There was much more going on at Jesus’s “Triumphal Entry” than most of us realize. This sermon examines the various groups that were present and the motivations behind their actions. It also shows why Jesus’s entry in Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday is relevant to us in the 21st century.

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Today is Palm Sunday, when the church celebrates what is known as “The Triumphal Entry.” It was Jesus’s highly symbolic entrance into the Capitol City just days before he was betrayed and executed. Most of us know the broad outlines of the story. Jesus rode into Jerusalem amid the cheers of a welcoming crowd. Five days later, those same people shouted for his execution. The fickle crowd turned against Jesus and had him crucified.

But that is not the entire story. It is not even the same story. For us to understand what is going on as Jesus rides into Jerusalem, we need to know who the different groups are that were involved and how each looked at what was happening.

The first group is comprised of Jesus and his disciples, though we should probably distinguish between them, since Jesus and the disciples understood what was happening in very different ways. The disciples were – this is the Evangelist Mark’s description – “astonished.” Jesus, who had always skirted the “messiah” question – warning his apostles not to talk about it, ordering the demonized to be silent – was now leading a massive crowd of pilgrims into the city, like a general marshaling his troops. Jesus had taken charge.

I suspect the disciples thought: “Finally! We’ve been waiting for this for three years! This is the beginning of the revolution. Jesus is taking his rightful place at last.”

When the crowds acknowledged Jesus to be the coming one – that’s shorthand for Israel’s messiah and the king, and he didn’t silence them; when the Pharisees begged him to tell the crowds to be quiet, and he refused, replying that if they were quiet the very stones would cry out – that’s when the disciples knew it was really happening. I think they must have been frightened, invigorated, and deliriously happy all at the same time.

The next groups are the crowds, and I say “groups” intentionally because there is more than one and we won’t understand what is going on unless we distinguish between them. The crowds that hailed Jesus as Messiah and king comprised one group. For the most part, they were pilgrims who had traveled to Jerusalem from Galilee for the Feast of Passover. That group included some of the same people who, a year earlier, tried to force the kingship on Jesus. (You can ready about that in John 6.) They want change and they believe Jesus is one to bring it.

But Galileans don’t comprise the entire crowd. There are thousands from around Judea and from Jerusalem. Many of these people know about Jesus and some have heard him teach, but they have had far less face time with Jesus than the Galileans. And there are still others from Jewish communities in Syria, Egypt, and around the Mediterranean, most of whom have never heard of Jesus. It is primarily the Galileans who chant Psalm 118:26, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Others in the crowd doesn’t know what to think.

So, it wasn’t the people hailing Jesus as king who turned against him five days later. They probably didn’t know about his crucifixion until it was already happening. The people who shouted for Jesus to be crucified were Judeans who only knew what their leaders – Jesus’s enemies – told them.

Those leaders comprise yet another group. They have been opposed to Jesus for a couple of years, and since the Feast of Tabernacles, which was six months earlier, they have been working on plans to get rid of him. As they watch him entering the city, they do not see the arrival of their new national leader, like the Galileans; they do not see a Messiah, like the disciples. They see a volatile firebrand who is about to bring the iron fist of Rome down on them. They’re scared. At a recent meeting of the nation’s highest ruling body, members were saying: “What are we accomplishing? …If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him…” (John 11:47).

The raising of Lazarus from the dead had sent the nation’s leaders into a tailspin. It had happened a few months earlier, and the religious leaders had been beside themselves ever since. All their efforts to stop Jesus had failed, and now he had performed an outstanding miracle right in their own backyard. They were desperate to get rid of him. “If we let him go on like this,” they had concluded, “… the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (John 11:48).

The other group present werethe Romans – the Roman army, to be precise. Each year at Passover, the Roman prefect deployed troops to Jerusalem to keep the peace. Passover was the Jews’ Independence Day, and at Passover nationalist fervor ran high. There had been much civil unrest at past festivals, even violent insurrections. So, now, at Passover time, you can’t look left or right without seeing a Roman soldier. They’re everywhere.

So, why didn’t the soldiers see what was going on? Or if they did, why didn’t they stop it? That presents such a problem to some scholars that they have claimed the church made up the triumphal entry. They insist that if anything like what John describes had really take place, the Roman military would have intervened.

But they are mistaken. They forget that the Roman army was comprised of men from all around the Mediterranean. There were Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Italians, Asians, Cappadocians, Libyans, and many others. But there were no Jews. Jews didn’t serve in the Roman army. That means that there were few, if any, military personnel who understood what the crowds were yelling in Aramaic. They would have heard the noise and the cheers, but they would not have seen that as a threat.

Neither would the Roman soldiers have grasped the symbolism in Jesus’s choice of a donkey’s colt for a mount. Romans – especially Roman soldiers – knew all about “triumphal entries.” Whenever Caesar or one of his generals returned victorious from a battle in which at least 5,000 enemy combatants had been killed, a great celebration – a triumphal entry – took place. Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem didn’t look anything like that.

When Caesar returned from battle, tens of thousands lined the road into Rome. They cheered as he rode by in a chariot, pulled by great steeds. Behind him was a long line of captives, including kings and generals. The procession would wind its way to the arena, where thousands gathered to watch selected captives fight wild animals.

Is it any wonder the Roman soldiers missed the triumph of Jesus’s triumphal entry. They did not see a mighty warrior. They saw a man in commoner’s clothing. There were no great steeds, only a young donkey. And where were the captive kings and generals? They saw peasants and children

Here is something to remember. What God sees as important and what people see as important are two different things. For the most part, the world is always excited about all the wrong things. If we follow their lead, we will miss the right things – we will miss what God is doing in the world. This is a big problem for many of us who confess Jesus Lord.

Now that we know the parties involved, we are ready to look at what is taking place. Look at verse 12: “The great crowd that had come for the feast…” (These are Galilean festivalgoers who arrived in Jerusalem before Jesus. The Jerusalemites hadn’t come for the feast; they were already there.) “…heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him…”

But palm trees don’t grow around Jerusalem, which is another reason historians doubt the validity of the Triumphal Entry. They do, however, grow in Jericho, and thousands of Galileans had just passed through Jericho on their way to the festival. Jesus himself had come through Jericho at the head of a caravan just days before. The fact that they had cut palm branches and brought them with them suggests they had this in mind before they got to Jerusalem. This was, I think, a second attempt on the part of Galileans to force Jesus to declare himself Israel’s king. And this time, Jesus did not stop them.

Alongside the Galileans is a sub-group of the Jerusalemites. There are the people who were present when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and the friends whom they had told about it. They also came out to meet Jesus. This is verse 17: “Now the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had given this miraculous sign, went out to meet him.”

As Jesus rode by, people in the crowd (these are probably the Galileans) began shouting, “Hosanna,” which is Hebrew and means something like, “O save!” I say, “something like” because by the first century the word was used as a general shout of praise or celebration. If you’d asked the people shouting it to define it, they might have struggled. It was like our word, “Hooray!” We all know what it means but not many of us could define it.

They also cried, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the King of Israel!” (John 12:13). If the Roman soldiers had understood Aramaic, there would have been problems right then and there. They didn’t; but the Pharisees and scribes did. The crowd was shouting to Jesus the words of Psalm 118, which was sung every year at Passover.

“The one who comes” or, literally, “the coming one” was a title for the Messiah. These people were hailing Jesus as Israel’s savior and king. Some of the Pharisees begged Jesus to stop people from chanting this. But this time, for the first time, Jesus welcomed it.

Look at verses 14 and 15: “Jesus found a young donkey and sat upon it. As it is written, ‘Do not be afraid, O Daughter of Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.’ At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that they had done these things to him.”

Why a donkey’s colt? If Jesus wanted to make an impression, wouldn’t he have done better to borrow a horse—maybe even a chariot? Peddlers rode donkeys, not kings. But Jesus knew something that the Roman soldiers didn’t know and that the disciples momentarily forgot: in the Old Testament, Zechariah had prophesied that Israel’s king would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey’s colt.

Jesus was intentionally fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy: “See, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt” – in other words, coming in peace. But the disciples, even the ones Jesus sent to get the colt, didn’t realize at the time that Zechariah was writing about Jesus. They were caught up in a great big story, playing a role in it, and didn’t even know it.

I think that happens to us too. Whenever we do what Jesus says, we get caught up in his story and become a part of it, even when we don’t realize it.

When Jesus’s adversaries heard the shouts, saw the palm branches waving, and cloaks being laid on the road in front of Jesus (which was what people had done at the coronation of King Jehu), they were confounded. Look at verse 19. “So, the Pharisees said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him.’”

The Pharisees and their fellow-conspirators had decided not to arrest Jesus during the feast, for fear of inciting a riot. Now, they were having second thoughts. Could they afford to wait? The whole city could be a bloodbath by week’s end.

Blood was shed, as we know, but it was Jesus’s blood. The story of which he was a part – was the lead character – the story that had begun long before Zechariah’s prophecy, that went back to the foundations of the world, was coming to its climax. The Lamb of God was being offered – was offering himself – for the sins of the world.

This is the story that we are in, the story of the God who pursues us, the maker who restores us, the Father who comes running to meet us. It is a love story, an adventure story, and a divine comedy all rolled into one. And everything turns out all right for those who belong to Jesus.

But from inside the story, things often look like they will turn out all wrong, which is why “we live by faith, not by sight.” After a tornado swept through a small town, a local builder had more work than he could handle. His own home had been destroyed and he and his wife were living in a one-bedroom apartment while he worked on everyone else’s homes. He worked hard and was fair to everyone, with the possible exception of himself and his wife.

His final post-tornado build was for a businessman who owned properties all around the area and for whom he already had done a great deal of work. This was not a repair; it was a demolition and new construction. The businessman visited the worksite weekly, and sometimes several times a week, to make sure everything was being done to his satisfaction. The builder just wanted to get this one done, so he could finally start work on his own place, but he was conscientious and he did his work well.

When the house was finished, the businessman was there to receive the keys. He said to the builder, “Look, I know I’ve been tough on you. You have been working hard and I pushed you even harder … but I wanted this house to be just right because I was having it built for a special person.” Then he handed the keys back to the builder and said, “These are yours. You didn’t know it, but all this time you’ve been building this house for yourself and for your wife.”

As we go through life, doing our work, struggling over hardships, helping others for Christ’s sake, we don’t realize that God is using these things to build us. We won’t fully realize that until we stand before the Lord in glory.

“At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only when Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that they had done these things to him.” I suspect that when we get to heaven, we shall have this same experience repeatedly.

Things we didn’t understand, that made no sense to us at all, will light up with meaning. We will see God’s hand everywhere, bringing good, righting wrong, redeeming the time. Sometimes we will see that his hand was operating – to our joy and amazement – through us. Sometimes – to our shame – that his hand was operating despite us. But, at all times, he was doing what was right and good.

The key to making sense of our past – and our present, for that matter – is found in the words, “only when Jesus was glorified…” When Jesus is glorified, the light that comes from him makes things clear. But in isolation from Jesus and his glory, our circumstances are a book written in a language we can’t understand.

We don’t have to wait for the new age to glorify Jesus. Our lives can be all for his glory now. When they are, things we’ve never understood will shine with meaning. But we see this only in the light of Jesus’s glory.

One of the books I most enjoyed reading is J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Professor Tolkien’s character, Aragorn, reminds me of Jesus. Though many people criticize him and some hate him outright – and almost no one understands him – he labors for their good in relative obscurity. Only a handful of people know who he really is: their rightful king.

Then the day comes when he enters into the great city and reveals his true identity. A herald proclaims: “Here is Aragorn son of Arathorn, chieftain of the Dunedain of Arnor, Captain of the Host of the West, bearer of the Star of the North, wielder of the Sword Reforged, victorious in battle, whose hands bring healing, the Elfstone, Elessar of the line of Valandil, Isildur’s son, Elendil’s son of Numenor.”[1]

Then the herald cries, “‘Shall he be king and enter into the City and dwell there?’ And all the people and all the host cried ‘Yea!’ in one voice.”

This scene has a parallel in real life. Every time a person acknowledges Jesus as Lord and welcomes him into his or her life, there is a triumphal entry. And those who welcome him now will be welcomed by him then, when the King returns. He will say, “Come, you blessed of my Father, enter into the joy of your Lord!”

Today, I serve as herald to the King of Glory. “Here is Jesus the Messiah, the Second Adam, the Bright and Morning Star, the First and the Last, Son of David, Son of Man, Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, Fear of Jacob, Lion of Judah, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”

Shall he be king and enter your life and dwell there? What say you: Yea or Nay?

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^[1] Ken Langley, Zion, Illinois, in Preaching Today.com