Palm Sunday

The land of Israel is an incredibly hilly country. The hills of Judah are not mountains, like the Rockies or the Appalachians—the tallest one is only about 3,000 feet. But the hills of Judah are steep, and they are cut sharply by deep valleys and rifts.

Israel is a dry land that receives little rain, so the landscape has not felt the softening, smoothing effect of water such as we see here in our rolling hills of Pennsylvania. The land of Israel is rough, and rugged. There are stones and rocks everywhere, and for most of the year, the vegetation is dry and brown. About the only thing that grows well on the hills of Judah are sheep and goats.

The city of Jerusalem is situated right in the midst of those limestone hills. It isn’t a flat city, like New York, or Philadelphia; it is a city of hills and valleys. The streets of Jerusalem are narrow and crooked—they go up and down. Some of the streets even have stairs in them.

Most of the great cities of the world are located near water. London is on the Thames, Hong Kong has its magnificent harbor. But Jerusalem isn’t like that. There isn’t a river or major body of water anywhere near the city, and getting enough water into Jerusalem has been a problem for thousands of years.

Jerusalem isn’t where it is for any economic reasons, either. It isn’t on a major highway. There are no trade routes, or natural resources, or agricultural, or industrial reasons for Jerusalem to be where it is. In fact, the city is literally off the beaten path, in what we would call the back country.

So why is it there? It is there because God put it there. You see, God chose that city to be the focal point of the greatest events in human history. Things have happened in Jerusalem—and are going to happen in Jerusalem—which are decisive for the history of the whole human race.

This year, the city of Jerusalem is celebrating a birthday of sorts. It marks the 3,000th anniversary of King David’s conquest of the city, meaning that for the last 3,000 years, Jerusalem has been a distinctively Jewish place.

The amazing thing about Jerusalem is that, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t seem to have any particular economic or strategic value, it has been more fought over than any other city on earth. Thirty-seven wars have been fought at its gates. It has been besieged countless times. More blood has been shed in its streets than in those of any other city in history.

And the reason for it is that Jerusalem is at the center of a great spiritual battle that is taking place. Not just human wars have been fought there. The armies of heaven and hell have literally been arrayed at its gates. You see, Jerusalem is the place where God chose to deliver the fatal blow to the evil spiritual empire of the devil. And Satan’s death throes have made Jerusalem, for most of its history, a rather dangerous place to be.

In the year 30 AD, just outside the city walls, a man was nailed to a Roman cross and hoisted up to die. And as he hung in agony there, with the blood flowing out of his wounds, God accomplished the redemption of the human race.

Jesus of Nazareth was not the only man who was crucified that day. Nor was he among a select few to meet death that way. History records that thousands of individuals were crucified on the hills around the city of Jerusalem, both before and after 30 AD.

So what made Jesus’ death unique? What was it that gave his death power to affect the life and destiny of every person on earth? Because he was the Son of God. He was the anointed one. He was God’s Messiah.

“That cannot be true.” said the Jews, both then and now. “The only thing that Jesus’ crucifixion proved was that he was not the Messiah. He couldn’t have been the Messiah, because the Scripture, in Deuteronomy 21:22-23, says that anyone who is hung on a tree is cursed by God. Jesus was hung on a tree; therefore, Jesus could not be our Messiah.”

But let’s go back to the hills of Judah, and let’s look at two hills in particular that lie just outside the city of Jerusalem. One of the hills has a very beautiful name—it is called the Mount of Olives. The other hill has a very ugly name—they called it Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. I want you to understand what happened—and what is going to happen—on those two hills.

When you approach Jerusalem from the east, you can’t see it because there is a big hill in front of it. That hill is the Mt. of Olives. It is actually higher than the old city of Jerusalem, and you have to climb to the top of it before you can see Jerusalem itself.

When you get to the top of the Mt. of Olives, the whole city spreads out before you. You can see the Temple Mount, the city walls, the Kidron Valley—it’s all there before you in a beautiful panorama.

And that’s precisely where Jesus was on the first day of the week before Passover in the year 30 AD. He was seated on a donkey, at the head of an incredible procession, just coming over the crest of the Mt. of Olives. Let’s read how John has painted that picture for us in John 12. (You can find it on page 1065 of the pew Bible.)

The next day the great crowd that had come for the Feast 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 upon it, as it is written, “Do not be afraid, O Daughter of 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 they had done these things 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 given this miraculous 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!”

Let’s try to put ourselves in the sandals of these people who lived about 2,000 years ago. First of all, they were Jewish. The time of year was Passover, which was immediately followed by the Feast of Unleavened Bread. This was one of the greatest feasts of the Jewish people. The city of Jerusalem was swollen with devout pilgrims who had come to observe the Feast.

The purpose of Passover, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, was to remind the Jews of their bondage in Egypt, and of the miraculous way that God had delivered them. Passover reminded them of that awesome night when the angel of death passed over their houses because they had sprinkled the blood of a lamb on their doorposts.

The Feast of Unleavened Bread reminded them of their hurried escape from Egypt, where they were in bondage as slaves. They were in such a hurry that they couldn’t even wait for yeast to make their bread rise.

But now, in 30 AD, the Jews found themselves in bondage again, only this time, it wasn’t in a foreign land, it was in their own land. That was what made their captivity so bitter. The Romans had conquered Judea and their presence was felt all over the city of Jerusalem.

When you stood at the top of the Mt. of Olives, you could see the whole Temple Mount before you, just across the Kidron Valley. The Temple was a magnificent structure, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Josephus said “If you have never seen the Temple, you have never seen a beautiful building.”

But at the north end of the Temple Mount, there was an ugly blemish—a huge, forbidding fortress, called the Fortress Antonia. It belonged to the Romans, and now, with the Feast of Passover at hand, that Fortress was full of soldiers. The Romans brought extra troops into the city to keep an eye on the Jews during their special feast days, such as Passover. When trouble erupted, that was usually when it happened.

The Jews hated the Romans, and wanted nothing more than to get rid of them. They saw it as a sacrilege that their sacred temple should be overshadowed by a Gentile fortress. They resented the fact that even as they worshiped, they had to do so under the mocking stares of the pagan soldiers who looked down on them from the ramparts.

Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were all about deliverance. And you can be sure that the Jews in 30 AD were fervently praying that they would soon be delivered from the Romans. And the one who would liberate them would be their Messiah.

The Messiah was spoken about in the OT Scriptures. Moses wrote about him; the Psalmist wrote about him; the prophets wrote about him. He would be a divine leader—a great king anointed by God to save Israel.

As the Roman occupation dragged on and on, getting harsher by the year, the Messianic hope of the Jews only burned stronger. By 30 AD, there were even groups of devout Jews who had gone out into the wilderness down by the Dead Sea to await the arrival of the Messiah and the great war of liberation that would ensue.

The Jews expected the Messiah to be a wonder-worker because he would be filled with the power of God. He would be a king in the royal line of David. In keeping with that kingly image, the prophet Zechariah wrote that he would come to Israel riding on a donkey.

That sounds like a strange image to us, but in ancient times, before the horse came into widespread use in the Middle East, the donkey was the mount of choice for kings. In the book of Kings, we read of King David and his sons riding on donkeys. David’s son Absalom was riding a mule when he got his head caught in the branches of a tree.

So these were the things that people were thinking about on Palm Sunday. They were awaiting their Messiah, and it was Passover—deliverance time—a perfect time for Messiah to come.

Many of them had heard about Jesus of Nazareth. They had heard that he was a wonder-worker. He had healed the sick; he had given sight to the blind; he had made the lame walk; he had even raised the dead. And, according to the prophet Isaiah, those were the kind of things that the Messiah was going to do.

He was an amazing man who certainly seemed to have the power of God within him. Everybody was talking about him. And now here he was, on Sunday morning the week before Passover, riding on a donkey, coming over the Mount of Olives, coming to Jerusalem. It all fit together perfectly. The Messiah had finally come—it was Jesus of Nazareth!

So they took up palm branches and began waving them. They took off their cloaks and spread them before him—something you would only do for a king. They shouted “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

But then something very strange happened.

Luke 19:41 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 to you.”

In the midst of all this tumult and celebration, Jesus wept. He wept because he knew that their idea of a Messiah was not God’s idea of a Messiah. The people figured that all the Messiah needed to do was eliminate the Romans and usher in the Millennium and everything would be hunky-dory. But Jesus knew that there was a far, far deeper work to be done—a work to be done in the hearts of men.

He had come not to bring political liberation to the Jews, but spiritual liberation. They didn’t realize it, but they were in bondage not to the Romans, but to the power of darkness and sin in their own hearts. That was the bondage that the Messiah had come to break. And to break it, he had to die, just like the Passover lamb had to die in order to liberate the people from their bondage in Egypt.

Jesus wept on Palm Sunday because he knew they didn’t understand, they couldn’t understand, they wouldn’t understand that that is what their Messiah had come to do. They wanted a Mt. of Olives Messiah—a king who would bless them, but Jesus had come to be a Golgotha Messiah—a Redeemer who would save them.

And that was why the crowd ultimately turned against him, and why so many people reject him to this day. Because we don’t like the kind of Messiah God sent.

You see, we tend to be a lot like those people on the Mount of Olives. We want Jesus to do for us what we think needs to be done to make us happy, to make us free. We want Jesus to help us to become nicer people. We want Jesus to take away the bad things in our lives—the problems and the pain—just like the Jews wanted him to kick out the Romans.

We want Jesus to change our circumstances, but what he wants to do is change our hearts. You see, he isn’t interested in making a few cosmetic changes in our lives to help us be nicer people. He knows that there is a desperate, fatal spiritual cancer that is eating away at the very root of our lives. It is called sin, it separates us from God, and it requires the deepest, most urgent measures to eliminate it.

It requires that someone die on behalf of the sinner. And that someone would have to be a perfect sacrifice—in other words, not a sinner himself. Now there’s only ever been one person like that: Jesus, the sinless one.

And so Jesus died for us. His death was the atonement, or the covering, for our sin. His blood over our lives is like the blood of the Passover Lamb sprinkled over the doorpost so that the people inside would be delivered from the wrath of God. He died so that we might live. That is what the Messiah came to do.

So if we’re going to own Jesus as our Messiah, as our Lord and King, we’re going to have to own him on those terms: as a Savior who died for us.

You might say that the story of Palm Sunday is actually the story of two Messiahs: the Messiah that the people wanted; and the Messiah that God actually sent. And the question that God is asking each one of us today is: Which Messiah are you willing to accept?

The prophet Zechariah prophesied that the Messiah would come riding on a donkey. That prophesy was fulfilled on the Mount of Olives on Palm Sunday in the year 30 AD. But Zechariah goes on to tell us that one day the Messiah—Jesus—will set foot again on the Mount of Olives.

Zechariah 14:1 A day of the LORD is coming when your plunder will be divided among you. I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped. Half of the city will go into exile, but the rest of the people will not be taken from the city.

Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights in the day of battle. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south.

You will flee by my mountain valley, for it will extend to Azel. You will flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.

On that day there will be no light, no cold or frost. It will be a unique day, without daytime or nighttime—a day known to the LORD. When evening comes, there will be light.

On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western sea, in summer and in winter. The LORD will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one LORD, and his name the only name.

Zechariah is talking about the day when Jesus Christ will come again in glory and majesty to set up his kingdom on earth. Significantly, he will come again to the Mount of Olives—this time as a conquering king.

But the first time he came, the Mount of Olives was not his destination—the other hill was; the hill called Golgotha; the Place of the Skull. And there, on a Roman cross, he gave up his life to pay for our sins.

There can be no victory, there can be no peace on earth, there can be no rule of God in your heart until your sin problem is taken care of. Jesus knew that. On Palm Sunday in 30 AD, the crowd on the Mount of Olives wanted to crown him without having to deal with those unpleasant truths. They wanted a Christ without the Cross.

Which hill are you on this Easter? Are you with the crowd on the Mount of Olives, cheering for Jesus? Hoping that if you wave a palm branch for him, Jesus will come along and “fix” everything that you think needs fixing in your life?

Or are you willing to go with Jesus down from the top of the Mount of Olives, down to the Garden of Gethsemane, down to the Praetorium where he was mocked and scourged, down to the Via Dolorosa where he stumbled under the weight of that awful cross, down to Golgotha where the Lamb of God died for our sin?

Galatians 6:4 - May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ