Among the many oddly specific details recorded in the Gospel is how Jesus procured the donkey he rode into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. 

“Go into the village ahead of you,” he told two of his disciples, and we are left to guess which ones, “and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord has need of them.’”

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How strange it must have been to receive that order! To be commanded by the Son of Man to take another man’s property, and a donkey, no less. (The owner, of course, consented).

Equally confounding was the idea that the Messiah should ride into Jerusalem at Passover on the back of an ass. Though prophecy described the Messiah as both “victorious” and “lowly,” many expected a military king. Wouldn’t a chariot be more fitting?

But for the God-man upon whom all of Western civilization would be built, the donkey would do. 

Jesus’s disciples, of course, were baffled by such displays of lowliness — a fact that makes them perpetually relatable. In riding the donkey into Jerusalem, Jesus confounds our notions of power and greatness. His very nature — Christians believe he is both God and man — underscores his emphasis on lowering oneself to serve a greater good. After all, humanity is a long way down from heaven.

This theme, becoming small to become great, runs throughout the Gospel. John the Baptist, the last of the Hebrew prophets in Christian theology and Jesus’s cousin, says of Jesus that “he must increase, but I must decrease.” Augustine of Hippo echoed the baptist 400 years later: “Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”

Many centuries later, this theme found a fresh vessel in Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Asked by Johnny Carson during an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1989 how she handled the accolades for her work with the poor, she pointed to the donkey of Palm Sunday. “Do you think, Mr. Carson, that the little donkey Jesus rode into Jerusalem thought the crowd was giving him praise and glory instead of Jesus?” she asked.

For a Christian, humility and service is the truest expression of greatness.

***

Nations, too, express their power most eloquently this way. And at its very best, America has reached down from its mighty perch in service of a higher good.

One such moment was the Marshall Plan, launched after World War II to rebuild a devastated Europe. The United States could have dominated the continent, exacting tribute, especially from Germany. But instead, it gave $13 billion, which is $150 billion today, with few strings attached. Not entirely altruistic — the move countered Soviet influence in Europe while boosting U.S. exports — Secretary of State George Marshall framed it not in terms of mission, saying in 1947, “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.”

For Marshall, who would attend Army chapels as an example for his troops, it was a consistent message. In 1941, he told Trinity College graduates that “the defense of a Christian nation and Christian values” depends not on “things of steel,” nor on “supreme confidence in our ability to conquer and subdue other peoples,” but on “something … encompassed by the soul.”

Another was the establishment of the Peace Corps in 1961. The idea emerged from President John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Speaking at a student rally at the University of Michigan, Kennedy asked off-hand how many would be willing to “spend 10 years in Africa or Latin America or Asia working for the United States and working for freedom?” The crowd’s enthusiastic response surprised Kennedy. After winning the election, he asked Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps’s first director, to flesh out the concept. 

The Peace Corps’s first mission was to Ghana, where 52 volunteers were sent to live and work on behalf of their nation in the cause of peace. They were not sent to dominate but to serve. 

Speaking to a group of Peace Corps trainees in 1962, Kennedy said, “You’re going out there to work with people, and I think that’s the important thing. … This is a chance to render service — not to demonstrate power.”

Indeed, examples abound of America using its position as the world’s dominant power to lift up the lowly. From the Berlin Airlift — dropping candy, not bombs — to major aid relief packages following natural disasters, this aspect of the U.S.’s legacy is too often overlooked. 

***

With the coming of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. has adopted a decidedly reduced role in international affairs, scaling back foreign aid and limiting military involvement — and for good reason. America’s foreign commitments have stretched thin the nation’s capacity to serve both itself and the world. An ascendant China, whose government espouses a starkly anti-Christian worldview, lurks as America’s debt soars, its infrastructure crumbles, and millions of migrants flood through its southern border. Meanwhile, decades of interventionist foreign policy, culminating in the Iraq War, cost America dearly in blood, treasure, and moral authority without making the world safer.

Trump’s first two months in office have seen this shift take form in numerous ways. In mid-March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced massive cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, slashing 90% of the agency’s programs and absorbing the rest of its responsibilities into the State Department. The agency, founded by Kennedy in 1961 to deliver aid, had grown wasteful: $335 million on an unused Afghan power plant, $19 million on Vietnam’s “inclusion,” and $6 million for Egyptian tourism. These and countless other examples strayed from Kennedy’s vision of humble service rooted in practical aid.

And while Rubio’s cuts preserved some aspects of “life-saving aid,” programs that would save countless lives from malnutrition and disease have also been cut. Programs that provide therapeutic food to severely malnourished children in developing nations have been halted. It was reported this week that over 200 health facilities in Afghanistan will be closed as a result of the cuts, meaning approximately 1.8 million will lose access to medical care. 

“We’re not the government of the world. We’ll provide humanitarian assistance, just like everybody else does, and we’ll do it the best we can,” Rubio told reporters in Brussels. “But we also have other needs we have to balance that against.”

Increased burden-sharing on defense spending has been another point of emphasis for the Trump administration, and understandably so. The U.S. shoulders a disproportionate load in NATO’s budget and has spent $8 trillion in wars since the turn of the century. 

Truly, there is a limit to what we can offer the world without destroying ourselves. Voters decided the nation had crossed that threshold when they elected Trump, who had promised to do all of this. 

***

Yet practical limit-setting must not harden into indifference toward the world’s poor and oppressed. While prominent Democratic leaders decline to grapple with economic realities, prominent MAGA figures have adopted an edge in their speech that reveals indifference toward the impoverished, even disdain.

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Whether it’s Vice President JD Vance admitting he doesn’t “give a s***” what happens in Ukraine or Trump saying, “No money in the form of foreign aid should be given to any country unless it is done as a loan, not just a giveaway,” this new attitude would doubtless repel the likes of Marshall and Kennedy — and certainly Jesus, whom Vance and Trump purport to worship. 

This Sunday, Christians nationwide will reflect on Jesus’s triumphal return to Jerusalem atop a donkey. American leaders would do well to reflect on the greatness demonstrated in this gesture. Our nation is at its very greatest when we pursue a greater good and when we remember to, in all things, “Lay first the foundation of humility.”