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If you’ve ever watched the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night you might remember a moment of chivalry from Ringo Starr that goes horribly wrong. I know it well because it was filmed just yards from where I now live. Ringo is strolling near a building site, spots a puddle and lays his coat across it for a beautiful young woman to cross. She goes straight through into the muddy hole in the ground.

Walter Raleigh had more success with his cloak over wet ground, enabling Elizabeth I’s dainty shoes to remain dry.

Tomorrow, Palm Sunday, is the day when Christians remember Jesus coming into Jerusalem on a donkey, with a rapturous crowd waving palm tree branches. It’s a moment of jubilation before all the agonies of the following week when the Romans arrest him, the crowd turns against him, and he is crucified. But on Palm Sunday, the crowd want to honour him, and so they lay their cloaks before him. It’s more than chivalry, easing his way into the city over rough ground. It suggests submission and respect.

For people at that time a cloak was the most important item of clothing they possessed. It was usually seamless, made from one piece of heavy fabric with a hole for the neck. You might carry crops home from the field in it, and use it as a blanket at night. Under the law at Jesus’ time, it was forbidden to take that outer garment from someone as payment for a debt.

The importance of a robe or cloak and how strongly connected to someone’s dignity it is would become evident in what happened to Jesus in the days following Palm Sunday. He was dressed in a robe by Pontius Pilate’s soldiers after his arrest, and mocked as a king. Later after his crucifixion, the Gospels record that the soldiers divided his clothes among them but rather than tear it, they cast lots for his seamless robe. On Palm Sunday a psalm is sung with a verse that Christians believe foretells this: they divide my clothing among them, they cast lots for my robe. It was part of the humbling of Jesus.

The cloaks cast before Jesus mirror that – a moment when the crowd offer him in humility what’s most precious to them – their cloaks. In recent times the tradition of those ancient seamless garments has led to a shaping of Catholic thinking, known as the seamless robe, based on Jesus’ own robe. Faith is not just about prayer, or church on Sunday, this teaching says. It shapes your entire thinking, how you live, your values. It is all of a piece.

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