Text: Mark 11:1-10
Date: March 28, 2021
Event: Palm Sunday, Year B
Mark 11:1–10 (EHV)
As they approached Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, on the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples 2and told them, “Go into the village ahead of you. As soon as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. 3If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it, and he will send it back here without delay.’”
4They left and found a colt on the street, tied at a door; and they untied it. 5Some who were standing there asked them, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” 6The disciples answered them just as Jesus had instructed them, and the men let them go.
7They brought the colt to Jesus, threw their garments on it, and Jesus sat on it. 8Many people spread their garments on the road. Others spread branches that they had cut from the fields. 9Those who went in front and those who followed were crying out,
Hosanna!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
10Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!
Hosanna in the highest!
Hosanna!
We are here, at long last. Everything has been pointing ahead to this week, to these moments. This past Monday evening in our Bible Information Class we got to study not only Adam and Eve’s fall into sin but also God’s response. His response was to promise a Savior who would rescue mankind by crushing Satan’s head and eliminating all the work that he had done.
After the fall into sin, Adam named his wife Eve, which means “living” or “life,” in what might appear to be an ironic choice. After all, he and Eve had just brought sin and death into God’s creation. So why name his wife, “Life”? Because they trusted God’s promises, that God would bring life back from death, that he would follow through on his promise to send a champion who would crush the serpent’s head.
From that time on, God shaped world history for his purposes. Everything that happened God worked for the good of keeping his promises, even if at first blush it didn’t seem like a good thing. He saved his promises in the flood, he called Abraham to be the father of the nation from which this Savior would come. He was with his people during their slavery in Egypt and rescued them. He was patient when they demanded a king instead of the theocracy he had created for them. He did not abandon then in their exile in Babylon, even though they were there because of their unfaithfulness to him.
Along this path of history, God gave glimpses of what was to come. Through revelation given to his people, usually through the prophets, God gave details of the Messiah’s life and work. He would be from Abraham’s family; and then more specifically from Judah’s family; and then even more specifically from King David’s family. He would have a kingdom that would never end. He would be a servant who would suffer for the sins of all people. Hw would be born in Bethlehem. He would even, as Zechariah promised in our First Lesson, ride on a donkey’s colt, yet be a king, the King.
And so Palm Sunday is really the start of the final fulfillment of all of these promises. When Jesus sent his disciples to the town ahead to get that unridden colt, we might see shades of Jesus’ humility there. But even more than that, Jesus is specifically leaving no stone unturned when it comes to fulfilling the promises made about him. The Messiah would be a king bringing salvation that would ride on a young donkey, so that’s exactly what Jesus needed to do. And that’s what he does.
He leaves no doubt that he is, in fact, the Messiah, the Christ, the long-promised Savior of mankind. He has come to be the champion over Satan and sin and death that God first promised in the Garden of Eden. He is the one whose life and work God has been working to bring about.
But why? What is so important that God would embark on this millennia-long effort to plan and execute Jesus’ life and work? Well, it’s us. Maybe more to the point, it’s his love for us. Our sin that we inherited from our parents and then have contributed copious amount of further sins toward in our life means hell, eternal separation from God for all of our sins. There was nothing we could do to save ourselves; there was nothing we could do to save any other person, no matter how dear they are to us. We were lost to certain eternal condemnation without any hope of help or rescue.
Which brings us to that word, that shout, that we hear from the crowd on Palm Sunday, “Hosanna!” They are quoting from Psalm 118, which was clearly a Messianic prophecy. The crowd is acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah, as the Christ. But “Hosanna!” rings out above all of it. It’s a simple phrase in Hebrew that simply means, “Please, save us!”
How powerful that is! Whether or not those in the crowd on that Palm Sunday fully understood and appreciated everything the Messiah was going to do is kind of irrelevant. As we look at that today, as we join our voices in shouts of “Hosanna!” as well, what are we saying? We are saying there’s no way for us to fix our lives and our eternal situation. We are saying there is no hope of ever being rescued from the pit of eternal death unless someone were to reach down and pull us out. Hosanna is as much a plea for help as it is an acclamation of praise. Hosanna! Save us, please!
It’s fitting to shout this request to Jesus. Jesus’ name, Ieshua in Hebrew, points us to reality. The sibilance in Hosanna and Ieshua come from the same root in Hebrew, the word to “save.” Jesus’ name means “The LORD saves” or “Yahweh saves.” The crowd pleads to be saved by the one named “The LORD saves!” There was no one else who could do this saving, to truly rescue us from sin, other than Jesus who is the LORD, Yahweh, himself in human flesh! And even if the crowd was misguided, even if they thought Jesus was coming to free the nation from the Romans or some other short-sighted thing, God used their words of praise and their shouts from the Old Testament scriptures to point to what he was going to do. The angel had been clear with Jospeh when he gave him the child’s name—“he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The prophet Zechariah was clear in our First Lesson, “Look! Your King is coming to you. He is righteous and brings salvation” (Zechariah 9:9).
In John’s gospel we’re told that in the moment the disciples didn’t fully appreciate what all of this meant, but after Jesus’ work was completed they did. You and I here this morning have the benefit of the hindsight that the disciples and the crowd in the moment did not. We know the rest of the story; we know what is going to happen; we know what the results of Jesus’ work are going to be.
Jesus had lived a flawless life of perfect obedience to God, just as was promised. He was going to his horrible suffering and death, just as was promised. But all of that pain and torment, the crucifixion, the punishment for sins he never committed, the hell he did not deserve on the cross, all of it would result in saving you and saving me from our sins. All of it means that we are rescued from hell and will be brought into eternal life.
We get to see and celebrate all of this, in full, this week. As we begin Holy Week today, as we join the crowd in celebrating the arrival of our King, we also know that the coming days are going to get darker and darker. The sounds of happy cheering in the streets will go quiet. There will be come secret trials and cries of “Crucify!” The one who never did anything wrong will be punished for everything you and I have done wrong. We will be rescued because he sacrificed himself.
What is there for us to say but, “Hosanna,” “Please save us!” He will and he has. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Amen.
