Can you hear the roar of
the crowds? Can you feel the excitement in the air? Think of that
scene from the first Palm Sunday! Have you ever wondered what this
meant – why the crowd got palm branches when they heard Jesus was
riding toward the city for Passover (John 12:12-13)? I mean, of
course what Jesus does is a fulfillment of the words of the prophet
Zechariah – riding into town on a donkey, at all (John 12:14-15).
Jesus wants them to know that, yes, he's the one they've been waiting
for. But to really understand the scene, let's turn back almost two
hundred years.
In the second century BC,
a Greek kingdom based in Syria held power over the Jews. For a
variety of reasons, the king Antiochus – the
great-great-great-grandson of Alexander the Great's general Seleucus
– decided that the Jews needed to stop practicing their religion.
So he banned circumcision, commanded the Jews to eat pork, banned
ownership of the Law of Moses, and slaughtered a pig as a pagan
sacrifice in God's holy temple in Jerusalem.
A band of brothers –
sons of the priest Mattathias – took up arms and led a revolt.
They were called the Maccabees. Judah was their first leader: he
took back the city of Jerusalem and had the temple purified –
remembered each year ever since by the festival of Hanukkah.
Antiochus died, but his nephew Demetrius kept fighting, and Judah
died in battle.
Judah's clever brother Jonathan took up the fight and
pressured the Greek general into a peace treaty. Jonathan went on to
become high priest. Years passed, he fell into a trap and was
executed, and his brother Simon took the lead. Simon secured the
Jews' freedom from Greek meddling. The book recording these things
tells us that Simon – now deemed high priest – set his sights on
Jerusalem all over again. It tells us:
They
entered [the citadel] with praise and palm branches, and with harps
and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs,
because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel. (1
Maccabees 13:51)
There it is – the palm
branches. That's what may be in the crowds mind here, as they see
Jesus riding their way. Their song means, “Jesus, be our new
Simon! Set us free!” They cry out, “Hosanna
– save now, save now!” Simon's descendants down throughout the Hasmonean Era claimed to be both
high priests and kings, holding power until a new David might come.
Well, here he is! Jesus is on his way: “Your king comes
to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a
donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot
from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow
shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his
dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of
the earth” (Zechariah 9:9-10).
Finally,
no more Greek rule, no more Roman rule – finally, no more
oppression – finally, the king who can turn back the tides and set
the world at peace – finally, the promised Messiah! Jesus is the
king in triumph, the king in victory – Jesus is Savior and King,
coming in the name of the God of all Israel! “Blessed is
he who comes in the name of the LORD!”
(John 12:13; cf. Psalm 118:26). Here is Jesus – “the king of
Israel” (John 12:13).
That's the word the crowd is spreading –
this is Jesus, who raises the dead; this is Jesus, who works wonders
we've never seen, never even dreamed could happen; this is Jesus, the
true Son of David, the King long foretold – let's welcome him,
let's celebrate him, let's be on his
side (cf. John 12:17-18)! No wonder the Pharisees fret and worry:
“Look, the
whole world has gone after him”
(John 12:19).
Now, fast-forward five days. Jesus has come into the city and
stirred things up. His greediest disciple sold him out for a slave's
price. At night in the garden, soldiers come to take Jesus away. He
doesn't resist – we know that (John 18:1-12). A show trial before
the Sanhedrin goes the only way show trials ever go. The next
morning, the priests and nobles of the people haul Jesus to the
courtyard outside Governor Pilate's fortress (John 18:28). Pilate
investigates, but he doesn't see a threat in this Jesus, who
proclaims a different kind of kingdom (John 18:36).
So
Pilate goes back out and calls everyone back – the chief priests,
the rulers, and now the people, the crowd. Pilate proposes to give
Jesus a slap on the wrist for the sake of peace, and then set him
free (Luke 23:13-16). Herod agrees – there are better things they
can be doing with their Friday morning. This is no time for
nonsense.
You might expect the crowd to cheer. “Blessed is the
king of Israel,” after all. But that chant is gone with the wind.
That was five days ago – get with the times! His fifteen minutes
of celebrity are over, they say. No, Jesus isn't the one they want
back. Jesus is no longer “king,” in their eyes – now, he's “this man”
(Luke 23:18). “Away
with this man! Release Barabbas to us!”,
they cry. Barabbas is a rebel leader (Luke 23:19). The Romans would
call him a terrorist, and with good reason. To the Jewish crowds, he's perhaps a freedom-fighter – the kind of leader who'd fight the
Romans – who might be bloody, but he'll get the job done, if you
don't care what gets lost along the way.
Pilate doesn't like the thought. “Please, here, Jesus is no real
criminal – he's one of you, take him back, he doesn't deserve to
die this way.” The crowd has turned dark, malicious, cruel.
“Crucify him!”, rings out a cry from somewhere in the crowd –
maybe the instigation of one of the priests. It catches on.
“Crucify him!”, we hear again (Luke 23:21). The shout travels
like a virus, infecting the whole crowd, everyone swept up in the
chant. “Crucify, crucify, crucify!”
Pilate tries to shout over
them, pleading as a voice of reason, insisting that Jesus go free
(Luke 23:22). But the crowd can't be appeased by anything but
bloodshed. “Crucify, crucify, crucify, crucify!” They won't
stop until Pilate gives in. He doesn't want a riot on his hands.
What the crowd wants, the crowd gets – and the crowd wants a
crucifixion. So Pilate sends Jesus toward the cross (Luke 23:23-24).
What happened to the loud
hosannas? Where did all the palm branches go? Left by the wayside in some back alley? Tossed in the
trash can? Stored on the shelf? In less than a week, the crowd
turned from “Hosanna” to “Crucify” – from, “Blessed is
the king of Israel,” to, “We have no king but Caesar” (John
19:15). How can that happen? How could the crowd turn on Jesus so
fast – from adoring worship to froth-mouthed condemnation – from
waving the palm branch and calling him king to wanting him flogged,
beaten bloody, harsh nails hammered through his hands and feet,
thorns slicing his forehead to ribbons, and hung naked 'til his heart
gives out or he suffocates under his own weight?
But this is Jerusalem, not Athens. As Chesterton said when paying a
visit there a century ago, “This is not a university town full of
philosophies; it is a Zion of the hundred sieges, raging with
religions; not a place where resolutions can be voted or amended, but
a place where men can be crowned and crucified.” And crowned and
crucified he was, thanks to the turning hearts of the mob. And I can
think of four main reasons why this happened – why the crowd handed
Jesus over to be crucified in Barabbas' place.
First,
Jesus proved to have a different idea of what a Messiah looks like.
When he came to them, they thought, “Now here's Simon Maccabeus all
over again, but with power to work miracles.” They wanted a
Messiah who'd give them what they wanted: rule by Jews for Jews (and over everyone else), so they could turn the tables on the Romans –
have Romans wait their tables, have Romans clean their floors, have
Romans look on them with servile awe. They wanted to lord their
worldly supremacy over the Romans, as the Romans had done to them.
“Do to others as they've been doing to you” – that's not
the Golden Rule, but it is what the crowd is hoping for. But that
just isn't Jesus' style.
In
fact, do you know the first thing that happens after Jesus gets
welcomed into Jerusalem with all the palm branches? “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'”
(John 12:20-21). Yeah, Greeks – as in, the people of Antiochus.
As in, the people Simon kicked out. And now here they are, and Jesus
welcomes them in.
The crowd wanted a messiah like Simon – a
warrior-king who'd make 'peace' at
the expense of the nations.
But Jesus is a king who wants peace for
the sake of the nations
– peace, not through war, but through worship. He insists that the
corrupt temple regime topple: what's now a “den of thieves” was
meant to be “a house of prayer for
all nations”
(Mark 11:17; cf. Isaiah 56:7). The crowd realizes that the problem
with Jesus is, he doesn't hate all the people they hate. He doesn't
sign onto their agenda. He makes radical demands – if they want a
messiah in him, he gets to define what that looks like. And so they
drop their palm branches, and they stop singing hosanna.
Second, the crowd turns their back on Jesus because, in their
disaffection and weakness of faith, they let their usual leaders lead
them away from him. They buy into what the Pharisees and the chief
priests and the scribal class say – and they say, “Don't trust
this Jesus, you never know what he's up to.” The crowd lets
themselves be talked out of blessing Jesus as king, because they
listen to all these other voices – not just give them a hearing,
but they give in to them. They deny what they've seen, what they've
heard, what they've experienced, what the Voice of Truth has told
them, all for the unreason of those in power.
Third, the crowd turns their back on Jesus because, once enough
people are doing it, everyone else feels the need to go with the
flow. Imagine being in that crowd on Good Friday. To your left, to
your right, in front of you, behind you, people shout, “Crucify!
Crucify!” You could speak up and shout out, “No, hosanna!
Hosanna!” But will it make a difference? And at what cost?
What's the price of breaking lockstep with the angry mob all around
you? Will they turn violent? Will they shun you? It's safer to go
the path of least resistance: to shout, or at least mumble, “Crucify!
Crucify!”
And
fourth, the crowd turns their back on Jesus because the crowd is
fickle. That's just what they are – fickle, deceitful, prone to
waver with the shifting of the winds. That's the mob mentality. And
crowds are fickle because we're fickle – all of us. We like to
give in to our impulses and desires. Self-denial is hard and
unpleasant. We'd much rather do what we want, when we want, how we
want. So we teach our children for generations, “Just follow your
heart.” Do what feels right. Never mind what Jeremiah says: “The
heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can
know it?”
(Jeremiah 17:9). The crowd follows their impulses, first to crown a
king, then to get rid of him on a cross.
For all their failings, the crowd starts out by doing the right thing
– maybe not in thinking the right way, but doing the right thing
when they wave the palm branches and shout their hosannas. The
priests, the Pharisees, Pilate – they didn't shout hosanna in the
first place. But that crowd did. Can you imagine if they'd clenched
their palm branches tighter? If they'd stuck it out with Jesus,
shouting hosanna on his terms and not theirs, resisting the priests'
influence? See, that's where they failed: the moment they dropped
their palm branches.
We may not have physical palm branches in our hands this morning.
But our hearts still wave them, all the same. If you're a believer,
with hearts and hands and voices we, as God's holy crowd of his very
own children, are waving palm branches, welcoming Jesus into our
lives as the one and only Savior-King. He's the one who sets us
free! He's the one who makes real peace! And all authority in
heaven and on earth has been given into his hands, and his kingdom
will have no end.
Every day of our lives, we're called to sing our
hosannas: “Save us, Jesus, save us now!” We look around at
danger and evil, we look at the avalanche of our sin rolling out of
control – “Save us, Jesus, save us now!” We're blind to our
own pride, our greed, our selfishness – “Save us, Jesus, save us
now!” We lay our loved ones six feet under topsoil – “Save us,
Jesus, save us now!” The world is broken, twisted as a tornado,
breaking all we hold dear and leaving debris scattered messily
through our lives – “Save us, Jesus, save us now!” We're sad,
we're angry, we're scared, we're alone and desolate and desperate of
heart – “Save us, Jesus, save us now!”
In the face of it all, it might be tempting some days to give up hope
that Jesus will ever answer that prayer and make all things right.
Instead of singing hosannas in faith, we surrender to fear and
despair. Instead of clinging to our palm branches and waving them
high 'til he comes, we set them aside. Maybe we go looking for our
salvation in some other name (though “there's no other name under
heaven given among men by which we must be saved” [Acts 4:12]).
Maybe we resign ourselves to having no salvation, no rescue, no
liberation at all; we just settle for where we are.
Throughout the
centuries, professing believers have tossed aside their palm branches
in all these ways: by giving up hope, by leaving the faith, by
trusting in other kings, even by imagining that “religion” is
just a nice compartment of life for Sunday mornings, and we can check
our palm branches at the door when we leave.
If there's one lesson to learn from the crowd in the Gospels, it's
this one: Don't stop singing hosanna! Don't drop your branches!
Keep waving them, loud and proud! Hold fast, cling tight, to what's
good! Our hearts may be fickle and deceitful in this sinful world,
but disciples discipline themselves to wave the palm branch, no
matter what their hearts whisper. And as King Jesus is welcomed
deeper and deeper into our lives, well, God sends “the Spirit of
his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'” (Galatians 4:6),
and so “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are
being rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17). And we live
for “singing and making melody to the Lord in [our] hearts”
(Ephesians 5:19) – putting hosannas there to stay.
If the larger crowd of culture insists on shouting “Crucify!”,
still we sing, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of
the Lord! Blessed is the king of Israel!” (John 19:13). “Hosanna
to the Son of David! … Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matthew
21:9). We refuse to be peer-pressured or manipulated out of our
commitment to celebrating Christ.
Don't drop your branches. Keep
them waving, even when Jesus does what you don't expect. Keep them
waving, even when Jesus takes up his whip and causes a ruckus,
knocking over tables left and right. Keep them waving, even when the
kingdom makes demands and when the King tells you to die to self and
store up treasure somewhere less earthly. Keep them waving, even
when King Jesus tells you to love and welcome your enemies. Hail
King Jesus on his terms – even when his salvation comes in the
shape of a cross, beyond which lies resurrection. Hosanna! Hosanna!
Hosanna!
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