Palm Sunday Matthew 21:1-11 The Real Messiah
Good morning! Happy Palm Sunday! It’s the traditional warning shot across our bow saying that Easter is next week!
In truth today marks the first day of Holy Week where we can follow the day-by-day events in the life of Jesus leading up to His crucifixion and resurrection. The Events of Palm Sunday, the triumphal entry as it’s also called, really did happen the Sunday before Jesus was crucified.
So we are going to take a break from our study in the book of Acts for the next two weeks to focus on this most important week in the earthly ministry of Jesus and the significance of the things that He said and did during this time.
Turn with me to Matthew 21:1-11, page 826 in the pew Bibles.
Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.” 4 This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,
5 “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.’ ”
6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. 7 They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. 8 Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 And the crowds that went before him and 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!” 10 And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?” 11 And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.”
Let’s pray.
Throughout the public ministry of Jesus he used parables to describe the Kingdom of God. He used everyday objects and ideas that people would have been familiar with to educate them on concepts that may have been less familiar to them.
What we see in this passage in Matthew is a similar use of objects and ideas to educate us on concepts we may be unfamiliar with, or at least need to hear about again.
Do you know the strength of flannelgraph? Flannelgraph, an old school Sunday School tool that was paper cutouts of people and objects that stuck to a big board covered with flannel. Our Sunday school teachers used to use it to display the stories of the Bible simply for kids to understand.
The power of that tool, at least for me, was the lasting images that it left in my mind. This is the strength of Jesus’ parables, and is also the strength of Palm Sunday.
In our passage from Matthew that describes this amazing event there are four powerful symbols that, it seems to me at least, nobody at the time truly understood.
Can you guess what those four things were? The colt, the cloaks on the road, the palm branches, and the shouts of the crowd, “Hosanna to the Son of David.”
So they’re not all objects but you get the idea.
So what do these four things represent? Let’s look at them in order.
First the colt, the foal of a donkey.
Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.” 4 This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,
5 “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.’ ”
The first, and most obvious purpose of Jesus riding the colt is the fulfillment of prophecy. Your Bible should have a footnote there that verse five is from Zechariah 9:9 written more than 700 before this event.
But this specific prophecy carried significance too, riding a donkey specifically tied Jesus to King David. Entering the city on a donkey was a simple way to symbolize the truth that Jesus did in fact come as King of Israel.
When Solomon was anointed king after David, David commanded that Solomon ride his favorite mule during the inaugural procession in 1 Kings 1:33. Now, as recorded in our text, a far greater "Son of David" rides triumphantly into the city of kings on a donkey.
The second thing with symbolic significance from the text is the laying down of people’s cloaks in the road.
7 They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. 8 Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road,
According to the scholars, the laying of garments on the ground for a person to walk on was a sign of honor at the reception of kings. It was a sign of their submission to Him.
2 Kings 9:13 says, Then in haste every man of them took his garment and put it under him on the bare steps, and they blew the trumpet and proclaimed, “Jehu is king.”
Jehu was one of the kings of Israel hundreds of years before this.
8 Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.
We call this Sunday “Palm Sunday,” because those branches were palm branches.
Matthew and Mark both include the cutting down of palm branches and waving them around and spreading them on the road and this was significant! It’s traditional to hand out palm fronds on palm Sunday that often get woven into little crosses.
Palm branches are highly symbolic in Jewish culture, they are like the bald eagle of Israel. They represented freedom, liberty, and victory! Palm branches were even stamped on their coins! They still are!
It was no small thing that the people would spread them on the road before Jesus, they were declaring that Jesus was ushering in freedom, liberty, and victory! What a message of hope to a people who were oppressed!
As they laid down their coats in submission to the new King, and spread palm branches on the road declaring that freedom, and liberty, and victory were finally on their way into Jerusalem, as verse nine says, 9 And the crowds that went before him and 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!”
The crowd was shouting a phrase straight from Zechariah’s prophecy: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
The word "Hosanna" is an Aramaic expression that means "save, I pray!" or "help, I pray!"
We can see it in Psalm 118, 25Save us, we pray, O Lord! [There’s the word Hosanna] O Lord, we pray, give us success! 26 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! We bless you from the house of the Lord. 27 The Lord is God, and he has made his light to shine upon us. Bind the festal sacrifice with cords, up to the horns of the altar!
Jesus came to bring salvation and the people cried out, “Save us!”
Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of David, the King, came to bring salvation and the people shouted, “Save us, Son of David!”
If there are VCRs in the kingdom, I want to rewind and watch this event. What a spectacle!
But as soon as Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem it all stopped. No more donkey, no more coats on the road, no more shouts of Hosanna. In fact, a week later there would be others shouts from another crowd, shouts of “Crucify!”
As I’ve said many times before, the people there at that time wanted a political Messiah, like a regular kind of king like all the other countries had, to come and save them from the oppression of Rome, to give political freedom, and liberty, and victory.
But Jesus instead came to be a different kind of King, that through submission to Him in faith, people would be freed from the penalty of their sin, and be liberated from the grave, and inherit victory over death.
The salvation that they should have cried out for was not salvation from their circumstances and the problems that were placed on them by somebody else, some outside force, but instead, they should have been crying out for the salvation from their sin, the problem that they brought upon themselves.
It seems really easy to armchair quarterback this whole scene and look at this crowd here in the text as a bunch of dummies that just didn’t get it. But honestly, as we think about your own lives, are we really much different?
Don’t we cry out for salvation from our circumstances? Aren’t we hoping that Jesus would sit on the throne of America and bring freedom and liberty and victory for Christians as a political Messiah?
My fear is that this is what has become of American Christianity.
Instead, let’s lay down our own coats and declare Jesus as King of our lives, trusting Him to take the penalty for our sin, and granting us real freedom, freedom from death and the grave, granting us real liberty as former slaves to sin, and grant us victory over the real enemies, Satan and our own selfishness. Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord, Jesus Christ, our Messiah, our King. Amen.
