Matthew 21:1-17 & Mark 11:1-17
Luke 19:29-44 & John 12:12-19
When they approached Jerusalem the next day and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, ‘Go into the village ahead of you. As soon as you enter it, you will find a donkey tied up. Tied with her will be a colt which no one has ever ridden. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything or asks, ‘What are you doing?’ say to him, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he’ll immediately send them here.’
Those who were sent left and did what Jesus told them. They found a young donkey tied outside the door in the street, just as he had described, and they untied it.
The owners were standing there and said, ‘What are you doing? Why are you untying the colt?’
‘The Lord needs it,’ they said, repeating what Jesus had told them to say.
Then the owners let them go. So they brought the donkey and the colt to Jesus, threw their clothing on them, and sat Jesus on the colt.
As he rode along, they began to spread their articles of clothing on the road. When he came to the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, a large crowd of disciples began to shout for joy and to praise God loudly for all the miracles they had seen. ‘Blessed is the King who is coming in the name of the Lord!’ they shouted. ‘Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest!’
A huge crowd had come to the feast. When they heard that Jesus was entering Jerusalem, they cut down palm branches, went out to meet him, and spread the branches on the road. The crowds who followed him as well as those who went ahead of hem kept shouting, ‘Hosanna! Hosanna to the Son of David!’ ‘Blessed is he who is coming in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel!’ ‘Blessed is the kingdom of our father David!’ ‘Hosanna in the highest!’
All this happened to fulfill what the prophet said:
Tell the daughter of Zion, ‘Don’t be afraid!
Look, our King is coming to you,
humble, and riding a donkey,
even a colt, the foal of a donkey.’
The disciples didn’t understand these things at first. But after Jesus was glorified they remembered these predictions about him, and that they had done these things to him.
The people who were with him when he raised Lazarus from the dead and called him from the tomb were telling others all about it. That is why the people went out to meet him; they heard that he had performed this great miracle.
Some Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, restrain your disciples.’
But he answered them, ‘I’m telling you, if they were to keep quiet, the very stones would cry out!’
When he came near and saw the city, he wept over it. ‘If only you – yes, you – had known on this special day the things that would bring you peace! But now they are hidden from you. The days are coming when your enemies will build a siege ramp around you and encircle you and hem you in on all sides. They will level you to the ground – with your children inside you – and will not leave one stone upon another. This will happen because you didn’t recognize the time of God’s coming to you.’
The whole city was aroused when he entered Jerusalem, ‘Who is this?’ they asked.
The crowds answered, ‘This is Jesus the Prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.’
Then the Pharisees said to each other, ‘See, we are accomplishing nothing. Look at how the whole world has gone after him!’
Jesus entered the temple, and when he had looked around at everything, he left for Bethany with the twelve since it was already quite late.
As Jesus was returning to Jerusalem from Bethany the next morning, he became hungry. In the distance by the side of the road he saw a fig tree covered with leaves, so he went to find fruit on it. When he reached it, he found only the leaves (it wasn’t the right season for figs). So Jesus said to it, ‘May you bear no fruit from this time onward, and may no one ever eat your fruit again!’
His disciples heard him say it. And the fig tree immediately withered.
Then they came to Jerusalem, and Jesus went into the temple of God and began to drive out everyone who was selling and buying things there. He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the chairs of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple. He began to teach them, ‘Doesn’t Scripture say, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers!’
When the teachers of the law and the Pharisees heard what had happened, they continued to seek a way to kill him. They were afraid of him because all the people marveled at his teaching.
The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.
But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he was doing and heard the children shouting in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ they became furious. They said to him, ‘Do you hear what they’re saying?’
‘Yes!’ Jesus replied. ‘Have you never read,
From the mouths of babes and infants
You have ordained praise?’
Then he left them, and when evening came he left the city and spent the night in Bethany.”
(This reading is a blending of Matthew 21:1-17 and Mark 11:1-17, Luke 19:29-44 and John 12:12-19 taken from THE GREATEST STORY, Johnston M Cheney, Multnomah Books, 1994 – a revision of The Life of Christ in Stereo, 1969 by Western Seminary)
Having read this lengthy account from which we will draw our inspiration today, I should first tell you that the story doesn’t begin with Jesus sending His disciples to fetch a donkey colt for Him to ride on.
It really begins with the raising of Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany. I say it begins there because, of all the notoriety Jesus has gotten over the past several years for His teaching and His miracles, it is the very public raising of Lazarus from four day’s death that has freshly put Him center stage, not only with the inhabitants of that small village and the nearby capital city of Jerusalem, but also with the multitudes who would soon pour into the city for Passover as they heard the account related to them.
It was John who told us in his gospel, “And so the multitude who were with Him when He called Lazarus out of the tomb, and raised him from the dead, were bearing Him witness. For this cause also the multitude went and met Him, because they heard that He had performed this sign” 12:17-18
HIS DARING
Here is the reason I mention the connection of the raising of Lazarus to what is referred to as the ‘triumphal entry’ into Jerusalem.
We must never think for a moment that the arrest, trials and crucifixion of Jesus were events that happened to Him as one who had little or no control over their unfolding.
A careful study of the gospel record, of the historical events, of His words and of His actions in the final weeks and perhaps months of His earthly ministry will reveal to the attentive student that He was very deliberately orchestrating their final outcome.
Where earlier in His ministry He healed or delivered from demonic possession and admonished the recipients of His power to go and tell no one, now, after the raising of Lazarus and His final trip to Jerusalem, which zigzagged back and forth across Judea, passing through inhabited places on the way, He was speaking of the cross and of the cost of discipleship. He was openly telling His apostles of what would transpire in Jerusalem and confirming His Messiahship to them.
He waited, after being told that Lazarus was sick and dying, so that He didn’t arrive in Bethany until after Lazarus was four days dead.
Now you have been taught in the past that in that ancient culture it was generally believed that the spirit of the departed hung around for three days hoping to be able to reenter the body, but on the fourth day when decay set in the spirit would leave and all hope for revival was gone.
So we can only surmise by this that Jesus wanted to demonstrate in a very public way that He was the giver of life; in fact it was before the yet unopened tomb of Lazarus that He declared to the sister of the deceased “I am the resurrection and the life.”
Did He know that news would quickly reach Jerusalem, only two miles away, and the ears of those who were already plotting His death? Of course He did. But instead of coming quickly and quietly to Bethany and healing His sick friend as He had done for so many others, He set Himself up for public exposure, even knowing where it would lead.
So here we come to this day on the Mount of Olives, early in the week that would culminate in His crucifixion, and His instructions to His disciples to fetch this special donkey, so He might ride into the city of Jerusalem in the tradition of a king coming in peace.
The multitudes have been primed with the telling of His power to raise the dead. They are looking for their long-awaited Messiah; their King; to come and deliver them and restore the nation of Israel, and surely the Messiah would be the One with the power to give life to one so long dead.
In addition to this, the people may also have been thinking of the recent history of the capture of Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanies around 175 B.C.
Antiochus had been determined to stamp out Judaism. When he entered Jerusalem he deliberately profaned the Temple by slaughtering pigs on its altar making sacrifice to Zeus, and turning the Temple chambers into brothels.
Then the Maccabees from the North rose up against him, retook the Temple and control of the city, and purged the Temple and rededicated it.
In the apocryphal book of 2 Maccabees we are given the historical account of the rejoicing of that day.
“Therefore they bare branches, and fair boughs, and palms also, and sang psalms unto Him that had given them good success in cleansing His place.”
With this knowledge and remembrance of Malachi’s prediction (3:1) that the Lord would come suddenly to His Temple, the people may have been spreading their cloaks and their palm branches and shouting ‘Hosanna!’, meaning, ‘save now’, in the expectation that their Messiah was coming in to take His place in the Temple, which is precisely what He did, although it wasn’t for the purpose they had in mind.
How daring! How courageous was this Son of Man; that He would come into the city in this fashion, where His enemies waited with murderous intent to find any excuse to do away with Him, by His actions making an overt Messianic claim, and by His words accepting praise and worship from the children of Israel!
Then, as if daring the chief priests to do their worst, He comes back to the Temple the following day when the crowds are pressing in to prepare for the Passover and the merchants are in full business mode, and commits the act that will, in the minds of His enemies, seal His fate for good.
Let’s talk about that and His claim to Messianic authority.
HIS DESIGNATION
In the New Testament there are two words that are used to refer to the Temple. One speaks of the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies in the inner Temple, where only the priests could go.
The other word that is translated “Temple” speaks more generally of the entire area and the collection of courtyards surrounding the inner Temple that each had their specific purpose. One of those, and the outermost courtyard of them all, was the Court of the Gentiles. This was the only place where a non-Jew was allowed to come and pray to the God of the Jews.
Any Gentile entering any of the other courtyards would be immediately dragged out and killed, and there were signs over each of those courts giving warning to them not to come in.
Now in Jesus’ time there were two kinds of trading going on in the Court of the Gentiles. One was money-changing. Pilgrims were coming from all over the Greek world to worship at Passover and their money had to be changed so that they could buy and sell while in Judea. Not a problem, except they were being gouged by the money-changers who were charging them more than they should for the exchange.
The other kind of trade going on there was the selling of doves for sacrifice. Animals used for sacrifice could be purchased anywhere. But they had to be inspected to be sure they were without blemish. Since the inspectors were officials of the Temple, it was an easy thing for them to reject animals that had not been purchased in the Temple, and that made it easy for the merchants to sell the sacrificial animals for much more than the people would have paid elsewhere.
So not only were they profaning the whole system of sacrificial worship by using their position for sordid gain, but by filling the courtyard with their tables and cages and loudly hawking their business, they effectively shut any Gentile out from the place of prayer designated for him.
Once more here let me point out both the deliberate plan and the amazing courage of Jesus Christ.
He had entered Jerusalem in the afternoon of the day before, and we’re told that He and His disciples went to the Temple and looked around, then left to spend the night in Bethany. It was already getting late when they arrived and many people had probably also gone to wherever they were staying for the Passover period, and the merchandisers were probably closing up shop too.
So Jesus leaves without saying anything, even though He must have been just as outraged by what He saw then as He would be the next day. Yet He waited until buying and selling was in full force, with chief priests standing all around and watching His actions intensely, and then fulfilled His Messianic duty in purging the Temple and reclaiming it for Gentile worshipers.
It was this act that was the final straw for the Jews. From that moment all they could think of was seizing Him and putting Him to death.
But let’s look at the significance of His actions as those that designated Him as the Messiah.
First, as we’ve already seen, was His entrance into the city with an entourage of thousands of admirers, worshiping Him and declaring Him to be the Messiah by virtue of their praise and their pleas for rescue and salvation.
In the ears of the Pharisees it was a deliberate claim to deity when they challenged Him concerning the shouts of the people and He quoted Psalm 8 to them saying, “…have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes Thou hast prepared praise for Thyself’?”
In applying that quote to Himself He was saying, “I’m the ‘Thou’ and the ‘Thyself’ in that Psalm.
Next was His cleansing of the Temple. Here’s what William Barclay said about it.
“If Jesus had been content to claim to be a prophet, the probability is that he need never have died. But he could be satisfied with nothing less than the topmost place. With Jesus it is all or nothing. Men must acknowledge him as king, or not receive him at all.” The Gospel of Matthew Vol 2, William Barclay, Westminster Press, 1975
In the act of purging the merchants from the Temple court and then reminding them that Isaiah (56:7) had called it a place of prayer for all peoples, Jesus placed Himself in a position of authority above the chief priests who had allowed this bazaar to operate there.
After that He healed the blind and the lame who came to Him in the Temple, in full view of these same priests, who also heard the people calling Him by the Messianic designation of “Son of David”, and He was not correcting them.
Folks, listen to me. If you ever talk to someone who wants to pacify you with their willingness to accept Jesus as a prophet or a great teacher only, and put Him on an equal plane with other religious figureheads such as Mohammed or Moses or Abraham, you just walk them through chapter 21 of Matthew or chapter 11 of Mark, and you show them that this Man of courage, this One who entered Jerusalem as a King coming in peace, made claim after overt claim in His final week to be none other than the Anointed One of God, the Promised One, the Messiah of Israel.
You tell them that when the Jews tortured Him and sent Him to a Roman cross they did it with full knowledge of precisely who He was; indeed, it was for that knowledge and awareness that they sent Him there.
In His earlier parable of the vineyard and the evil vine-growers, recounted in Luke 20, the vine-growers knew the owner’s son when he came to them but they killed him and threw his body out of the vineyard anyway. Jesus, in telling that story the way He did, confirmed to us that the men who sent Him to the cross did so deliberately with full knowledge of who He was.
Jesus, coming to the Temple, came there in Divine authority, fortified with Divine courage, carrying out perfectly the Divine purpose.
He was utterly in control of Himself, of them, of the circumstances of the day, and with not one hint of a desire to hold back or avoid the wrath of evil men He came in the demeanor of a King and performed acts that would clearly designate Him as the Messiah.
Just a good man? Just a good teacher? Like Lewis said, He did not leave that option open to us. The one who would relegate Jesus of Nazareth to those lesser designations only demonstrates profound ignorance of the facts.
Well finally, let’s talk about…
HIS DRAW
I’ve mentioned twice now that Jesus came to Jerusalem as a king coming in peace.
Here is what I mean by that. A King coming to a city on a horse would have been viewed as an attack, or at the very least a claim to lordship over that city.
When a neighboring king wanted to demonstrate that he came in peace and to make peace he rode in on a donkey to show his intent.
His coming in this way should also have brought to mind their own scriptures, quoted by Matthew from Zechariah 9:9
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, Humble, and mounted on a donkey, Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
…which is followed by these encouraging words from verse 10…
10 I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; And the bow of war will be cut off. And He will speak peace to the nations; and His dominion will be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.”
Yes, the people misunderstood what they were seeing. They had expectations of a strong arm coming to win an earthly victory and restore their nation to them and reign as king over them
The fact is, if Jesus had come as a warrior King He would have had to make war with us! He could not have drawn us to Him for any other reason than to slay us, since we were all His sin-blackened enemies.
As Holy God He would have been constrained by His own Godly nature to strike us down, speak us to oblivion or transport us to hell fire in an instant.
The draw of Jesus is that instead He came as the courageous Messiah, who dared to come empty-handed and in peace, to make peace between men and God.
He came suddenly to His Temple, purged it, reclaimed and rededicated it symbolically so that He might return in a few days as the Passover Lamb of God to sacrifice Himself on its altar.
The draw of Jesus is that He gave Himself unreservedly to the Father’s will, preparing His house so that we might come, opening to us His place of worship so that we might open to Him a place in our hearts.
The significance of Jesus coming to the Temple is that He was doing the very thing He had claimed was His duty and His mission all of His life.
“Why is it that you were looking for Me? Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house?” Luke 2:49
And the Temple sacrifices stopped. And the Temple was torn down and not one stone was left on another because they failed to recognize God in the day of visitation. Luke 19:44
“…but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.” Heb 3:6
The significance of Jesus coming to the Temple, Christian, is that He has come to you, His Temples, as King of Peace to make peace, and to introduce you by faith into this grace in which you stand.
Humble and on the foal of a donkey, with the nobility of a reigning king, with a holy zeal for righteousness, He came to His Temple and laid Himself down on the altar for you and for me. How could we give Him less than our heart?
