a mind of conquest, but of kenosis—self-emptying. This is not a call to passivity, but to rootedness. To walk so closely with creation, with humility, that we join the donkey and the stones and the palms in bearing Christ’s weight into the world.

Hildegard’s God is not found in thrones but in tree roots, not in swords but in sap. This Palm Sunday, we are invited to tune our bodies and our breath to the holy pulse of the earth—to recognize that the donkey’s bray is not noise but proclamation, and that the shaking branches are waving with resurrection already.

Reflection:

• How can you hear creation joining in Palm Sunday’s praise? 
• What would it look like to welcome Christ not with spectacle, but with reverence? 
• How does Hildegard’s image of a greening, singing creation shape your understanding of Holy Week? 

Breath Prayer: Inhale: The earth proclaims… Exhale: …Hosanna in the highest.

May this Holy Week begin not just in songs, but in shaking leaves, braying donkeys, and stones ready to speak. Let us walk with Christ into the heart of things.

Amen.