Matthew 21.1-11
As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”
4 This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:
5 “Say to Daughter Zion,
‘See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”
6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. 7 They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,
“Hosanna to the Son of David!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
10 When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?”
11 The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”
Jerusalem was an emotional place during Passover season. Jewish pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean poured into the holy city to make sacrifices at the Temple. There was enormous religious fervor in the city, so much that the Roman garrison there went on special alert since the Jews’ hatred of the Roman occupiers reached a fever pitch during Passover week.
There may have been as many as two hundred thousand pilgrims in the city on that day. We don’t know how many of them greeted Jesus with palm fronds. There might have been only a couple of hundred people gathering at the gate to welcome Jesus or there may have been several thousand. Certainly, Jesus was famous enough by then to draw a large crowd. In fact, that Jesus attracted crowds was the reason the high council later arrested him late at night, when everyone would be in bed.
Whatever the number of people waving palm fronds was that day, they had a definite expectation of Jesus. Instead of entering triumphantly on a charging stallion, Jesus rode into town on a colt; other Gospels say a donkey. This was no act of humility on Jesus’ part. He was asserting kingly authority and messianic identity. Matthew’s account of the day refers to the prophecy of Zechariah that says that Jerusalem’s king would come “triumphant and victorious ... humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Mark, however, doesn’t make much of this. Like Matthew, Mark does not say the crowd waved palm branches, but instead “leafy branches.” John’s Gospel says they waved palms, a practice the Jews of the day observed for a number of important celebrations. Even so, the crowd who preceded Jesus into Jerusalem shouted its excitement of his arrival:
“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
The crowd was proclaiming Jesus as their messiah who would deliver them from Roman rule and restore the glories of King David’s ancient kingdom of Israel. So let’s jump ahead five days, to when Jesus, under arrest, is brought before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate:
6 Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked. 7Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection. 8So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom. 9Then he answered them, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” 10For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over. 11But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead. 12Pilate spoke to them again, “Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” 13They shouted back, “Crucify him!” 14Pilate asked them, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him!” 15So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.
However, the crowd that demanded Jesus’ execution was hand-picked by the high priest. They were men whose position and livelihood depended on Pilate’s favorable opinion of them. Indeed. The high priest himself took that office only with Pilate’s approval.
The men of that crowd – and they were almost certainly all men – may have watched Jesus’ Sunday entrance, but they did not wave a leafy branch. Jesus claiming messianic authority alarmed them rather than gave them hope.
And yet, I wonder: how many of the Sunday people would have joined the Thursday men if they had been given the chance?
For centuries Christians have commemorated Palm Sunday by waving palm fronds in a celebratory processional into the sanctuary. I have read that this church tradition began in Jerusalem as a way that pilgrims there could learn of Jesus’ last week. It was an early form of interactive learning.
But is it really such a great thing to pretend we are part of that palm-waving crowd? One thing about the way the Gospels tell their story is that crowds in the Gospels are almost always clueless. They just don’t get it. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a colt, the crowd cheered him. Why?
No one, including the disciples, had the slightest notion that the messiah would be anything other than political figure. Devout Jew, of course, but a political leader who would return Judea to full independence. That meant a kingly military leader.
That the messiah would never think of such a thing was not part of the picture. And that the messiah would be executed by the Romans would have been thought impossible.
Importantly, that the messiah would save Israel by his death and then bodily resurrection would have struck them as insane. The gospels are clear that even after Jesus had explained this to his disciples on the way to Jerusalem, they simply dismissed it.
So on Sunday, the crowd cheered Jesus mostly from their own selfish ambition of what they wanted him to do. They hoped first that he would reclaim the throne of David, which was contested by Herod the Great’s three sons and daughter. Then they hoped that Jesus, divinely assisted, would lead an uprising against the Romans that would drive them from Judea. Jesus planned to do neither. After all, he already had possession of the true throne of David, which the angel Gabriel had told Mary, Jesus’ mother, in Luke chapter 1. As for raising an army, what use would that have been to someone who could summon unnumbered legions of angels to his side?
Jesus surely knew what the crowd expected and just as surely knew he was not their man, not like they wanted.
But let us not be too hard on those cheering Jerusalemites. We cannot blame them for wanting to be free of oppression. Nor should we scorn them for not knowing that Jesus was destined to be crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day to rise from the dead. That was still several days away and who could have imagined it, anyway? All the Palm Sunday people knew about Jesus was that he loved God, he spent a lot of time with the unlovable people of society, he was known to work miracles now and then, and he was a compelling preacher who verbally fought with the powerful people of the Jewish nation.
There really was not much more to know about Jesus, five days before he was executed as a religious heretic and political insurrectionist. Everything that makes us know Jesus as the Christ springs from Easter, not Palm Sunday. It is Easter, not today, that defines our faith. Unlike the crowd calling Hosanna! two thousand years ago, we know Jesus as the Risen One, the King of Kings whose throne is infinitely more glorious than that occupied by David or his descendants.
That being so, why on earth would we celebrate that crowd of two millennia ago? Perhaps we should do so to remind ourselves that all earthly glory is fleeting. Gratitude does not last forever, sometimes not even for a few days. Disappointments or worse always follow from staking one’s well-being on any mortal human being.
The ugliness of fickle faith will never be more nakedly displayed than during Jesus’s last week in Jerusalem. One crowd cheered him, another crowd jeered him and called for his death. For the Palm Sunday crowd, Jesus turned out not to be who they hoped he was. For the Good Friday crowd, Jesus was all too potentially who they feared he was. Jesus entered the city riding as prophecy foretold the King of the Jews would ride, being greeted to uninhibited acclaim, yet the final calls of a crowd Jesus heard were calls for his execution only a few days later, people yelling to Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar!” and “Give us Barabbas!” instead of Jesus. Then finally, they will scream, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
If we are to commemorate the Sunday crowd, it can be only to admonish ourselves not to be like them. They cheered sincerely and earnestly, but they cheered in vain. The lesson they teach us is only to stake our lives on something other than mere human aspirations or merely human leaders. It is to remind us not to define the Christ by our own mere wishes, but by God’s revelation.
It must be to ask ourselves, even if only once per year, “What do we expect from Jesus?” Consider what Jesus endured during Passion Week. He was –
Hailed by the people,
feared by the powerful,
watched by the Romans,
loved by his disciples,
then betrayed by one and abandoned by the rest,
arrested by the Jewish police,
beaten by his countrymen,
tried and convicted by the Jews and the Romans,
flogged by the Romans,
scorned by the people,
crucified by the Romans,
buried by some friends.
With a record like that, what do we expect of him? Is it sensible that we should expect Jesus simply to give us more of what we already have? Was the mission of Jesus Christ simply to assure us that he’s okay, we’re okay, just keep doing what we’re doing, living like we’re living, wanting what we’re wanting, and Jesus will just smile approvingly at us and make sure that everything works out all right? Or should we imagine that the Son of God has a different agenda than we do, and his agenda might topple our own as certainly as the ancient temple in Jerusalem came tumbling down forty years after Jesus entered the city?
These are questions to ponder this Holy Week. The answers are not found on Palm Sunday. They begin in earnest later during Passion Week, reaching their crescendo Sunday morning.
