Shaken to the Core Palm Sunday 2024

Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.” 4 This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,

5 “Say to the daughter of Zion,
‘Behold, your king is coming to you,
    humble, and mounted on a donkey,
    on a colt,[a] the foal of a beast of burden.’”

6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. 7 They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. 8 Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” 10 And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?” 11 And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.”

- Matthew 21:1-11

“And when he entered the city, the whole city was stirred up…”

You can be forgiven for thinking that Palm Sunday is the ‘cute’ day in Holy Week, the day the children happily march into worship waving palm branches or making little crosses of palm leaves in a children’s ministry activity. It’s all sweet, and the grandparents are there with more cameras than a White House presser. 

The original Palm Sunday was not sweet. It was an earthquake that shook the world. 

That word ‘stirred’ in Matthew’s description of what happened in Jerusalem that day is eseisthe, the ancient Greek root of our word seismic. The arrival of Jesus unleashed earth-shaking power that could not be ignored. With apologies to James Bond, the city was ‘shaken not stirred’ and shaken to the core.

Within a week, the leaders of the Temple and the Romans would become co-conspirators in the successful effort to put Jesus to death. They needed a business-as-usual city, not a city shaking and quaking in the presence of the Messiah King ushering in his Kingdom. 

Jesus entered the city to the tune of Zechariah 9, a First Testament prophecy that foretells Israel’s Messiah-King coming to reign, creating a universal kingdom that would stretch “from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zech 9:9-10). Jesus knew that word and purposely enacted it. He came to shed his “blood of the covenant” and, by doing so, “free the prisoners from the waterless pit” (Zech 9:11).

That’s revolutionary stuff. It’s a politically charged, subversive act that announced the coming of a Kingdom greater and more powerful than Rome, of a deliverance for which Israel had longed as “prisoners of hope” (Zech 9:12).

One leader knew this kind of thing could not be tolerated. It was the kind of thing that, left unchecked, would bring down the wrath of Rome on the entire city. “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him,” some observers noted. Crafty old Caiaphas knew what had to be done. “It’s better that this man should die for the people than the whole nation should perish” (John 11:47-50). It was a cold but undeniably accurate calculus in a shaken city under Roman domination, teetering on the tipping point of desolation. 

And that was the point. Jesus came to die for the people. He came to offer himself, the King dying on behalf of his people, giving his life for theirs so that they would not perish but have everlasting life. He knew it.

That’s not the way of most kings. But this King, who comes to answer the cry of “Hosanna” - “O Lord, Save!” - is no mere king, but the King of Kings. 

And the world's shaking under the weight of his arrival was just beginning.