The Lowly King

I’m calling my Easter sermon series All Hail King Jesus! We’re using the four Sundays leading into Easter to consider various dimensions of the kingship of Jesus. As part of my research for this series, I asked our crowd at a Wednesday night Bible study to do a little word association game with me. I asked them to tell me the first word that came to their mind when they heard the word king. Here are some of the responses: royalty, throne, crown, power, Jesus, sovereign, palace, wealth, queen, and majesty. All of those are dead on. And other than the word Jesus, those are the same words I’d have heard if I asked the question at the mall instead of at a Bible study. None of those word associations is a surprise. I’m likewise not surprised at the words I didn’t hear: meek, humble, lowly. Any king those words describe is ripe for overthrow. And yet those words describe King Jesus.

Each week in the series we’ll be considering a dimension of Jesus’ kingship and we’re doing it, in part, by hearing the story from someone who was there. We looked first at Jesus the lowly king. His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday captured the lowliness and humility of King Jesus. And the disciple John tells us about that event.

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I was there, you know … on the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey colt. We’d been to Jerusalem before, but we never made an entrance like this.

We had just come from Bethany and there was still quite a buzz about what Jesus did there. He raised a man from the dead. The man’s name is Lazarus. He and his sisters Mary and Martha are friends of Jesus. Lazarus got sick and died. We got word of his sickness, but Jesus just sort of blew it off and took his sweet time getting to Bethany. Lazarus didn’t have that time. His sickness got the best of him and he died.

We got there too late. We even missed the funeral. By the time we arrived, Lazarus was four-days-dead, wrapped in burial clothes, and laid out in a tomb. Lots of mourners were still there. And nobody seemed particularly happy to see Jesus. First Martha and then Mary got in their little dig at Jesus: “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” The crowd got into the act too saying, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept Lazarus from dying?” It was pretty tense. They didn’t need Jesus now that Lazarus was dead and all Jesus could do was pay His respects.

But Jesus didn’t come to pay His respects; Jesus came to raise Lazarus from the dead. And that’s exactly what He did. “Move the stone away from the grave,” Jesus said.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Martha replied. “The odor is going to stink to high heaven.”

“Wait till you smell the fragrance of the glory of God,” countered Jesus. “Now somebody move the stone!”

The stone was moved. The smell was bad. Everybody covered their noses except Jesus. Jesus did two things. The first thing He did was talk to God. The second thing He did was talk to Lazarus. Jesus shouted, “Lazarus, come out of that tomb.” Guess what—Lazarus came out. He was wrapped up like a mummy. He walked out stiff-legged, but he walked out alive. And Jesus said, “Unwrap the man and let him go.”

A lot of the people who saw it believed in Jesus on the spot. But the religious leaders did not. They got their heads together and said, “Jesus has to die. If we let him go on like this everyone is going to believe in him. It will create chaos. Rome will come down and take away what little freedom we have left. It’s going to get ugly around here.” The high priest Caiaphas piped up and said, “It is better that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” Caiaphas was dead on, but in a different way than he thought.

So word got out that Jesus was a wanted man. We pulled back to a more wilderness area for a short time to let things cool a bit.

But things didn’t cool much. People were still buzzing over Lazarus’ resurrection. And now it was Passover time. Jesus wanted to celebrate it in Jerusalem, so we headed back to Bethany on route. Lazarus, Martha, and Mary threw a big thank you dinner for Jesus. Mary got so carried away she ended up anointing Jesus’ feet with about a year’s salary worth of nard. Leave it to Judas to raise a stink in a room that smelled like flowers. “The woman’s crazy,” he said. “That’s a lot of help we could have given to the poor.” Don’t believe Judas for a second. He didn’t care about the poor; he was the keeper of our purse and sometimes he even helped himself to the proceeds.

Judas didn’t like what Mary did, but Jesus liked it a lot. He said that she had anointed Him for burial. Huh? Burial? We had no idea at the time what Jesus was talking about. But it wouldn’t take long till we’d know exactly what he was talking about.

The next day was Sunday. The Passover was this week. It was time to go to Jerusalem, and we went. We didn’t go alone. You wouldn’t believe the crowd that came along and the crowd that was there to greet us. It seems that everybody had heard about Lazarus and wanted to see for themselves this man who raised him from the dead. That miracle was such a crowd-pleaser that the religious leaders said, “We better not stop at killing Jesus. We need to kill Lazarus too”—you know, get rid of the evidence, so to speak. But they made no move in that direction on that Sunday.

How could they? There were too many people in a crowd that was Jesus-friendly. If they tried to take Jesus or Lazarus that day, they would have instigated the very riot they were trying to avoid. So they had to sit back and watch with everyone else.

It was quite a parade really. I admit that I don’t tell the story with the detail of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They explained how Jesus got the donkey’s colt on which he rode. I chose to cut to the chase. I did mention the donkey. That’s important. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, by choosing a donkey’s colt Jesus was fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy: “Fear not, daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt.”

That whole processional was both glorious and bizarre. It was glorious because with knives gleaming in the sun, people were cutting palm fronds from trees along the trail. They were waving those palm fronds and laying them in Jesus’ path. You roll out the red carpet; we laid down palm branches. And the people were shouting phrases right out of the messianic psalms: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Hosanna means save us now. Those were big words, big praises and prayers. I know what the crowd was thinking—probably the same thing we disciples were thinking: is this the signal that Messiah Jesus is going run those pagan Romans out of town? It was glorious. It was like worship. It was like a royal procession.

And believe me, we knew all about royal processions: kings or generals making their grand entrance into the city mounted on bleached chargers, surrounded by soldiers and guards with their swords and their spears and their shields, people lined up along the route shouting and cheering the heroic conqueror. Such processions were a common occurrence.

And that’s why Jesus’ procession was also a bit bizarre. He sat not upon a great stallion but upon a donkey’s colt. Those who surrounded him were not soldiers armed to the teeth but the poor and the peasant and the common and the weak. If Jesus was trying to make a political statement here, He failed miserably. If He was trying to stir fear in the hearts of the occupying Romans, the best he got from them was a chuckle. If He was trying to signal Jerusalem that King Messiah had finally arrived, well, He sure didn’t enter like the Messiah they were expecting. Jesus was sending a signal all right, but not one of us picked up on at the time.

But still the people loved Him. They loved Him that day anyway. The religious leaders didn’t. They were up in arms: “What are we going to do now?” they said to one another. “He’s got the whole world eating out of the palm of His hand.” None of us—not us disciples nor the religious leaders—had clue one that by the end of the week this city, this crowd, would turn on Jesus like a rabid dog on its master. People wouldn’t be eating out of the palm of His hands any longer; the Romans would be driving nails into those palms instead.

Hmm … not exactly what you’d expect … from a king.

Unless that King is Jesus.

Palm Sunday in First Person: What's with the Crowd?

It wasn’t exactly Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but it was a pretty big deal for our little part of the world. We had no mammoth balloons of cartoon characters, no bands, no floats, no celebrity emcees. But we had Jesus, and on that day He seemed to be enough.

To put it in your terms, Jesus was “hot.” Had He lived in your day, Jesus would have been hounded by the paparazzi—invading His privacy, snapping pictures, a hundred flashing lights in his face every time they could steal a shot. He would have been on magazine covers, would have made the list of People magazine’s “The Year’s 25 Most Intriguing People.” He would have been a celebrity—and not just famous for being famous either, but famous for His mighty acts and deeds.

It’s not that Jesus tried to be famous or anything. He really didn’t court all the attention He received. Truth is, Jesus enjoyed quiet times and solitude as much or more than the attention of the crowds. But crowds were drawn to Him nonetheless. And it’s easy to see why. Jesus did things no one else could do—supernatural things, miraculous things, Messiah things. He healed the sick. He stopped a storm. He walked on water. He took one sack lunch and fed thousands. He made mincemeat out of demons, restoring the people they once possessed to sanity and wholeness, to family and community. He did some very amazing things. Things nobody else could do.

And word gets around about somebody like that. Even though Jesus usually told the people he healed not to blab it all over town, people just couldn’t keep it to themselves. And how could they anyway? Suppose you’d been blind all your life, led around by the hand wherever you went, and one day Jesus healed you. What do you say when a friend sees you walking around with 20/20 vision and asks what in the world happened to you? Do you say, “Gee … I don’t know … uh … I’ve been eating a lot of carrots lately”? Like who’s gonna believe that? Nobody, that’s who. So word got out. Jesus’ fame began to spread like a prairie fire. And people flocked around Him like bugs around a lamp.

He drew a crowd most everywhere He went. Many wanted His healing touch. Some loved to listen to His stories. Others were just curious and wanted to see this celebrity up close. You know, just in case Jesus ever amounted to anything lasting, they wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren, “Yes, I saw Jesus with my own eyes. Yes sir, I was close enough to touch him.” I don’t know, maybe they hoped some of Jesus’ fame might rub off on them.

Jesus was a celebrity in many ways, but He was not without His critics. He was not universally popular. For the most part, the common folks gave Him a thumbs-up, while the majority of the religious leaders gave Him a thumbs-down. They didn’t like Jesus much. Fact is, some of them hated him with a passion. I think they felt threatened by Him. In every encounter with them, Jesus ate their lunch. They could never outwit Him, outsmart Him, or outthink Him. Plus, Jesus didn’t keep the Laws like they thought He should—especially the Sabbath laws. And when Jesus said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven,” well, in the minds of the religious leaders, that was blasphemy. “Only God can forgive sins,” they said. And they pretty much had it in for Jesus the rest of the way. So whether for good or for bad, Jesus was the talk of Israel in those days.

And now it was time to go to Jerusalem for the Passover. We had a hunch that once word leaked out about this, there would be a crowd waiting for us. And sure enough there was. We had a pretty good contingent of followers already as we climbed up the mountains to Jerusalem.

And once we got up the Mount of Olives outside of Jerusalem, we stopped for a break. But this was more than a rest stop; this break had purpose. We didn’t stop just to rub our aching feet. We stopped because Jesus had a little mission to accomplish. He sent two of His disciples to get it done. The whole thing sounded like something out of a spy novel. The two disciples were to go to the village up ahead. Jesus told them that they would find a donkey and her colt tied up there. “Untie them,” Jesus said, “and bring them to me.” You could see these two disciples were a little confused about this. It showed in their eyes. And it looked like they were thinking, “Okay, You’re telling us to go steal a couple of donkeys. A fellow can get hung for something like that.” Jesus must have sensed their anxiety, so He quickly added, “If anyone says anything to you, your code words are, ‘The Lord needs them.’ Just say that and you’re home free.”

Those of us in the group who were paying attention realized that our entry into Jerusalem was going to be different from our entry into a hundred other dusty little towns in Israel. Believing Jesus to be the Messiah, some of us wondered if this was somehow connected to the prophecy of Zechariah: “See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” We wondered if that prophecy was about this entrance? But surely not. Messiah’s bound to enter Jerusalem with more boldness than on the back of some donkey’s colt. Why not a white stallion, a bleached charger—ready to rumble with the Romans and set things right?

Anyway, we laid our cloaks on the animals and Jesus sat on the colt. A humble way to enter the city. But the humility of Christ was balanced by the jubilation of the crowd. It was a very large crowd. You should have seen it. As Jesus made His way into the city, the crowd began throwing their cloaks on the road. I know that sounds odd to you. You roll out the red carpet; we threw down our cloaks. And with knives flashing in the sunlight, some in the crowd began to strip nearby trees of their branches. They threw them in the road too. People began to circle Jesus, some behind, some in front. And while we had no bands in this parade, we had shouting and singing. “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” It was quite a spectacle really. The whole city was caught up in it. People were asking who it was that was stirring up such a fuss. For a man who never seemed to be much in for fanfare, Jesus made anything but a quiet entrance on this day.

Some of us had been a little nervous about going to Jerusalem. The reception Jesus received was quite a relief. Jesus had been talking about going to Jerusalem to suffer and die (whatever that means), but with such a warm welcome, maybe Jerusalem will be kind to us after all.

The crowds that greeted us were certainly hospitable. But you never know about crowds. Were they sincere? Or did many of them just get swept up by the momentum of numbers? People can act very differently in crowds than they might act alone. There’s security in a crowd. There’s anonymity in a crowd. And there’s pressure too. Crowds create pressure to conform—for good or for bad. When a crowd is moving one way, it’s hard to move against them. I think your courts call this “mob mentality”—“He couldn’t help it, your Honor, he was the victim of mob mentality. He was swept up by the crowd. He would never have done this were it not for the crowd. He would never do such a thing alone.” We’re talking about mob mentality here … about crowds.

So we didn’t really know about this crowd on Palm Sunday. They were giving three cheers for Jesus today, but were they sincere, or were they just swept up in crowd and the passion of the moment? We didn’t know. But one thing appeared obvious: Jesus wasn’t caught up in this crowd. He seemed almost oblivious to their praise—as if He knew something about this crowd that we did not know.

But there was one particular thing that did trouble some of us on that day. When we got into Jerusalem, people were in quite a stir by all the commotion and you could hear them asking people in the crowd, “What’s going on? What’s all the fuss? Who’s the man on the colt?”

“This is Jesus,” the crowds answered, “the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.” The crowd was with us now, but they called Him a prophet. Those of us closest to Jesus believed Him to be more than a prophet. We believed He was Messiah. This prophet thing is troubling. Here we are in Jerusalem, and anybody who knows anything about Jerusalem knows this: Jerusalem is a good place for a prophet to get himself killed.