Beginning in verse 1. Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, ‘Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you’ll find a donkey tied and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, “The Lord needs them,” and he’ll send them at once.’ This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying, Say to the daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming to you humble and mounted on a donkey and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden. The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them.
They brought the donkey and the colt and put them on, on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him, that followed him, were shouting, Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!
And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, Who is this? And the crowds said, This is the Prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee. And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers. And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.
The word of the Lord.
We read in 2 Samuel chapter 5, the time when King David actually conquered the city of Jerusalem. Some thousand years before the coming of Jesus, David was unifying Israel, Judah and Israel coming together, and Jerusalem was a great place for a capital, somewhat central to both. And there we read, it said, King David and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, you will not come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you off, thinking David cannot come in here. Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, that is the city of David. And therefore it is said, the blind and the lame shall not come into the house.
The first coming of the royal king of Judah to the city of Jerusalem was to a defiant enemy who were taunting him that the blind and the lame were enough to repulse his entry. How different from David was Jesus’ entry into the city. Jesus, the second David, he enters in the city to conquer in a different way. And there we just read, the blind and lame came to him in the temple and he healed them.
Earlier we recited Psalm 24. It’s closely tied to the triumphal entry, and it raises the question, Who is the King of glory? And it responds saying, the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle, the Lord Almighty. He is the King of glory. And when Jesus enters in, there are all these ironic opposites happening at once.
There are these praises of great triumph. And then we’re told by Luke that Jesus wept over the city, the great King comes in on a very lowly donkey. The Messiah of Israel is unsupported by the Jewish priests, and the Prince of Priests overturns tables in the temple. Cheering crowds are going to give way in a week to those crowds demanding his death. The branches of a palm tree in praise give way to the beams of a tree in crucifixion.
Nothing is as it seems on this bright day in Jerusalem. And yet everything is as it’s supposed to be. Who is the King of glory? The question of Jesus’ identity, it remains central and it affects how we see him. What should be clear gets distorted though, when we answer this wrongly, everything is off center if we miss it.
And so many times and ways. Things war against that clear vision of who he is. But in spite of this, Jesus never goes off mission. King Jesus is glorious and he’s mighty, and we are called to see this glory even as it spins against the heartaches of life in a fallen world. And that’s the challenge for us.
Who is the King of Glory who weeps in sadness as he sees the city that his heart has longed for? Who’s the King of Glory who in anger he tips the tables in the temple, and in compassion he cares for those who are blind and lame? This is who he is. It’s the time of the Passover. You may recall that in the Old Testament, the Jewish people were supposed to come to the city 3 times for the great celebrations.
There was the Passover, there was Pentecost, and then there was the Feast of Booths or the Feast of Tabernacles, which was in the fall. And all three of these were times of celebration for God’s people to come. The population of Jerusalem was normally around 50,000 people, but during the Passover it more than doubled— 100,000, 120,000 people. And the surrounding valleys were filled with Jewish people who had come from all over the Roman Empire. It’s a time of celebration.
It’s a time of excitement, part religious, part national identity. And Jesus tells him, he said, go into the village in front of you. Immediately you’ll find a donkey tied and a colt with her and tie them and bring them to me. And we’re told that this is a fulfillment of prophecy. Specifically from Zechariah, where he wrote, say to the daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.
That this is a prophetic fulfillment telling us something about who Jesus is. Some have rightly called him a prophet, but he’s way more than this. This is where so many were short-sighted. They didn’t get the big picture because Jesus is more than a prophet. He’s the culmination of all the prophetic words from Genesis to Malachi.
The divine author has woven his story into the tapestry of a people that spans thousands of years, and he is the soon and the coming king. He’s not just a king, he’s the king. His glory is also tied then to his people, to his subjects. By being our King, he submitted himself to having us as his subjects. A glorious King with not-so-glorious people.
There is a humorous quote, it’s wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill, and it goes something like this: a woman is looking over a man and she disapprovingly says to him, if you were my husband, sir, I would give you a dose of It’s poison. And the man looked at her and he replied, if I were your husband, I would drink it.
And we get that playoff. We see that tit for tat. People responding this way.
But Jesus is just the opposite of this. He’s the willing groom. We are his bride, the church. And he comes to drink the poison on our behalf, not to dismiss us. And no doubt you have seen some poor soul with a friend or a family member who’s just awful, and you felt sorry for them, thinking to yourself something like, oh man, poor guy, poor gal, what a jerk to be tied to.
The reality is is that we are that jerk. We are the bride of Christ. This is what Jesus gets.
And yet in Ephesians, Ephesians 5, we read that Jesus is making his bride holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any blemish, but holy and blameless.
Who is this Jesus? He is the groom who loves his wayward bride.
And that’s us.
We’re the ones with spots, blemishes, and wrinkles that Jesus is in the business of cleansing and purifying. The king who loves unfit and treacherous subjects.
We are the very ones who have no problem showing him our anger and resentment when things in our lives don’t go the way that we want. Often our first response is we blame him, our glorious king. And yet we also do what we see the crowd doing. In verse 8, they’re spreading cloaks before him. They’re cutting palm branches from the trees on the road and they’re shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” How easy it is to switch from one to the other so quickly. Palms were a symbol of Jewish nationalism. Palm branches were not a neutral thing. They were a strong national symbol for Israel.
And the Romans were ruling them and they hated Rome. They hated everything about it. And they think, though they see who Jesus is, they think they see very clearly that they understand the nature of who his person is, of what he came to do. So as they’re shouting, they have one thing in mind, and Jesus something entirely different. They’re shouting Hosanna, which is Aramaic for save us.
Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew, sort of like you think of maybe Portuguese and Spanish. Hosanna, it’s a greeting and a blessing. In Psalm 118, they’re quoting there, it says, save us, we pray, O Lord. We pray, give us success. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
And this psalm was a part of what’s called the Hallel, which means praise. The Hallel was cited, 113 to 118 of the Psalms, at the Passover as part of the celebration feast. It would have been readily on the lips of the people during the time that Jesus came into the city. And here they’re welcoming the Messiah into the city of the great king. And naturally, those who were visiting for the first time, because they come from all over, they would ask this question, who is this?
And we see the crowds respond, this is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee. And while true, this answer is so inadequate, so understated. Because they so missed who Jesus is. Their expectations for what he was to be and what he was to do, they completely were off track. The Lord of glory, the creator of the universe, has come to die for his creatures.
A prophet, yes. A priest, yes. A king, yes. The Word made flesh, wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. This is who this person is, who this Jesus is.
He voluntarily enters into the city of his death, and his subjects want him to reign. They want him to free them from the tyranny of Rome, but it’s the tyranny of sin and death that they’re truly shackled to. And they don’t see this. They want a military leader who’s gonna put them on top again. While they cannot see that they are buried at the bottom in their own rebellion and unrighteousness.
They just want the chess pieces to be moving around on the board. We’re on top, we’re down, we’re on top, we’re down, we’re on top, we’re down. And historically, this is what that looked like. And Jesus is coming to do something complete, something final, not about ruling and reigning. It’s about completely overcoming sin and death.
Voluntarily, he enters the city of his death. And he sees the turning of the crowd. He sees the betrayal of Judas. He sees the vacillation of Pilate, the mockery of Herod and the soldiers. He sees the betrayal of Peter, the running away of the disciples.
And he is undeterred from his work, for this is the kind of person that he is. He’s glorious.
And what did the King of Glory do?
Well, here he weeps and he wars, two things that rather surprise us. In Luke’s Gospel, we are told that he wept. There it says, when he drew near and he saw the city, he wept over it, saying, would that you even now had known the day the things that make for peace, but now are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set a barricade around you, surround you, hem you in on every side, tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another because you did not know the time of your visitation. See, there was a refusal to see And it’s going to be their ruin in the end.
Around 66 AD, the Jews revolted against Rome, and because of what Jesus had predicted, the Christians actually left the city.
And for a while, they were able to revolt and kind of have self-rule for just a few short years. They even minted their own coins, and one of the imprints on the coin was a palm tree. Because again, it’s a sign of the Jewish people. But in 70 AD, just a few short years later, the Romans completely destroyed the temple, completely put the city of Jerusalem to the sword. This is also the time of— you may be familiar with it— Masada was the last holdout, the last stronghold.
It took them quite a while to defeat them, and everyone there ended up committing suicide before the Romans breached the walls. Utter devastation and destruction. And Jesus knows that this is coming and he weeps over their hardness of heart. There’s no vindictiveness in Jesus. No, aha, you’re gonna get yours.
But Jesus did more than just weep. He also made war, so to speak, in a way that wasn’t expected. Matthew tells us, says that Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold in the temple. He overturned the tables of the money changers, the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, it is written, my house should be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers.
Now, a few years prior to this, the high priest at the time, Caiaphas, he allowed animal stalls and money changers to be moved, what was from the Mount of Olives, just across the valley, into the outer temple court. Now, it definitely would have been more convenient, practical, and even helpful for the many Jewish travelers who were coming to Passover, because you weren’t coming with all these animals for sacrifice. You came with, with money, you purchased an animal, and then you brought it to the temple for sacrifice. So it was a commerce that did need to take place. But this outer court was where the Gentiles could come to worship.
They were not allowed past it to go into the inner court area. So it’s as if these worshipers were in the food court at the mall. There’s all this activity happening around them of buying and selling and animals and kind of a crazy chaotic moment. And this was where they were to worship.
And Jesus quotes from Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 17. He reminds them of the very purpose of the temple. Their convenience is getting in the way of access and worship by all the people.
That’s something they missed.
Didn’t make room for anyone who, who wasn’t Jewish, for the Gentiles. And Jesus’ purifying work can be seen in bringing greater access to all the peoples for worship. At his death, when the veil of the temple was torn in two, we, we see that as a great symbol of unhindered access to the Father. Because even in the Holy of Holies, no one was allowed to come in but the priest once a year for atonement.
We see Jesus, the King of Glory, giving full access to the Father. It’s part of his mission that he came to do. And unlike David before him, this Jewish king allows Gentiles into the very place of worship at his father’s house. His people includes us. And as we’ve already seen, his work includes healing.
The blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he healed them. Those who were in need, they came to Jesus. They were— he was not put off by who they were. And, and they saw his purifying in there, his cleansing work. And the glory of Jesus is seen both in his person and by what he does.
And how he reaches out to sinners and loves them, accepts them, and ultimately cleanses them from their defilement through his own blood. They were who he came to. And in Jesus, we have this perfect integrity. And that word integrity means to be complete or to be whole. In Jesus, there’s a perfect single-mindedness of who he is, of what he thinks, of what he does and how he acts.
Let that perfection just sink into you for a moment. Because who of us can say that we have this type of true integrity completely through all of who we are? Imagine if the smallest thought in your head would be true to every action and every word.
When you walked the halls of school, in the hallways, you would not be thinking, “Oh, what a dorky haircut,” or, “That’s a stupid shirt,” or how we see and do that all the time with people. Those quick thoughts that come into our head where we judge people almost instantaneously. Think of what that would be like if that wasn’t there, but something glorious and grand. Consistently all the time.
Walking into Home Depot and this young woman with a little girl was walking past me and she was pretty rough looking. And she’s one that had tattoos all over her face. And the first wave of thoughts that came to me were all negative and judgmental. I have no idea what this woman’s story was. How she got to where she was or anything else.
But wouldn’t it have been great if the first thoughts would have been, “Wow, I bet she’s doing a remarkable job turning her life around and being a great mom to this little girl.” Why can’t that be the first thought and not the war against it Because it’s negative. I know you deal with the same thing. You see someone, you do something, and it’s like the first thing is almost always negative or tearing somebody down. That wasn’t Jesus.
Scripture speaks that he knew the heart of a man, of a woman. He actually knew what was there. We just judge from appearance. And yet Jesus enters in and pushes near those who were despised, those who are on the outside. They’re the very ones he came and he embraced.
Jesus came to those who then see their own defilement, their own blindness, those who see their lameness. They were the ones that responded to Jesus. Jesus. And what does Jesus do? He accepts them.
He heals them.
The ones who are having a hard time with all this, they were the good religious people.
They’re the ones who struggled with what Jesus was doing.
But in his person, we know Jesus is the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And in his works, we know he came to redeem. The King of Glory, he comes to his subjects and it’s cost him dearly.
It is a costly grace that Jesus brings. And I’m reminded, I’m sure you’ve maybe heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his writings on cheap grace. I put it in your bulletin, but there, said cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We’re fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheap goods.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance. Baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ living incarnate.
See, Jesus is the complete package and so is his redemption. And because of what Jesus has done, we are enabled to respond. This is not a way of trying to smuggle in works. It’s not like Jesus has freed you by grace, now go and earn it. No, that’s not what’s being said.
Bonhoeffer recognizes that if this is truly costly grace, it transforms us because of who Jesus is and what he has done. The living and incarnate one, God in flesh.
It speaks to his greatness, his goodness. And he bids then as his subjects that we would follow him down this very same path to take up our crosses. The palm trees of praise must include with us the tree of crucifixion. Jesus has set us free in order that we can serve. And that sounds like such a contradiction.
It’s so anti-American, to be sure. But am I a fallen human?
Be freed to serve.
Be free to be subjugated to a self-giving love that pours itself out for another. That is not what we sell in the marketplace today.
And as we lay down our lives for others, we become more like him in his person and in his work. When we think about that integrity, the wholeness of who we are and what we do, and we’re wanting those things to be joined together, it is only through Jesus that this is possible.
And that’s the great glory of Christ for us, the King of glory who enters in Who is he? The Lord of hosts, the Almighty One who transforms us, who changes us. He’s not just trying to change the sticker on the door of what country or what empire is ruling, of our people are one up over your people. He’s trying to change us from the inside out.
That when we would actually see someone walking by us That again, the first thoughts in our head would reflect the thoughts and the works of Jesus towards them, and not our own judgment, not our own condemning.
That is a bright and a glorious future for God’s people. That is what Jesus has come to do. And in Palm Sunday, we celebrate this triumphal entry into the city. City where Jesus is once for all going to put to death, death itself. He is going to overcome and conquer sin that we would have that cleansing and purification that he alone can bring because Jesus has come to weep and to war against that, which has removed us from the fountain of all good, of all life.
To give us access back to him through him.
That is the glory not only of Palm Sunday, but the path that we see it coming to Easter. And yes, Good Friday lies in between. The weight of that and our sin reflecting upon that, all of that should cause us to see the wonder and the image of Christ in such a glorious and greater way. And the greater your desperation, the greater your capacity that he gives us to know and to worship him and to be changed by him. That is a glorious promise given to the people of God.
Pray with me.
Father Almighty, as we come before you, We do confess, Father, that we so often, we judge others. We look down on them. Father, we see ourselves in a twisted vision of our own self-righteousness. And Lord, we pray that you would give us a clear vision, not only of who we are, but of who Jesus is. Father, give us a better understanding of what he has come to do.
And Lord, that you would transform us, that we would be more like him, that as his subjects, Father, that his glory and majesty would pervade us. We bless you that you are making your bride beautiful. We praise your glorious name. And all this we offer before you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One God forever.
Amen. Please stand. What loves my God?
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.