I was born not far from the home of Washington Irving, the author of Rip Van Winkle. Imagine with me for a moment that you are a modern Rip Van Winkle. You fall asleep one day while on a mountain hike and you wake up twenty years later. As you walk back into your hometown, you see twinkling lights lining the city streets, decorated evergreen trees in the windows of homes and shops, and evergreen wreaths with red bows on the doorways. If you saw all these symbols, then you would know it was around Christmastime.
Now I invite you to imagine a different scene. You are Rip Van Winkle, but this time when you wake up and return to your hometown, you see colorful eggs and bunnies in shop windows. If you saw that, you would know it was near Easter, wouldn’t you?
OK. Now indulge me a bit further and imagine yet another scene. You are still Rip Van Winkle. You wake up after your twenty-year snooze, but this time it is night. As you make your way back to town, you see children running around in costumes. Some are dressed like witches and other scary creatures. Of course, you know it’s Halloween.
Alright, let’s play one more round. Imagine you are Rip Van Winkle and you wake up, and as you walk into your hometown you see Christmas trees and Easter bunnies and children dressed in scary costumes going door to door and saying “Trick or treat?” If you saw this all at once you would think your hometown had gotten their holidays seriously mixed up, wouldn’t you? After thinking on it for a while, you might even guess that your town was trying to make a statement, send a coded message, but you might not be sure what the message was.
The last scenario is a little bit like what happened the day Jesus entered Jerusalem the Sunday before his death. Symbols are very powerful in communicating a message. Jesus knew this and used symbols to great effect. However, in the story we are about to read, the symbols and holidays represented are all mixed up. Our job today is to sort out their meaning and message for us.
We read about these mixed-up holidays in John 12:12-22. Listen for God’s word to you…
The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting,
“Hosanna!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the king of Israel!”
Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:
“Do not be afraid, Daughter 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 these things had been done to him.
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 performed this sign, went out to meet him. So the Pharisees said to one another, “See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!”
Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the festival. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. “Sir,” they said, “we would like to see Jesus.” Philip went to tell Andrew; Andrew and Philip in turn told Jesus.
It was indeed a great crowd that came to Jerusalem for the Passover Feast. Some thirty years later, the Jewish historian Josephus would estimate the Passover crowd in Jerusalem to be 2.5 million.
Thus, the first holiday being celebrated here was the springtime holiday of Passover.Passover was a remembrance of the Exodus, the time when God delivered his people from slavery in Egypt through the leadership of Moses. Passover had unique symbols, of course, as does every holiday. One of those symbols was the sacrifice of a lamb. It may be just at this very moment, as Jesus was entering Jerusalem, that the lambs were being led into the city for slaughter. If there were two and half million Jews in Jerusalem for the festival, and one lamb was required for every ten people, then that means a quarter of a million lambs were being led to slaughter. That number may well be inflated, but you get the picture. There were many lambs being led into the city, and Jesus was walking in the middle of them. Soon, John is going to show us how Jesus fits into this whole picture as the Lamb of God.
But Passover is not the only holiday symbolized in this scene. We read that when the crowds heard that Jesus, the famous prophet/healer from Galilee, was on his way into Jerusalem, they took palm branches and went out to greet him. It’s the wrong time of year for this holiday—but the palms have something to do with Hanukkah, which, as you know, is celebrated around the time of our Christmas. When Judas Maccabaeus defeated the pagan invaders in 164 BC, and cleansed the Temple, the people of the city greeted him with palm branches. (See 1 Maccabees 13:51 and 2 Maccabees 10:7.)
What is Jesus about to do, after entering the city? He is going to cleanse the Temple in a different way. And how do the people greet him? They greet him the same way the people greeted Judas Maccabaeus.
What is the message in this mixture of symbols from Hanukkah and the Passover? By waving the palm branches, the people are saying to Jesus that they want him to be their king. By entering Jerusalem in this way during the feast of Passover, Jesus is sending a signal that it is time for God to deliver his people from bondage.
And there are echoes of yet a third Jewish holiday in this passage. The shout of “hosanna” means “save us now”. Clearly, the people wanted Jesus to be a conquering king like Judas Maccabaeus, someone who would deliver them from the power of Rome. “Hosanna” is a quotation from Psalm 118:25 which was part of the Hallel, the section of the Psalms from 113 to 118 sung daily during the Feast of Tabernacles. This feast was celebrated in the autumn and when the worshippers reached the word “hosanna” in their singing of the Hallel, every Jewish male would wave his “lulah” which was a bundle of willow and myrtle tied with a palm.
The words, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” are also taken from Psalm 118. This verse was widely understood as referring to the Messiah. This is made explicit in the words added by the pilgrims who greet Jesus. They say, “Blessed is the King of Israel!” Clearly, the people wanted Jesus to be their king.
The question is: how did Jesus respond to this greeting? John tells us that Jesus found a young donkey and sat upon it. John also tells us the disciples did not realize the significance of this until after Jesus was glorified. That is, they didn’t understand until after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus was living out another symbol from the Hebrew Scriptures. We looked at this two weeks ago in Zechariah 9:9-10…
Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
and the warhorses 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 from the River to the ends of the earth.
So, Jesus accepted the people’s desire for him to be king, but not the expectation for him to be a certain type of king. Jesus was not going to be like Judas Maccabaeus, who entered Jerusalem on a war-horse. Rather, Jesus is the Prince of Peace, entering the city on a gentle donkey. Jesus deliberately de-militarizes the desire of the people and declares the true nature of his messianic rule: a rule of peace and gentleness. Yes, Jesus is moving majestically forward to his throne: but he will be crowned with thorns and his throne will be a cross.
Another thing Jesus rejects about the people’s messianic hope is their narrow nationalism. He is not entering Jerusalem simply to become the King of the Jews. As it suggests in Zechariah, he has come to proclaim peace to the nations, and his rule will extend to the ends of the earth.
How did the people respond to Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey? Those who had seen him raise Lazarus from the dead were spreading the word about him. Furthermore, those who heard about this great miracle wanted to meet Jesus.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy characters interpret ancient lore and rhymes to discern events in the present in much the same way that Christians interpret Old Testament prophecies to predict the coming of Christ.
In the third book of the trilogy, The Return of the King, the hero, Aragorn, who is the rightful claimant to the throne of Gondor, returns to the city of Minas Tirith. He is victorious in the battle against the dark lord Sauron, but he’s not yet able to claim the throne.
He enters the city in disguise, to go to the Houses of Healing. There he seeks to heal his friends who were struck in battle. As he performs this healing, one of the attendants repeats an ancient verse: “The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known.”[1]
It was the same for some in the crowd that first Palm Sunday. In the hands of the healer, they recognized their rightful king.
However, the Pharisees were not so enthusiastic. They very dismissively say, “Look, the whole world has gone after him!” In effect the Pharisees were saying, “Look at this rabble who applaud Jesus. They are just riffraff. We know better.”
But the words of the Pharisees were, in another way, very prophetic. The very next thing we see happening, after Jesus enters the city, is that some Greeks who had come to worship at the feast approach Philip and say, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” (John 12:21) Those words were emblazoned on the back of one of the first pulpits I ever preached from. The words of John 12:21 continue to be a great reminder to me of the foremost goal of preaching: to help people see Jesus.
And this leads me to two questions. (1) How do we see Jesus? And (2) where do we find ourselves in the crowd?
Are we like those in the crowd who were merely sightseeing? William Barclay once wrote,
Here was a man who, as rumour had it, had raised a man from the dead; and many had simply gone out to gaze on a sensational figure. It is always possible to attract people for a time by sensationalism and shrewd publicity; but it never lasts. Those who were that day regarding Jesus as a sensation were within a week shouting for his death.
Or perhaps we are like those in the crowd who greeted Jesus as a conqueror. Yes, of course we want Jesus to be our Messiah, but we want him to be our kind of Messiah. I wonder: do we merely see Jesus the way we want to see him, or do we see him for who he really is?
Perhaps we are like the Pharisees. Maybe we despise the enthusiastic crowds. We know better. We have no use for Jesus. Maybe, like the Pharisees, we are jealous. Perhaps we would never admit it in so many words, but the fact of the matter is: we want to be the center of attention. We want to sit on our own throne, and not have Jesus there messing things up.
Maybe we are like old Rip Van Winkle. We gaze at the spectacle, trying to figure out the mixture of symbols and we just don’t get it. Well, that’s alright. The disciples were a bit like that. They didn’t understand all the symbols of that first Palm Sunday until after Jesus was glorified. The important thing is just to keep following Jesus, and to keep our eyes, our mind, and our heart open to him. We need to keep on saying, as the Greeks said to Philip, “We would see Jesus.” If we ask the Father to reveal more of his Son to us, he will surely do it.
However, if we do know Jesus, as Philip and Andrew did, then we have the responsibility to introduce others to him, especially those who ask us about Jesus, those who ask us about our faith.
In John 12:32, Jesus says, “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
Tom Wright has written about this verse…
That must be our prayer as we read this story and mull it over. Each of us belongs to part of “the world”. Our part has, most likely, only heard in a limited way of Jesus. It has probably not discovered that he was and is the true king, the true rescuer, the bringer of true freedom. As we watch his progression into Jerusalem, and on to meet his fate, we must ourselves be drawn into the action, and the passion, that awaits him. And we must ourselves become part of the means by which his message goes out to the world.
Joseph Bayly once wrote this very appropriate Psalm for Palm Sunday…
King Jesus, why did you choose a lowly ass to carry you to ride in your parade?
Had you no friend who owned a horse—a royal mount with spirit for a king to ride?
Why choose an ass, small, unassuming beast of burden trained to plow not carry kings?
King Jesus, why did you choose me, a lowly unimportant person to bear you in my world today?
I’m poor and unimportant, trained to work not carry kings—let alone the King of kings, and yet you’ve chosen me to carry you in triumph in this world’s parade.
King Jesus, keep me small so all may see how great you are; keep me humble, so all may say,
“Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord,” not what a great ass he rides.[2]
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings; submitted by F. Bradford Townley, Dover, Massachusetts, http://preachingtoday.com
[2] Joseph Bayly in “Psalms of My Life”. Christianity Today, Vol. 33. No. 5.
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