Sermon for MHBC (10 April 2022). You can watch on our website or on Facebook or YouTube. Live at 11:00am on Sundays.
It is Palm Sunday, and now we are closing in on Jesus’s sufferings. You may be accustomed to thinking of Palm Sunday as a great celebration and it is, in some sense, for us who know what it meant for Jesus to enter into Jerusalem. But for Jesus, entry into Jerusalem meant the cross. And while he appears to receive the welcome he deserves, we will see that this welcome was ultimately a rejection. What seems like acceptance turns out to be rejection. They accept Jesus, not on his terms, but theirs. They want a king, but not a king like Jesus.
In the period of the NT, Rome governed Israel. The OT had prophesied frequently that the God of Israel would free Israel and restore Israel. God would send the Messiah and establish God’s kingdom. Many Israelites read these things militarily. They expected a Messiah who would crush their enemies. And the current enemy was Rome, so a major part of the expectation was that the Messiah would confront Rome.
In Israel’s history, just before Jesus’s time, several military uprisings occurred. These were messianic movements—moments when people believed the messiah had come. At least three of these uprisings occurred in Jesus’s neighborhood about the time he was born. One of the most significant resulted in 2000 rebels from Galilee being crucified. Here’s the tension: Israel expected a liberator, but the Romans were determined to crush any would be liberator. Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem was like putting a match to gasoline.
TRIUMPHAL ENTRY
In John’s Gospel, one significant event happens before Jesus goes to Jerusalem. In John 11 Jesus raises Lazarus from the grave. Unsurprisingly, this gets some attention. The Pharisees are concerned with a political problem. As long as Israel didn’t do anything to upset Rome, they were left alone for the most part. The Pharisees are concerned that Jesus will start an uprising. If that happened, the Romans would send an army into Israel to take away the temple and their freedom. That’s the last thing they want. So the Pharisees plan to kill him. They reason that it is better to kill one man than have the Romans destroy the nation.
Just before the entry into Jerusalem, Jesus has dinner with Lazarus. We are told that large crowds came to see Jesus and also Lazarus, who had been dead, but was now alive. The Pharisees don’t like this either because they don’t need Jesus gaining a following.
Verse 12: The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. A large crowd hears that Jesus is coming to the feast. Jesus had a reputation and people wanted to see what he was all about.
Verse 13: So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” They take palm branches. Palm branches were a sign of victory. In the ancient world, people would wave them in the streets as a victorious king returned with his army. This was a Jewish symbol too. About 130 years before this, Judas Maccabeus had taken back the temple from Syrians who had defiled it. They celebrated by waving palm branches in the air. Just 100 years after Jesus’s death, a Jewish revolt occurred. During this time, Jewish revolutionaries made coins. On those coins was the symbol of a palm.
These palm branches are a sign of enthusiasm. Why are the crowds so enthusiastic about Jesus? They see him as a national liberator. He will use his power to free them from Roman rule and win their independence. If he can raise people from the dead, surely he can run the Romans off.
That the people thought like this is clear from the end of the verse—”even the King of Israel.” Back in John 6, a smaller crowd had perceived Jesus as this king and liberator already. In that case, Jesus fed a huge crowd of thousands, and when the people saw this miraculous sign, they say this is the Messiah. But they missed the point because John tells us in 6:15: “Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” They misunderstood him.
The word “Hosanna” also tips us off that they see Jesus as a national liberator. The word is actually two words in Hebrew, meaning “Save us, please/now.” We see these same words used to address kings in the OT. So this whole event seems to misunderstand Jesus. He is the Messiah, but he has not come to destroy Roman rule.
Verse 14: And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written. I think it is significant that in John’s sequence, the people greet him as a military leader, and next Jesus finds a donkey, which illustrates what kind of king he is.
Look at v. 15: “Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” This is a partial quote from Zechariah 9:9. The full quote says that he is righteous and humble, having salvation. This is one way Jesus is unique. The people expect a grand ruler—a king. But Jesus is humble and on a donkey. There’s a difference between a donkey and a horse. Kings typically ride horses. Horses are ridden into battle. Donkeys are not ridden into battle. Jesus comes humbly, not in the way that the people expected.
Verse 16 tells us that this prophecy is about Jesus: His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him. This verse also tells us that many of Jesus’s own disciples misunderstood this whole event. It wasn’t until after his death and resurrection that they understood what all of this meant. When he took the donkey, they didn’t immediately recognize that he was fulfilling prophecy from Zechariah. Some of his own disciples likely hoped that Jesus had come to liberate Israel.
Verse 17 once again reminds us why the people were excited: The crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to bear witness. Jesus’s ministry had become well-known. The small ministry in rural areas had now become known in the great city of Jerusalem. The recent raising of Lazarus had, of course, been the event that turned the fire into a blaze. Jesus’s ministry had been slowly gaining attention, but the raising of Lazarus was like gasoline on the fire of Jesus’s ministry.
So on one hand, Jesus seems to be accepted, but v. 18 shows that Jesus was not understood: The reason why the crowd went to meet him was that they heard he had done this sign. One commentary puts it this way: “They were welcoming a miracle worker, perhaps a deliver from Rome’s bondage, but certainly not a savior from sin.”[1] Many of these same people will cry out for Jesus to be crucified in just a few days.
In v. 19 we see the Pharisees are once again upset by the attention on Jesus: So the Pharisees said to one another, “You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.” Now they don’t understand Jesus either. They are afraid that Jesus will cause a political problem. Pharisees were religious leaders. They may not have liked being governed by Rome, but they had good positions and they didn’t want things to be disrupted. They were comfortable. Changing the status quo would change their comfortable life. They didn’t want Jesus messing things up for them. We also learn from this verse that they are starting to feel like they are running out of time. “Look, the world has gone after him.” It also highlights their pride. The whole world might be blind, but they are not.
MISUNDERSTANDING
I’ve told you many times that Jesus was misunderstood. This all becomes clearer as the story continues. Verses 20-22 show people still treating Jesus like a celebrity. But everything turns on v. 23: And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. If you read the gospels, you know that we are often told early in the story that Jesus’s hour had not yet come. Pharisees seek to kill him, but they can’t seem to get him. We are told, “His hour had not yet come.” At this point in John 12:23, we are told the HOUR HAS COME.[2]
In v. 24 Jesus begins to reveal his real purpose: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. His purpose is not to liberate Israel from Roman rule. His purpose is to die. Jesus was to be buried in the earth like a kernel of wheat. Just as a seed is buried, “Jesus was destined to die in order to give life to the world.”[3] History tells us the results of this seed, who is Jesus, being buried. Untold numbers have come to Christ because of this burial.[4] But as the story goes on, Jesus tells the crowd the Christ must die, the people don’t understand this. They think the Christ will not die.
APPLICATION
The triumphal entry reminds us that Jesus gave himself for us. The God who created all things became a sacrifice to redeem all things. Even though Christ is the king of the world, he doesn’t enter the world as a king. He allows a sinful world to reject him and hang him on a cross.
This might seem insane to us but this is the deep mystery of God’s plan. John’s description of Jesus’s interaction with Pilate is fascinating. At one point, Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Now get inside Pilate’s head. He’s a Roman governor and actually has been in some recent political trouble. Here he has a crowd saying a guy is claiming to be the King. Pilate can’t understand though because he only thinks in terms of the way the world works. He can only think in terms of power. But Jesus tells him, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would be here fighting. But that’s not how my kingdom works” (John 18:36).
The way God has worked and is working to redeem this world is not through power and influence, but through death and suffering. As Paul tells us, “The wisdom of God is foolish to the world.” And this is seen most obviously in the plan of redemption. The king of the universe goes to the cross.
Jesus will enter this world triumphantly again. For those of us who trust him and love him, this will be a great joy to us. We will bow before him because he is our king. He will be king on his terms, not ours. We can look forward to this day. We look forward to Easter when his kingship is revealed. This triumphal entry into Jerusalem was just a shadow of the thing to come. So the Christian hope is in a returning king, who will rule on his terms. And he will rule through power the world does not understand.
[1] Comfort and Hawley, Opening John’s Gospel and Epistles, 165.
[2] Brown, The Gospel According to John I, AB, 1:470: This hour is “the hour of Jesus’s return to his Father through crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.”
[3] Comfort and Hawley, Opening John’s Gospel and Epistles, 166.
[4] Ibid., “[H]is death, like a planting, brought germination and multiplication…[T]he one grain multiplied and, in so doing, became the bread that gives life to the entire world.”