"Tell the daughter of Zion, Behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass.

"Blessed is he that cometh ..." Some of us never knew there was such a thing as English grammar until we had to learn it the hard way by taking first year Latin in high school. Verbs and nouns and pronouns were a mystery to us, although in time we did learn that there were tenses to verbs such as present, past, and future. These were pigeon holes in which we could fit action now, again past, action that was not yet but would be.

So, when Matthew says in today’s Palm Sunday gospel, "Blessed is he who comes" that is a kind of historical present which really belongs in the pigeonhole of the past. But the surprising thing is that we cannot keep Palm Sunday with tha…