Origen's short homily allegorizing Luke's triumphal-entry donkey as the human soul, once bound by sin, that Christ frees and rides into Jerusalem.
Homily on Luke 37 is one of Origen's surviving sermons on the Gospel of Luke, preached to a congregation and later translated into Latin (by Jerome, in the manuscript tradition this text descends from). It takes as its text Luke's brief account of the triumphal entry: Jesus at Bethphage and Bethany sending two disciples to untie a colt "on which no man had ever sat," so that he can ride it into Jerusalem while the crowd spreads garments before him.
Origen reads almost none of this literally. He etymologizes the place names -- Bethany as "house of obedience," Bethphage as "house of jaws" -- and turns the colt itself into an allegory of the human soul or the human race: an animal no rational being had ever ridden until the Word of God, in the person of Christ, came to sit upon it. Untying the colt becomes the loosing of a person from sin and the many false "masters" -- the passions and vices -- that ruled it before. The disciples who throw their garments beneath the animal become the apostles, whose teaching and manner of life the freed soul now walks upon and imitates. The crowd that meets Jesus only once he descends the mountain represents the multitude that could not encounter Christ while he remained withdrawn with his closest followers alone.
The homily closes on the exchange with the Pharisees -- "if these are silent, the stones will cry out" -- which Origen turns into a warning about believers' own silence: when love grows cold and faith fails, as Christ foretold, something lesser will testify in place of the faithful. The whole piece is a compact example of Origen's characteristic method: treating a small narrative detail (an untied, unridden colt) as a deliberate cipher for a moral and spiritual truth about the soul's bondage and liberation, rather than as incidental historical color.
“There then, where, having been made subject to "obedience," he sends his disciples to untie the colt of a donkey, on which no man had ever sat”
— Homily on Luke 37 · read this chapter →
“he will see that the word and reason of God sat upon us, when the Lord Jesus came and instructed his disciples that, going, they should untie the colt”
— Homily on Luke 37 · read this chapter →
“He "has need" of your salvation; he desires you to be loosed from your sins”
— Homily on Luke 37 · read this chapter →
“When we speak, the stones are silent; when we are silent, the stones cry out”
— Homily on Luke 37 · read this chapter →
It is a short sermon on Luke's account of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, focused on the colt that Jesus's disciples untie for him to ride. Origen reads the colt allegorically as the human soul, bound by sin until Christ frees it and takes possession of it.
He treats the colt, on which 'no man had ever sat,' as a figure for the soul or humanity itself, previously ruled by many 'masters' (the passions and vices) until Christ, as the Word of God, becomes its true rider once it is untied -- that is, freed from sin.
Origen etymologizes Bethany as 'house of obedience' and Bethphage as 'house of jaws,' connecting the latter to the priestly portion of jaws prescribed in the law, and uses both to frame the spiritual meaning of where the colt was tied.
He interprets the cloaks the disciples spread beneath the colt as the apostles' good works and teaching, which the freed soul (the colt) walks upon by imitating their life and doctrine.
It closes on Jesus's reply to the Pharisees that if the crowd is silent the stones will cry out, which Origen applies to his own congregation as a warning to keep praising God rather than falling silent as faith and love grow cold, ending with a doxology to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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