Holy Week is the most sacred week in the Christian calendar.

Running from Palm Sunday on March 29 to Easter Sunday on April 5, 2026, it commemorates the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

At its heart is the Easter Triduum that consists of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Three days that changed everything.

But Holy Week is not just history to remember.

It is a mirror to hold up to our own lives.

It asks us a quiet but piercing question:

Do we trust how God chooses? Do we trust who God chooses?

The answer begins on a road into Jerusalem, on the back of a donkey.

Palm Sunday - The Unlikely Entry

The Messiah, the King of Kings, did not ride into Jerusalem on a white horse. He did not arrive with a royal procession or a fanfare of trumpets. He chose a donkey. A simple, ordinary, working animal that people walked past every day without a second glance.

That choice was not accidental. Jesus knew exactly what He was doing. Matthew 21:1–3 shows Him deliberately arranging this. He sent two disciples ahead specifically to find a donkey and bring it to Him. This was not the only option available to the Son of God. It was the chosen one.

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In the world we live in, people who proclaim the Word of God and live by it are often dismissed. They get called naive. Simple. Foolish. In the language of that day, they might be branded as “mere donkeys.”

But here is the truth Palm Sunday reveals: when Jesus chooses to ride on something, even the most ordinary thing becomes extraordinary. Even the donkey that carried the King of Kings had a glory and a dignity in that moment that no chariot could match.

No creation in this world is insignificant.

No person is without worth.

Everyone and everything has a glory assigned to it by the One who made it.

Divine Selection - God Chooses the Overlooked

This pattern of God choosing the unexpected runs all through Scripture. It is not the exception. It is the pattern.

David - The One Who Was Not Called!

When the prophet Samuel went to the home of Jesse to anoint the next King of Israel, Jesse presented his sons one by one. Tall sons. Strong sons. Sons that looked like kings. But God said no to each one.

David was not even called to the gathering. He was out in the fields doing the humble, unglamorous work of watching sheep. His own father did not think he was worth presenting. And yet that is exactly who God chose. The shepherd boy became the king.

The Pattern Continues

Think of Moses! A man with a speech impediment, a fugitive from Egypt, tending someone else’s flock when God appeared to him in a burning bush and said, you are the one I’m sending.

Think of Gideon! Hiding in a winepress, calling himself the least in the weakest clan, when an angel showed up and called him a mighty warrior.

Think of Mary! A young, unknown girl from an unremarkable town called Nazareth, chosen to carry the Son of God.

The logic of heaven has always been different from the logic of the world. The world picks the most qualified, the most polished, the most impressive. God picks the willing heart.

This is not a consolation prize for the overlooked. This is the actual strategy of God. He is not settling. He is choosing deliberately, because His power is made perfect in weakness, and His glory shines brightest through the vessels the world has discarded.

Good Friday - The Cost of Being Chosen

Divine selection does not mean an easy road. Palm Sunday’s hosannas gave way within days to the crowds crying crucify Him. The same city that laid down palm branches before Jesus was the city that handed Him over to be crucified.

Good Friday is where divine selection meets suffering. Jesus, the one chosen before the foundation of the world to be the Lamb of God, walked willingly into the hardest thing imaginable. He was stripped, mocked, beaten, and nailed to a cross between two criminals. To everyone watching, it looked like defeat.

But the cross was not an accident. It was not a plan gone wrong. It was the plan.

Here is the profound mystery of Holy Week: the most powerful act in all of human history looked, from the outside, like total failure. The King of Kings died as a criminal. The one who healed the blind could not come down from the cross. The one who raised the dead went into a tomb.

If you have ever been chosen by God for something that looked like failure from the outside - a calling that cost you, a path that others did not understand, a season that felt like burial - Good Friday says you are in good company. The cross precedes the crown. The tomb comes before the resurrection.

Holy Saturday — The Silence Before the Dawn

Holy Saturday is the most forgotten day of Holy Week. Nothing dramatic happens. The disciples are in hiding. The tomb is sealed. The world goes quiet.

But something is happening that no one can see yet. The work is not finished, and the story is not over. This is the day of waiting, of sitting in the dark not knowing what is coming.

Many of us live in Holy Saturday seasons. We have said yes to God’s calling, we have walked through our own Good Friday, and now we are in the waiting. The promise feels buried. The silence feels heavy.

Holy Saturday invites us to trust. Not because we can see the outcome, but because we know the God who holds it.

Easter Sunday — The Final Word

And then comes Sunday.

The stone is rolled away. The tomb is empty. The one the world rejected is alive. The one who looked like a failure is the firstborn of the new creation. The donkey that carried Him into Jerusalem, the shepherd boy who was not even called to the lineup, the fishermen who were passed over by every other rabbi, the tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers that no one else wanted - all of them now part of the most important story ever told.

The resurrection is God’s final answer to every voice that said you are not enough, you are not qualified, you were not chosen. Easter declares that in God’s economy, what dies gets raised. What is buried gets resurrected. What the world throws away, God raises to glory.

Divine selection is not just about how God chooses people. It is about what God does with the people He chooses. He takes what is broken and makes it whole. He takes what is lowly and lifts it up. He takes what is dead and makes it live.

A Word for This Week

As you walk through Holy Week this year, here is a question worth sitting with:

What if the very thing you are most ashamed of is exactly what God is choosing to use?

What if the season that felt like failure is your Good Friday - not the end, but the doorway?

What if the silence you are sitting in right now is your Holy Saturday - and Sunday is coming?

You may feel like the donkey. Ordinary. Overlooked. Not the obvious choice. But if Jesus chooses to ride on you, everything changes. Your ordinariness becomes the very container for His glory.

You were not an afterthought in God’s plan. You were the plan.

A Closing Prayer

Lord, this Holy Week, we remember how You have always chosen the unexpected.

You chose a donkey over a stallion.

A shepherd over his brothers.

A manger over a palace.

You chose the cross when You could have chosen power.

Help us to trust Your choosing in our own lives.

Help us to stop disqualifying ourselves from what You are calling us toward.

And help us to remember that the tomb is never the last word.

You are.

Amen.

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