Matthew's Gospel explicitly connects the Entry into Jerusalem to a passage from the prophet Zechariah describing a king coming to Jerusalem humble and riding on a donkey, a citation scholars generally read as central to how the episode was composed and transmitted: the Gospel writers present Jesus's entry not simply as a spontaneous popular reception but as a deliberate, symbolically loaded act on Jesus's own part, staged to evoke this specific prophetic expectation of a humble, peaceable king rather than a conquering military figure.
The donkey itself carries this contrast directly, since ancient Near Eastern royal and military tradition associated arrival on horseback with conquest and arrival on a donkey with peace, a distinction the Gospel writers appear to expect their audience to recognize without further explanation.
Palm Sunday, the liturgical commemoration of the Entry, is kept in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions on the Sunday before Easter, opening Holy Week with processions and the blessing and distribution of palm branches in many churches, directly reenacting the crowd's actions as described in the Gospel narrative and linking contemporary liturgical practice to this specific scriptural scene each year.