Palm Sunday 2024: Your King Is Coming

This week, we reflect on Palm Sunday, emphasizing Jesus' triumphal entry as a fulfillment of prophecy, the crowd's response, and Jesus' path to the cross, highlighting the contrast between earthly expectations and His true mission of salvation.

Consider these questions as you listen to this week’s message from John 12:12-19:

1. How does the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in Jesus' triumphal entry deepen our understanding of His messianic mission?

2. In what ways did the crowd's expectations of Jesus as a political Messiah differ from His actual purpose of bringing spiritual salvation?

3. How does the story of Lazarus' resurrection influence the crowd's perception of Jesus and contribute to the events of Palm Sunday?

Transcript:

While parades aren't quite the big deal that they maybe were in the past, parades are still a significant thing, aren't they? They are quite a spectacle. You arrive early, you wait for it to start and you just make conversation with the people. You just happen to be around and there is a sense of anticipation that the parade is about to start. But it's different because it doesn't have the excitement of a tip-off of a basketball game or the kick-off of a football game, for example. Instead of cheering in anticipation or waiting for something like that to start, instead, a parade normally starts with reverence and respect because the flags come and you stand in your quiet as the flag comes by. But then you have that moment where the flag has passed by and you're not sure how long you're supposed to stand in reverence, but, pretty quick, the people around you sit as well, and then the spectacle of sight and sound begins. There's marching bands, there's people throwing out candy, there's politicians making their way around to shake as many hands and kiss as many babies as they possibly can, and then you see old tractors and new tractors, a variety of floats, people waving at you. Well, and soon you see the horses, and they are fittingly and appropriately, at the end of the parade, right. But somewhere along that journey, in the spectacle of sound, you have the emergency vehicles from every town within about 190 miles, making your hearing worse by blaring their sirens. My point is parades are unmistakable. The sound's alone Let you know what's happening. Even if you're blocks away from the festivities, you can figure out that you are around a parade. And as we arrive at Palm Sunday, this morning we're remembering a parade that stands as one of perhaps the most famous parades in history. But there were not a variety of entries in this parade. There was just one entry, but the sounds of the event as it took place would have been spectacular, as people were shouting for Jesus to be their king.

Now, today, we're going to be considering this famous event and thinking about three different elements from the passage. I'm going to let you know what those are. We're real quick this morning before we dig into John 12. The first thing we're going to see is that this is a fulfillment, a prophecy from the Old Testament. Secondly, we're going to think about the way that people recognized and responded to Jesus. And then, finally, we'll think about the path that Jesus is on, because he's not simply riding into Jerusalem. He's on a path that will end on a hill outside of Jerusalem on a cross. So, as I alluded to earlier, the story of Palm Sunday is a story that we know. When we look at the calendar, we see that we're getting close to Easter, which is usually as a surprise because it moves around. But we see that we're a week from Easter and we know what we're going to expect Palm branches at church, songs with the word Hosanna in them. You get the idea. This is a familiar thing. We know what the text is going to be Jesus making his way into Jerusalem.

Now there's different details in the Gospels, there's assorted narratives of this event, but essentially the story is the same in all the Gospels that tell it. We see an interesting emphasis, though, here, in John's account of it. We see that in verse 12. Here, as we look at the way the passage starts out, and the emphasis that we see that's different in John's Gospel is the importance of the resurrection of Lazarus to what is going on, and we see this mentioned specifically later on. We heard it when we read through the passage when we got to verse 12. But here we get an illusion to it because it says here the next day Well, what went down the previous day?

Why is John bringing up the day beforehand? Well, jesus the previous day was making his way towards Jerusalem and people find out that Jesus is in the area and a large crowd gathers. And John tells us that they didn't just make their way there to see Jesus, but we read that they also went there to see Lazarus. As you can imagine, lazarus was interesting to people. They had heard this story that Jesus had raised this man from the dead. You'd want to not only see him, you would want to hear him speak. You would want to know everything about it, this man who was raised from the grave. You would want to go and see the evidence that the story was true. You wouldn't miss this, especially in the first century. What else you got going on for entertainment? Lazarus would be top tier right.

Well, at the end of this short section, prior to verse 12, here we see that there's a crowd gathering and we read that the chief priests are not only plotting how to get rid of Jesus, but they're also plotting to put Lazarus to death. Now that makes me laugh. I think that's funny. I chuckle every time I think about that idea that they want to put Lazarus to death. You better get to Jesus first. He already raised him from the dead once. Right, you'd think that they would think this through and be specific, but anyway, by the verse directly preceding our passage today tells us that they want to eliminate Lazarus, and so many people were, and it's because so many people were believing in Jesus, because of this sign, obviously, he raised Lazarus from the dead. This is going to cause you to be like, hey, maybe this Jesus guy is the real deal. He can even bring someone back from the dead.

So the idea that comes here as we land in verse 12 is a building fervor around what happened in John 11, with Jesus raising Lazarus. And again, we can understand this. We get this, while our culture is different than theirs. If we heard about something like this, we would be trying to get there too. In our culture, we would be searching YouTube for any video off of somebody's phone. We could get to see that this had actually happened. This is an extraordinary event, and so it would have brought people from everywhere.

And then, on top of it all, jesus is going to Jerusalem for a reason. I think I mentioned this nearly every year as we come to the week of Easter, but we have to remember that Jesus didn't just hang around in Jerusalem. That's not where the majority of his ministry took place. He taught out in the backwater areas of Israel, and now the reason he's headed to Jerusalem is for one of the feasts Passover is coming and so that means it's not just Jesus on the road. It is a whole lot of people who are going to Jerusalem to celebrate this feast together, and so imagine how much talk there would have been about this raising of this man named Lazarus from the dead. You're running into your fellow Hebrew people heading to the celebration in Jerusalem and the Scuttlebutt starts. There's this guy we think might be the Messiah, and just recently he raised this guy named Lazarus from the dead, and yesterday I saw him with my own eyes. Imagine how that story would have spread through the crowd. This is what is happening on Palm Sunday.

This is what we're meant to feel in the text here that there's this excitement for who Jesus is, and so in verses 13 through 15, we see what they do, and this excitement that we see in these verses isn't just because Jesus has raised a guy from the dead. They would have been excited about who that shows Jesus to be, because what they're probably thinking is we've heard about Jesus before, keep watching. But now the rumors of what they're saying about him must be true. He has to be the Messiah, and what were their expectations? That he is going to kick the Romans out. He is going to get rid of them. He is going to be the king. He is going to sit on a throne in Jerusalem. Finally, it's gonna happen. Our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents have been telling us about this coming Messiah, and people have been hoping for this since the dawn of time, since he was promised way back in the garden. But now I am alive at this moment, and so this is what creates this parade, this anticipation of the Messiah. And so they go out to meet Jesus and look at what they say Hosanna Now.

For us, that's a word we say in Palm Sunday and never say it again, unless there's a church that has that name in the title right or something to that effect. We don't use this word, but this word is a powerful word. It means save us now. It is a cry. It is. We use it as a word of praise, but for them it was a cry for salvation. It was a cry of hope, and, as I mention every year, we have to remember that these people are not looking to be saved from their sin, they're not looking to be saved from hell and death. They are crying out to be saved from the Romans who stand over them. And so this is language of hopeful conquest here. This is not just praise.

When they say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, this is a hope of taking over from the Romans, and all of this is language from the Psalms, and so these words were words that were baked down deep into them. These were words that they would have sang in worship, that they would have sang even on the road to celebrate the Feasts. These are hopeful words. They not only use these words as worship, but as a prayer of hope, and we get the idea of what their expectations are here. When they say even the king of Israel, they are not wanting a king who is just a figurehead, like Herod was. Herod had no real power, he was just a Roman figurehead. He was subject to the Roman government that was above him. They want a real king, but they don't just want a real king. They want the Messianic king. They have great hopes, they have great expectations in these words, and then we see that Jesus comes in on a young donkey, and this not only fulfills the Old Testament prophetic words that we've heard multiple times this morning in the book of Zechariah. It also provides a contrast for what the people are hoping for, what the people are asking for here, because Jesus isn't coming into Jerusalem on a war horse, is he? He's on a donkey.

Now, honestly, this image has new significance for me, because until January, I can honestly say that I had very, ever rarely actually seen a donkey Very few in my life. And I saw them and saw that they were small and I thought, oh, we don't use donkeys on farms really anymore, so we don't need big ones, we just need cute little pet ones. Well, when I was in Ethiopia in January, we flew into a small city and a small airport and when I say small airport, I mean it. It has one airline that flies into it twice a day and it was out in the country and we had to wait for the people that we were going to be riding with, so we needed to take a taxi that, for the record, I had to fold myself up to get into. It was so small, but we had to take that about 15 miles into the city of Hwasa and within about, I would say, two miles of our leaving the airport, I saw more donkeys than I had seen in my life, like instantly. They were everywhere. They were pulling carts, they were, you know, guys were standing on carts whipping them to go forward. All these this is the image, and it was everywhere and they were doing this work. And they were just as small as the donkeys I thought were just all bred to be cute pets on the farm. They're tiny.

So imagine, not an image that the people expect, jesus coming in on a war horse conquering the Romans, but coming in on one of these little donkeys. This is truly an act of humility. It's a sign of being one who is a king of peace and not a king of earthly military conquest, just like the prophetic words in the book of Zechariah that he would be a king of peace. And as this passage continues and we move on to our second point, I want us to think quickly about these expectations that I've already mentioned that the people have. It's interesting to see here, with what we have in this next part of the passage that the disciples didn't get this as it was happening either did they? They were expecting the great military conquest as well. What did it take for them to get it? It took the resurrection. It took the ascension of Jesus for them to understand what all this meant, to understand who Jesus really was. And the idea is they had about the Messiah being an earthly king who gives the Romans the boot had clouded their ability to see what was right in front of their faces. They had to understand that Jesus is riding in a Jerusalem on a donkey. He's clearly not taking over, but their expectation of the Messiah clouded their understanding until he had risen from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father. And of course it did. Of course it did.

You've likely seen videos of people sitting down with a kid with something like an Oreo cookie, and they offered the child the Oreo and some milk or enough money to buy hundreds of Oreo cookies later. And the kid always takes what's visible and what's in front of their faces. Now, sure, we expect this from kids, but we are all tempted by what's in front of our face, aren't we? We're always going to go after the things that we want, the quick gratification we go for what benefits us the most in the moment or what we think we need the most.

The people thought that they needed a pe. People did not think that they needed a peaceful king. They didn't think they needed a king that would conquer sin, death, hell and the devil. That's not what they thought they needed, because what was in front of their faces was Roman soldiers and the taxation that came with it to pay for those Roman soldiers. That's what was in front of their faces. They couldn't see the Messiah for who he was supposed to be, the one who would crush the head of the serpent, because that wasn't what was in front of their faces. The oppression of Caesar was in front of their faces.

But the truth of who Jesus is becomes clear when you see that he defeated death and that he ascends to a throne much higher than one on the top of a hill in a palace in Jerusalem. And this truth means so much to us. But it wasn't visible to these crowds. They couldn't understand it because they were short-sighted, because of what was in front of their faces. And so, as we move to verses 17 and 18, the story of Jesus calling Lazarus out of the tomb is what created this crowd, because this is an amazing sign that Jesus is from God. If he can do this, he must be the Messiah Now. These folks already would have had a fervor for getting rid of the Roman occupation of Israel, but the idea that this guy can raise someone from the dead and now this Lazarus, they can see him it would have caused people to line the streets with cloaks and branches. Right, they are expecting the Messiah. This is who they must. This is who Jesus must be. He is going to give the Romans the boot. Why else would he be coming to Jerusalem? Let's prepare the way. They want a king who's going to sit on a throne in Jerusalem, and so they are going to make a path for him to go there. But you and I know that's not the path that Jesus is going to take on.

We come to church every Palm Sunday fully aware that the road in front of Jesus is not one that ends up at the palace, but his throne is a cross. That's where he is in my. We understand that. We understand that His throne, where he is exalted, is not in the splendor of people yelling and going to a palace and having a crown of gold put on His head, his enthronement, his glory, is found on a path to the cross, where the crown is a crown of thorns and he is exalted in suffering, bearing the wrath of God for His people. It's a better path for His people, but it's a difficult path, a path of suffering. And we see, then, how the events of Palm Sunday cause an escalation in the plotting of the religious leaders that cause that path that ends up at the throne of His cross. We see this in verse 19. It tells us that the Pharisees said to one another you see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after Him. As I mentioned earlier, john tells us of the plotting of those who are trying to kill not only Jesus but Lazarus. The events of Palm Sunday have caused them to realize that it's even more apparent that they need to do something about this. Jesus.

An event such as the triumphal entry on Palm Sunday is going to draw attention from the state of what is going on with Jesus. Before, it was just this guy out in the backwater sections of the country roaming around with 12 guys teaching. Nothing needs to be really done about that, does it, but a very large group of people singing psalms about a king of Israel who will save them. Having that happen right here in Jerusalem, that's a problem. That's a serious problem. They need to deal with it because that's a danger to the peace that's been arranged between the Romans and the Jewish authorities. You see, they had an agreement that they don't need to participate in the state religion of Caesar worship, but that agreement was naturally a very fragile one.

An uprising would put that religious observation and the understanding that they had with Rome in jeopardy. They don't want to lose the temple, and the religious leaders don't want to lose the high positions they have in front of the people. They don't want to use it. And so we see that they've come to this realization. All their plotting is doing nothing. They can try to argue with Jesus, they can speak poorly about Jesus or try to turn people against him, but none of that is doing anything. It's doing nothing. They're not getting any ground. In fact, the crowds are now singing Hosanna, and this is making it very obvious to these religious leaders, because the people are going after Jesus, they believe he's the Messiah. But again, we need to remember that the people singing Hosanna to Jesus didn't understand who he is, and so neither did the religious leaders. Well, they didn't want him in power. They thought that what he was and what he was saying was still a big deal. They thought maybe he was seeking political power as well, because no one not the disciples, not the religious leaders, not the crowds seemed to understand the significance of who Jesus really is.

And as we stand here today, on Palm Sunday, I want our application from this familiar story to dwell on the truth of who Jesus actually is, because we're going to leave from here and we're going to embark on a week where Monday, thursday is coming, good Friday is coming and Easter is coming. These things are naturally going to be on our minds and the events that we remember over the course of this coming week all have deep significance to who Jesus really is. If we understand those events, we will understand the true nature of the mission of the Messiah, because the institution of the Lord's Supper on Thursday reminds us that we are in covenant with God and it comes through His broken body and shed blood. And when we meditate on the events of Good Friday, it shows us that Jesus satisfied the wrath of God to pay for our sins on the cross and Resurrection Sunday shines the truth that Jesus is victorious over sin, death and hell by His bodily resurrection from the grave, and so this week reminds us of what the Christian story is and why it's important Now. It's a story that we know well, but it's so easy for us to lose sight of it.

Just like the people on Palm Sunday, we can quickly turn Jesus into a champion for whatever we think the greatest need right in front of us is. And this is the temptation for us, even as the people of God who know what the gospel is the temptation to make Jesus about my desires instead of the truth of his remedying my greatest need. So may our reflection on the events of the last week of Jesus' earthly ministry drive us to repentance. May the truth of what he came to do help us to see where we've made idols out of the things that we value more than him in our lives, because we live on the other side of the story. Just as the apostles did.

May we remember that apostolic message of the cross and what it really means. May we spend this coming week reflecting on the truth of the salvation we have in Jesus, the salvation that he has won for us, and may the Holy Spirit use this in our lives to change us and to drive us to live lives of holiness because of the gratitude that we have for his saving work, for he has saved us. He is the king of Israel. He is seated at the right hand of the Father for us. May we celebrate his salvation and remember its significance in this coming week. Amen, let us pray Great and merciful God. We thank you for the gift of your word and we thank you that we have these coming events to remember what you came to do. Bless us with the gift of repentance and faith in this coming week, so we might live lives that honor you and bring glory to your saving work, for you are our king. It's the name of Jesus that we pray, amen.