“Was there ever love,
    In earth or heaven, equal to this?"[5]

And so the King entered His capital.  It was a royal procession.  Mark keenly the result.  Again that utter, ominous, loud silence, that greeted His ears first, more than three years before.  He had come to His own home.  His own kinsfolk received Him not!

Then each day He came to the city, and each night, homeless, slept out in the open, under the trees of Olivet, and the blue.  Now, He rudely shocks them by clearing the temple areas of the market-place rabble and babble, and now He is healing the lame and maimed in the temple itself, amid the reverent praise of the multitude, the songs of the children, and the scowling, muttered protests of the chief priests.  Calmly, day by day, He moves among them, while their itching fingers vainly clutch for a hold upon Him, and as surely are held back by some invisible force.  By every subtle device known to cunning, crafty men, they lay question-traps, and lie in wait to catch His word.  He foils them with His marvellous, simple answers, lashes them with His keen, cutting parables and finally Himself proposes a question about their own scriptures which they admit themselves unable to answer, and, utterly defeated, ask no more questions.  Then follows that most terrific arraignment of these leaders, with its infinitely tender, sad, closing lament over Jerusalem.  That is the final break.

Then occurs that pathetic Greek incident that seems to agitate Jesus so.  This group of earnest seekers, from the outside, non-Jewish world brings to Jesus a vision of the great hungry heart of the world, and of an open-mindedness to truth such as was to Him these days as a cool, refreshing drink to a dusty mouth on a dry hot day.  But—­no—­the Father’s will—­simple obedience—­only that was right.  The harvest can come only through the grain giving out its life in the cold ground.

Before the final act in the tragedy Jesus retires from sight, probably for prayer.  Some dear friends of Bethany in whose home He had rested many a time, where He ever found sweet-sympathy, arranged a little home-feast for Him where a few congenial friends might gather.  While seated there in the quiet atmosphere of love and fellowship so grateful to Him after those Jerusalem days, one of the friends present, a woman, Mary, takes a box of exceeding costly ointment, and anoints His head.  To the strange protests made, Jesus quietly explains her thought in the act.  She alone understood what was coming.  Alone of all others it was a woman, the simple-hearted Bethany Mary, who understood Jesus.  As none other did she perceive with her keen love-eyes the coming death, and—­more—­its meaning.