The Triumphal Entry By: Caleb Miller
The Triumphal Entry
I want to open up today with a question: when you think about Jesus, when you see him depicted in art or in pop culture, or when you read about him in the Bible, how do you think about him? Do you think of him as a religious figure, a miracle worker and healer, or as a king?
Today we’re going to be looking at what is called the Triumphal Entry. It is called Triumphal because Jesus was declaring himself to be a king, almost as a victorious general or athlete who would ride back into his hometown from battle or a championship to a parade. It is called an Entry not only because it is the way Jesus approached the city of Jerusalem, the capital city of Judea, and the center of Jewish worship, but also the moment that he fully entered into our world. He became a political figure.
It is the end of the story of Christmas and the Beginning of the Events of Easter
We are looking at the last leg of Jesus’ journey, the final stage of Jesus’ public ministry, and the events that occurred roughly one week before Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection. Let’s read a little bit from Luke 19.
And when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you shall say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’ ” So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?” And they said, “The Lord has need of it.” And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
As I’ve been preparing this week, studying a bit on the book of Luke and what has come before, it has become very clear to me that as much as I’d like to set the stage there are just too many details to go over. I could spend all this time talking about the different passages in the Bible that connect to this one. Or I could talk about the historical events that led up to this. As you can imagine there are people who study the Bible for a living who have a lot to say.
So what I’m going to do is hit the highlights, talk about why this should matter to us, what impact it could have on how we think about Jesus, and who he claimed to be, and also how we look at our own place in this world, and how we live our lives.
I’m going to ask the opening question again: when you think about Jesus, when you see him depicted in art or mentioned in the Bible or in pop culture, do you think of him as a religious figure – a guru, a life coach, a wise man – or as a miracle worker, or as a king?
Maybe you think of him as one or the other. Maybe you think of him as all of the above. Maybe you’re not even sure Jesus existed, or if he did, not as the Bible portrays him. Maybe you don’t know what to think or you’re waiting for more information. Today we are looking at a text that clearly shows Jesus as a king, that is the direction this piece is heading, but I’ll admit that, even as someone who grew up in the church, it took me a long time, and a few years of careful study, to understand what it meant for Jesus to be called a “king.”
Jesus is King
A few years ago there was a book written called American Jesus by Stephen Prothero that documented the way Jesus has been depicted in American culture in the last 250 years or so. And it is fascinating (to me at least) to see all of the variations. We often like to think of Jesus as a member of our ethnic group, who shares their political agenda, and who dresses in clothes that may or may not be appropriate to his historical context.
There are a million ways to show this. You can look at Sunday School lessons or reprints of European art, or just pull out your phone and Google and you’ll see that we tend to imagine Jesus in a flowing white gown, maybe with a sash, long brown hair with a lot of wise things to say and maybe some magical powers thrown in. He shows up as a ghost now and again to comfort people.
This isn’t necessarily all bad, but it is not very kingly. It is no wonder, then, that when I talk to people who would not consider themselves very religious or spiritual, they do not think of Jesus as someone with authority. They think of him as someone who may have had good ideas, or may have profound ways of speaking, but who was not really a king, and certainly not God. From a human perspective, here is what they might say: he was a poor carpenter from some backwater village. He died at an early age because he got caught up in a political misunderstanding. That was it.
But what about people who go to church, or call themselves Christians and take the Bible seriously? Well it has been my experience, and maybe it is yours too that most people want to think of Jesus as a consultant not a king – someone who we can listen to if we want, but we always have the freedom to “interpret” his words however we want to suit our own opinions and preferences.
This passage does not give us much information on what kind of color Jesus’s hair was or what he may have looked like riding on a donkey or weeping over the city of Jerusalem in the distance. But it does give us a glimpse of Jesus as a king. And not just as an honorary title, but as a king in action.
I think it is fair to say that each of us, in our own way, put Jesus in a kind of box and the way we imagine him contradicts texts like this. We often think of him as a guru a life coach or an idea. Even words like “savior” or “lord” have just become hollow religious words that get thrown around without really meaning anything. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the words Christ and Messiah are both words that in English mean “king.”
But we are all too good at borrowing the parts of the Bible that we like and leaving the rest. We think of his teachings as optional, and when we run into something that confuses us, we try to force our own categories on it or else change the subject.
If you read the book of Luke carefully, in that account, you’ll notice Jesus has been on his way to Jerusalem for a long time. In the book it has been since chapter 9, so many pages as Jesus is making a journey to Jerusalem. And along the way he has interacted with all sorts of people. For sick people who desperately need relief from disease or life-long disability, Jesus brings healing. For religious and political leaders who think they have life figured out, Jesus brings a warning. For men and women who join the crowds and become his followers, Jesus brings ideas that are challenging and sometimes confusing. And there are so many sinners – social outcasts, corrupt bureaucrats, prostitutes – for these people, Jesus brings forgiveness. He brings peace.
For those of us today who are sick, or young and seemingly invincible, or highly educated, or not very educated, or caught in the grip of a deep sin, what does it look like to really encounter Jesus on his own terms, in his own book?
Jesus is surprising. He has always been. He surprised the people of his day, even his closest friends, and he still is full of surprises even after all these years. See, at that time there was actually a lot of talk of a coming king, one who would appear, a man who was in the bloodline of David, a man who would be part of a long dynasty of kings, a man who would rescue the nation of Israel. But rescue them from what? Well, from its oppressors. In those days that meant the Roman Empire. But Jesus had something far greater than the Roman Empire in mind.
And for us today, we have almost the opposite problem. We have either heard the story so many times that it has begun to become meaningless or we have never heard it properly told the first time. And culture today is quite different than it was 2,000 years ago. And because we really do not know why Jesus would ride anywhere on a colt, or why the people would say “blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!,” or why it was such a big deal that Jesus would come to Jerusalem to weep over it, we chalk it up to just one more bizarre thing Jesus did that we can’t explain. And mentally we put Jesus back in that flowing white gown, maybe with a sash, long brown hair with a lot of wise things to say, and maybe some magical powers.
In reality, Jesus was declaring himself to be a king, the king, the long-awaited king, who would rule over Israel and the nations and the earth and yes, even the heavens. One of the ways we know this event was so important is that an account of this event shows up in all four of the Gospel accounts in our Bible. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have all sorts of differences – they tell of different periods of Jesus’ life and are arranged in different orders. They emphasize different things because they are written to very different groups of people. But they all agree that this event, the Triumphal Entry, is important.
Palm Sunday- What’s Happening?
So much so that every year around this time most churches around the world devote a Sunday to telling this story, called Palm Sunday, referring to the account in John where the crowds waved palm branches. It may seem odd that Jesus riding on a donkey would be of such importance, but I promise you, it was.
So let’s look briefly at what is going on here with the Triumphal Entry. As I look at this story I see four episodes. There is the colt, there is the way the crowds responded with the cloaks and the palm branches and the shouts of praise, there is the rejection of the Pharisees and the people of Jerusalem, and then there is Jesus’ own weeping as he approaches the city.
So first, the colt. Jesus and his followers had been traveling south for about 70 miles from his hometown in the north in Galilee, south to Jerusalem. Bethphage and Bethany and the Mount of Olives were sort of like the last exits on the highway of this trip and this crowd was drawing near.
It may seem logical to think that Jesus was tired after all that walking and may have just needed a place to find rest. But it would be strange to take that seat so close to the end of the journey, and not somewhere in the middle. And none of the other travelers with him seemed to need a donkey to ride on.
He tells two of his followers to go find a colt, and he seems to have some inside knowledge of where the colt could be found. Some readers of the Bible here see a minor miracle, others just think there were people near the Mount of Olives who had heard of Jesus and were willing to lend him their animal and understood what the disciples meant when they said “God needs your donkey.”
I’m not sure, but I think if someone showed up at my house asking to borrow my car, and then when I asked why they replied, “Well God needs it,” I’d probably not give in so quickly. So I think there is probably a minor miracle here. We know from other accounts in the Bible that Jesus had the ability to find coins in the mouths of fish or predict which side of the boat a net should be dropped on to catch fish, so it could be that this was just another instance of Jesus knowing more about animals than humans typically do because Jesus had authority over creation in a way we do not.
But whatever we make of that episode, the reason that the colt is significant actually has to do with a prophecy made long before Jesus was born. It came from the book of Zechariah and it said: “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout Daughter of Jerusalem! See your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey. I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the war-horses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and run from the River to the ends of the earth.”
See your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey. And what this even more remarkable is the line that comes before it: God says “I will defend my house against marauding forces. Never again will an oppressor overrun my people, for now, I am keeping watch.” If you want to read this or study this yourself sometime it is found in Zechariah chapter 9. The whole section is about a coming king who will deliver the nation from its enemies and bring an era of peace.
The nation of Israel was desperate for renewal. In Jesus’ time, it had been through a lot. For the past thousand years before Jesus came it had endured wars between tribes, a civil war, invasions, two sieges that left its capital cities in ruins, and a long period of exile in Assyria and Babylon. It was a shadow of its former self, back in the days of David. Only a few tribes had survived, and called themselves Jews, not Israelites, after the tribe of Judah. And now the nation of Israel, or what was left of it, and the city of Jerusalem in particular, suffered under the oppression of the Roman Empire, with its heavy taxes, and its demands for manpower and resources and food and control.
So here is Jesus, a carpenter’s son who had been working miracles and teaching people radical things throughout the countryside, riding into the heart of Israel, the city of Jerusalem on a symbol that says, I know what Rome thinks it is and I know what the religious leaders would say but, actually I’m in charge. I am the king Zechariah spoke about, who would deliver the nation from its oppressors, extend dominion throughout the nations, and who would bring peace.
And the city of Jerusalem at this time was packed with people and merchandise. Passover was a holiday, as big of a deal in Jerusalem as the week of Christmas and New Year’s Day is in America. It actually still is. You can go to Israel today and find that kids are home from school for the week, and there are thousands of tourists pouring into the city. Since it is warm there are museum exhibits, festivals, and special tours. Then, just as now, the square around the temple would be packed not just with Jews but with Gentiles – traders, teachers, tourists, beggars, families. Men and women, boys and girls, preparing for a week of holiday festivals.
Jesus was putting a lot of pressure on himself in that moment. He was not yet in the city but he was just outside of it. He was announcing his presence to Jerusalem as the Messiah or Christ. In our terms today, it would be like someone announcing their campaign for President while also claiming to fulfill all the hair-raising prophecies in the book of Revelation.
He is the king of Israel, of the nations, of the whole earth, and of the heavens. Since Jesus was actually born into the bloodline of the great King David from a thousand years prior, he had a rightful claim to the title of King of Israel. As the one who fulfilled so many prophecies in the circumstances of his life, such as the one in Zechariah, he also demonstrates his place over all nations – of which Rome or America is just one of a great multitude. And through his miracles and evidence of his also being divine, the Son of God, he is king of creation and king of heaven. And he is coming back, actually, to restore the world to the way it was supposed to be.
Now I suspect his disciples and the crowds that greeted him only understood the first one of these, that Jesus was claiming to be king of Israel. In John’s account, it says “At first Jesus’ disciples did not understand all of this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him.”
In that part of the world in those days, culturally a donkey could have been a symbol of power and control. In the early days of Israel, in the book of Judges you see times where rulers would set princes on donkeys, especially in times of peace. And just as a general today often likes to take a flag bearing his rank with him, or celebrities in Hollywood like to walk down the red carpet, kings would be greeted by their people by cloaks being spread out to make a path.
The palm branches, by the way, communicated something similar. In Roman times they could symbolize victory, almost like the laurel wreathes placed as a crown on the heads of athletes. In Jewish festivals, sometimes at Passover or other times during the year, they would be waved along with a traditional greeting a lot like the one found in the book of Luke, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” Not all that different from our Merry Christmas or Happy Easter. However the people in this account seem to be a little more eager and change it to, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord,” and then add “peace in heaven and glory in the highest” – which sounds a lot like a Christmas carol or two.
But then another group takes notice. The Pharisees, the exacting and highly educated and very well-respected teachers of the Bible put two and two together. We can almost hear the concern in their voice: Jesus, there must be some misunderstanding. Jesus, you have to tell your disciples they’ve gone too far. You can’t be serious. You may have said some great things and performed a miracle or two or ten or fifty, but you can’t be serious here. This is too far. You’re not the king. There is no peace. The book of Zechariah is not about you. No man can have that kind of authority, only God. And besides, there are Roman officials in there, who have the power to execute all of us, who will not be pleased to hear about this commotion.
But then notice what Jesus does. He does not shrink back from this or start to apologize or offer a word of explanation. He didn’t start worrying about the Romans and how powerful they were. Jesus ups the ante yet again: “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” (v. 40)
The stones will cry out. The land itself groaned in desperation.
And this is followed by Jesus’ own weeping. (v. 41):
As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace – but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming for you.’
See the Pharisees, and the people of Jerusalem, and perhaps even the eager crowds spreading the cloaks and waving the branches, they were all so focused on what was immediately in front of them that they could not see the big picture. They were not thinking in Jesus’ terms, not really, just as it is so hard for us to think in his terms today.
They were so busy worrying about what Jesus said about Israel. They weren’t even thinking about his authority over the nations, or the earth, or the heavens.
Rome was barely even a blip on the radar. Jesus wasn’t worried about what the Romans would think. Jesus was thinking about something bigger, and older, and much more difficult.
A long time ago – a long, long time ago – back before Israel and Rome, or nations and politics, and most of our inventions and languages, back even before most of the Bible was written or wickedness was really spread out and entrenched under every stone in our world, the first man and woman lived in a glorious garden. They were put there and surrounded with good things by their heavenly father. They were like kids on a playground, or spirits in the most wonderful myth. They did not know evil. They did not know what it was like to bury a child, or live in fear, or not want to get up in the morning to face the world, or get angry over the dumbest things. They weren’t like us.
They didn’t have those problems, not yet. And when we read the accounts of their experience in the opening chapters of Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, they seem utterly foreign to us, far more foreign than things a few thousand years ago in Jerusalem. Talking to animals. Walking around naked. Never getting hungry or thirsty. Never once thinking about whether they could really trust each other or what the meaning of it all was. They were happy, joyful even.
And when they disobeyed their heavenly father, and they found themselves cast out of that beautiful Garden, God punished them. He told the man: cursed is the ground because of you.
The stones are still on the verge of crying out. The Bible says that all of creation groans for restoration. For the way things once were. For the way things should be. You and I, and all of us, even people who’ve never been to church or showed any interest in God, we groan too. This world is broken. Something has gone horribly wrong. This earth is full of beauty. It is too detailed and too fantastic to be put here by accident. But at the same time, it has gotten so bad that even the best intentions of those trying to put it back together get twisted and distorted out of recognition. No amount of technology or political activism or medicine or creativity is going to right all wrongs and wipe all tears. It’s just not. Perfection is out of reach.
If we look for peace in the things we can see and touch and feel around us, we ultimately will be bitterly disappointed. We will be let down. We will never find completion. That was true 2,000 years ago and it is true today. But our hope can be found here: that Jesus is king of many different things at once. It is not up to us to make things right. Jesus is king of it all, and therefore he can fix what we have broken.
Riding into a city on a donkey on its own is not anything special. But when put into the context of all of Jesus’ claims and mighty works, it becomes clear that Jesus was the only person to have ever lived with the authority to speak about the entire world as a whole, and claim titles like “Christ” and “Messiah.” This is why he will never fit neatly into our categories, and he will always remain hard to imagine and impossible to predict, why he will always be full of surprises. If you aren’t confused or startled by at least one thing you’ve heard about Jesus, you probably aren’t paying attention.
In the chronicles of the great kings of history, especially in ancient history, it became standard to write up an account of the reign of this or that person. So there are accounts of Pharaohs of Egypt or kings of this or that land, and they would say “in the third year of the reign of so-and-so, this happened” and they would usually talk about some law or battle or monument, similar to the things politicians like to put on their resume’s today.
In fact if you read some books in the Bible, such as Kings or Chronicles in the Old Testament, you find whole sections written like that. “Jehoiakim was twenty-three years old when he became king and he reigned in Jerusalem for three months.” Or “In the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army.”
In the early years of the church, there was a long period of time, like in some places in the world today, where Christianity was outlawed. Part of the reason it was was because the emperors did not like competition. They wanted people to recognize them as the king of kings and lord of lords, the supreme rulers of the land to whom all bowed or fled.
But the Christians would not be moved from their conviction that Jesus was king of kings and lord of lords, and they refused to take part in the ceremonies.
The emperors and officials were brutal. They would capture Christian families and torture some until they renounced their faith in Jesus. Many died that way. And their bodies would be recovered by relatives or other people in the church for a proper Christian burial. Unlike the Romans who liked cremation, the Christians would bury their dead, as a sign that they hoped to use those bodies against someday when Jesus, the king of kings and lord of lords, would return.
But on their tombs they would write “here lies ____ , who died in the 60th year of the reign of our lord, Jesus the Christ.” Or the 204th year, or the 357th year, and so on. And they would calculate the date based off of an event in Jesus’ life. And this is where we get our calendar. For the Latin phrase for the in the year of our Lord is anno domini, or AD.
For those of us today who are sick, or highly educated, or not very educated, or caught in the grip of a deep sin, or just full of questions, what does it look like to really encounter Jesus on his own terms, in his own book?
When you think about Jesus and consider who he really was, whether you think of him as a religious figure, or a miracle worker and healer, do not forget his claim to be king. Do not lose sight of the fact that we are living in roughly the 2024th year of the reign of the Lord Jesus, the Christ. However you think about Jesus today or in the days and weeks to come, whatever you do, do not forget that he was and is a king.