Jesus’ hours of earthly triumph

Following is an excerpt from The Gospel As Revealed to Me written by Maria Valtorta(1) from mystical visions and locutions she received from Jesus, on the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday:

I see the people in the crowd getting mixed up continuously, and known faces appear and disappear: all the disciples from all the places in Palestine, all the followers… I see Jairus for a moment, and Jaia, the youth from Pella (I think), who was blind like his mother and was cured by Jesus, I see Joachim from Bozrah and the peasant from the plain of Sharon with his brothers, I see lonely old Matthias from a place near the Jordan, on the eastern bank, where Jesus took shelter when the place was all flooded, I see Zacchaeus with his converted friends, I see old John from Nob with almost all the citizens, I see the husband of Sarah from Juttah… But who can cope with faces and names, if it is a kaleidoscope of known and unknown faces, seen several times or only once?… Now there is the face of the little shepherd brought from Enon. And, near him, is the disciple from Korazim who did not bury his father to follow Jesus; and close to him, for a moment, the father and mother of Benjamin from Capernaum with their son, who almost falls under the hooves of the little donkey when he throws himself forward to receive a caress from Jesus.

And—unfortunately—there are faces of Pharisees and scribes, livid with rage because of this triumph, and they overbearingly elbow their way through the circle of love that is pressing round Jesus and they shout to Him: "Make these mad people keep quiet! Make them reason! Hosannas are to be sung to God only. Tell them to be quiet!"

And Jesus replies to them kindly: "Even if I told them to be silent and they obeyed Me, the stones would extol the wonders of the Word of God."

…"Your Mother!" shouts Peter, pointing at a house almost at the corner of a street that leads up to the Moriah and along which the procession begins to pass. And Jesus looks up to smile at His Mother, who is up there among the faithful women.

(1) Maria Valtorta (1897 – 1961) was a Roman Catholic Italian writer and poet. She was a Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary. She lived most of her life bedridden in Viareggio, Italy. She claimed to receive visions of scenes from the Gospel that she wrote down in many notebooks.

Maria Valtorta