The Misunderstood King

And I blurted out, "Oh, yeah. She was so boring. You remember?" And my friend, just his face just dropped and there's just silence, and I was like, "What's going on?" He said, "Yeah, that's his mom" — the friend that he was introducing to me.

I embarrassed myself horribly. You see, if you get somebody's identity wrong, it can be really embarrassing for you. Actually, it can cause a lot of trouble for you. Now, in the passage that we're looking at today in John 12, it recounts the events of Palm Sunday. And the crowds, as Tony mentioned, they were praising Jesus, calling out Hosanna, they came with palm leaves, and yet they actually misunderstood the identity of Jesus.

They were half right, but they were also half wrong. And so Jesus does something very subtle in the passage to correct this mistaken identity they have for Him. Now for me, being a silly teenager at the time, not all teenagers are as silly as me, but I was, I just got a little bit embarrassed when I got someone's identity wrong. But if you get Jesus' identity wrong, that can be a lot more severe. Jesus made some big claims about who He is and what He offers us, and so we want to make sure that we get Jesus' identity right.

So that's what we're going to do today on Palm Sunday. We're going to explore the passage from John 12 and let Jesus show us who He is. And we're going to start by looking at verses 12 to 13 under the heading, Jesus the warlord king. Jesus the warlord king. A little question mark there, because this seems to be how the crowds are viewing Him.

Let me read the verses for you again. The next day, the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, crying out, "Hosanna, blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord, even the king of Israel." Now from the outset, those verses, they look really positive, don't they? They're coming out, they're welcoming Jesus, they're praising Him, they're calling Him the king of Israel.

What's the big problem? Well, these verses are often called the triumphal entry, but really, they should be called the ironic entry. The crowd was actually deeply confused about the identity of Jesus in this moment. Yes, they're praising Him, but they're praising Him from a false idea about Him. They're praising Him for someone He isn't, and if you ask me, that's no praise at all.

Let me show you why I'm saying this. So later on in this same chapter, Jesus talks to the same crowd about His need to die, but this doesn't compute with the identity they've given Him. So they say, in verse 34, "We have heard from the law that the Christ remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up?" That's John's gospel way of talking about Jesus being lifted up on the cross in death.

"How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up?" They're confused. They didn't understand. So John ends up concluding, verse 37, "Though He had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in Him." So what's going on?

They've come out in the streets to welcome Him into Jerusalem. They're praising Him. They're saying He's even the king of Israel. How can John say they don't believe in Him? What did they believe about Him?

Well, like I said earlier, they got His identity half right but half wrong. Remember in verse 13 what they said about Jesus? They said, "Hosanna, blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord, even the king of Israel." Now this phrase they were using comes from Psalm 118, that psalm I started the service with. And it's actually part of a group of psalms that the Jews in the first century called the Hallel Psalms.

That's the beginning of our phrase hallelujah. Hallel means to praise. So these are a part of the praise psalms, and Psalms 113 to 118 are a special group of Hallel psalms called the Egyptian Hallel psalms, the Egyptian praise psalms. These psalms were used by the Jews in that time to praise God, and they were recited at some of the Jewish feasts. So during this Passover feast, these are some of the psalms that they would sing.

These are probably the hymns that Jesus sang with His disciples after His last supper, that Passover meal even. There's good evidence to suggest that. Now the crowd were actually quoting from the final one, Psalm 118, where it says, "Save us, we pray." That's the word in Hebrew, hoshiyana, which eventually is what we've got in our anglicised hosanna. Hoshiyana, which means "save us, we pray, oh Lord."

"Oh Lord, we pray, give us success. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord." You see, that's the quote that the crowds were using to praise Jesus. They were praising Him as the saviour figure of Psalm 118, and that's right. Jesus was the saviour figure of Psalm 118.

This psalm has all these royal messianic expectations wrapped up in it, and they think Jesus is the one that is this Messiah, this king, and that's correct. So what did they get wrong? What did they think Jesus would be? What kind of king or messiah did they think He was? And what did they think He was going to save them from?

Well, an important clue comes in the fact that they took branches of palm trees out to meet Jesus. You see, by this time in Israel, palm branches had become a national symbol, a national symbol of military and political victory. About a hundred years before Jesus, in a book called 1 Maccabees, it's not part of the Bible, but it records a defining moment in Jewish history. In 1 Maccabees 13, a Messiah figure called Simon also came to Jerusalem, just like Jesus did in our passage. And this is what it says in verse 51 of that chapter.

"The Jews entered it" — that's Jerusalem — "with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments and hymns and songs," why? Because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel. So this is a part of Jewish history. By the time, a hundred years later, by the time you come to Jesus' time, palm branches had become a national symbol that reminded the people of this military victory. Do you see what the crowds were expecting of Jesus?

Ever since that Simon figure in the book of Maccabees, people were waiting for it to happen again. Simon had liberated them, but then Israel was occupied again by the Romans. And so during the first century, Israel was waiting for a messiah to come and crush the Roman occupiers. They thought Jesus was going to put the Romans to the sword, just like Simon did in the book of 1 Maccabees. They thought Jesus was a warlord king.

But if you know anything about Jesus, you know He came to Jerusalem to do something that completely contradicted these expectations. He didn't come to kill the Romans. He came to be killed by the Romans. He didn't come to bring violence. He came to bring peace.

The crowds thought that Jesus was going to be their conquering warlord. They thought Jesus was going to be their national problem solver who would get rid of the oppressive Romans and give them their land and honour back, but Jesus made no promises to solve things the way that they wanted Him to. He is the king, but not the king that they wanted Him to be. They misunderstood Jesus. You know, in our modern day Western church, we have misunderstood Jesus in ways as well.

Not that we really see Jesus as a political national problem solver, but maybe we've done even worse in the West. Sometimes we've miniaturised Jesus and made Him our own personal problem solver. Sometimes you'll hear about Jesus being preached as your key to health, that He won't let you endure sickness if you love Him and you obey Him and you pray with faith. Sometimes you'll hear that Jesus is the key to a successful life, that you'll be happier, your family will go better, things will be more like what the Australian dream promises if you follow Jesus. But Jesus doesn't promise to be our personal problem solver.

If we try to make Jesus fit into an identity that we've constructed for Him, it won't work. He just won't bow down to our misguided expectations. He is the king and a far better king than we could ever dream up. A preacher called Alan Burns says, "Jesus is not a ticket to eternal life, or a ticket to a mansion in heaven, or a get out of hell free ticket, or a ticket to a better marriage, or to be cancer free, nor is he the key to a new car, or house, or job. Jesus is the ticket to get Jesus."

"If you are not completely satisfied in having only Jesus, you don't want Jesus as your saviour." Have you let Jesus set the priorities of your life? Have you let Him be king? Don't come to Jesus to try and get your own dreams and ambitions fulfilled. He's far larger than our personal ambitions.

He's far better than the little dreams that we have for our lives. He won't bow down to our expectations, not because He doesn't want your joy, but He's just building something far better than what you and I can construct. And He loves you too much, and He loves me too much to get derailed by our little dreams in this world. He is building an indestructibly beautiful future through the misunderstood path of suffering and death. Jesus is not a political warlord king, nor is He a personal problem solver as sometimes the Western church puts Him out to be.

He is a suffering king who achieves victory through suffering, and we're called to bow the knee to Him and to follow Him on the path of suffering, which leads to victory. Now I want to play a video for you in a moment to hear from a brother who comes from an East African country called Eritrea, and he has followed Jesus through the path, though the path has been full of suffering. He understands the kind of king Jesus is. Jesus is not a king who promises to give us an easy life, but He is worth following, and the path of suffering is the way on the way to resurrection. So let's take a look at the screen and hear a little bit from our brother Peter from Eritrea. One of the most incredible stories I've ever heard from the persecuted church, a Christ-centred passion about this guy called Peter from North Africa.

He was arrested when police stormed into the secret Christian gathering that he was attending. He was caught and held for six years without charge, in some of the most horrific conditions I've ever heard of. On one occasion, Peter was locked in a cell so narrow that he could only lie down, essentially a coffin, for five months. They took him straight from this coffin and placed him in an underground cell completely dark, and they left him there for a further six months. When they finally pulled him out of this hole, he said not only was he almost completely blind, but his legs were paralysed.

And over the coming months, by the grace of God, he says, my sight returned and my legs were healed. The police would regularly pull him in and say, "Peter, we want you to sign this piece of paper," which literally said, "I will not speak about Jesus. I will not meet with Christians." And on each occasion, he would refuse to sign it. One day, Peter and two fellow Christian inmates resolved to escape.

With no shoes and just the clothes on their backs, under a hail of gunfire, they ran for their lives. In fact, Peter didn't stop walking for more than 200 kilometres until he reached the relative safety of a refugee camp. And as he spoke about the last six years of his life, he said he realised that not only had he lost his freedom, but he had lost time. He said, "I'm almost 40 years old. I'm not trained.

I'm not that educated. I may never get married or have a family of my own." But then he stopped and smiled and he said, "But I still have Jesus and He's worth it all." I'll stop the video there, but Jesus is worth it all. Our persecuted brothers and sisters, that's the video that comes from Open Doors who serves the persecuted church.

Our persecuted brothers and sisters know this deeply because of what they have to endure to follow Jesus. They know that Jesus is not our personal problem solver, but that He's worth following because He's come to deal with our ultimate problems. We must not misunderstand Jesus to be someone who will help us get around suffering, but He is someone who will walk through suffering with us, through the valley of the shadow of death. The question for us in the West is, do we know King Jesus in this way? Do we believe this?

Do you understand that while Jesus might not be our political warlord or personal problem solver, that He is the king of heaven and earth? We bow the knee to Him no matter what that costs us, like Peter from Eritrea. The first group of people in John 12 think that Jesus is the warlord king. They misunderstand Him. But there is another group of people in our passage who get Jesus' identity wrong as well.

So we'll look at them next under the second heading, Jesus the impostor king. Jesus the impostor king. Now in our passage, this group is the Pharisees. Look at verse 19 with me. So after they see the crowds praise Jesus with palm branches and shouting out Hosanna, this is what they say to one another.

Verse 19. "You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him." Now what do they mean by saying, "We're gaining nothing"? You're gaining nothing.

Well, in the previous chapter, the Pharisees had had enough of Jesus. So this is what they said about Him in chapter 11. "If we let Him go on like this, everyone will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." So they made a plan. Verse 53, "From that day on, they made plans to put Him to death."

So since John 11, they had been trying to find and arrest Jesus in order to put Him to death, and the reason is because they also misunderstood Jesus, but in a different way to the crowds. They didn't think Jesus was the king or the Messiah at all. They thought He was bad news, that He was stirring up the crowds, that He might even get them into some kind of revolutionary frenzy, and that if that happened, the Romans would unquestionably come and crush it, and then they would come to the Jewish leaders, people like the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, and ask them, "What's going on? Why didn't you stop this uprising?" and remove them from their place of power. They were scared that Jesus would threaten their position of power.

Hence, why they say, "If we let Him go on like this, everyone will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." In other words, Jesus represented a threat to their position of power and to the future of their nation. Jesus was an impostor king in their eyes, a threat to be eliminated, a dangerous person to be stopped. But the crowd and the Pharisees got Jesus' identity wrong. The Pharisees were completely wrong to think He was an impostor.

The crowd were right to think He was a king, but wrong to think He was a warlord king. So Jesus corrects their misguided expectations by showing Himself to be the humble king. Let's look at how He did that under the final heading, Jesus the humble king. Now let's think about this. The crowd praises Jesus with palm branches and calls Him the king of Israel, but how does Jesus respond?

He doesn't do what the Pharisees thought He should have done. "No, I'm not the king. Stop praising me. Stop singing these psalms in my honour." Jesus doesn't do that.

The Pharisees think He's false, He should come out and say that, but He doesn't do that. Nor does He get on a war horse, unsheath His sword and say, "Let's go and kill the pagan Romans," and then start riding through the city, does He? No, He makes a very subtle move. It says in verse 14 that Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it. Why did Jesus choose to sit on a donkey?

If you want just a word of advice, if you want to start a military uprising soon, and you want to be known as like a great hero, don't choose a little baby donkey as the animal to ride on into the streets. This was a humble animal. Don Carson, a respected New Testament scholar, says He does not enter Jerusalem on a war horse, which would have whipped the vast crowds into a revolutionary frenzy, but He chooses to present Himself as the king who comes in peace, gentle and riding on a donkey. Jesus was correcting the confusion, the misunderstanding about His identity, so He chose to enter Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. And John tells us that this action of Jesus alludes to one of the scriptures, Zechariah 9:9, back in the Old Testament.

That's what John is quoting in verse 15. So it says, "And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written" — that's in the Old Testament scriptures — quote, "Fear not, daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt," a baby donkey. Now, here's the direct quote from Zechariah 9 itself, and I'll also include verse 10. It says, "Shout aloud, oh daughter of Jerusalem. Behold, your king is coming to you, righteous and having salvation is He, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey."

"I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off, and He shall speak peace to the nations." Man, I bet that's something the Jews did not want to hear in Jerusalem, peace to the nations? No, no, get rid of the nations from our city. Get rid of these Gentile Romans. But Jesus takes up a donkey in fulfilment of Zechariah 9 to show that He comes to speak peace to the nations.

John points out this reference to Zechariah to help us as the readers to understand what Jesus was doing. The crowds are getting excited for a potential warlord king, a military messiah. They're shouting and praising and laying down palm branches, and instead of getting on a great war horse or riding on top of a tank, Jesus gets on the back of a lowly donkey. Jesus was sending a message. He was correcting their misunderstanding.

He was saying, "I have not come to start a military uprising or to kill the Romans. I haven't come to do kingship like the violent rulers of this world. I've come to cut off the chariot and the war horse. I've come to speak peace. I am a humble king."

Now don't be mistaken. Jesus in His first coming came to bring peace, but in His second coming, He will come in wrath, and He will bring judgment against those who refuse to obey the gospel. But in His first coming, He wasn't coming to fight against flesh and blood. He was coming to bring peace and actually deal with our ultimate enemies. The crowd imagined that Jesus would deliver them by putting their enemies to death, but Jesus would deliver them by giving Himself over to death.

The crowd thought He would destroy these wicked pagan Romans, but instead, Jesus came to Jerusalem to give Himself over to the pagan Romans. You see, Jesus was actually reenacting Israel's story. If you think about the Old Testament, Israel failed again and again and again. They were God's son, Israel, but they were a rebellious son that God had to keep judging, and eventually that judgment would lead to exile. They'd be given over to the pagan nations, whether it was the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and they'd be taken into exile.

Jesus is like the new Israel who is repenting on Israel's behalf, who's taking their sins upon Himself, and He's taking the judgment that rebellious Israel deserves. He's giving Himself over to the pagan nations. This time it's the Romans. He's being exiled from the city. He's going to get taken outside of the city and put to death.

He's repenting on behalf of the people of God. He's taking the judgment that the rebellious people of God deserve. This is why Jesus gave Himself up to crucifixion, because this was the way to defeat our enemies, our ultimate enemies. In a sense, the crowd was right to think He came to fight our enemies. But Jesus' enemies were not ultimately Rome.

His enemy was the darkness behind Rome. His enemy is the sin inside the Pharisees, the sin inside you and me. He came to conquer Satan, sin, and death. The Pharisees wanted to keep their position of power through an alliance with death by killing Jesus, but Jesus overthrew the powers of darkness by submitting Himself to the death which rebels deserve. He died to sin, destroying Satan's accusations against us and removing the curse of death from over His people.

Jesus did come to win a victory over His enemies, but not the enemies most of us assume, and not in a way that even looked like a victory. Jesus was the humble king who won a victory through suffering. He took on our sin and shame so that through humble faith in Him, we could be made clean and blameless. He paid the debt which we owe to God so that Satan would be made to look like a fool. In Colossians 2, it talks about that, how Jesus has triumphed over Satan by the cross, because Satan is pictured as this accuser who's holding the debts against us and saying, "You guys deserve to be dead."

"God, how can You be just? Why are You giving grace to these people?" And it's like Jesus took those charges off him, nailed them to the cross, and paid for them for us. So Satan's like this naked person that's claiming that we shouldn't be given grace, but God's like, "Actually, I've paid for those charges in Christ. You fool."

That's how He destroys Satan's accusations against us. That's how He overcomes the power of darkness, by paying the charges that we owed to Him. Jesus was the king that no one expected, but He was the king that everyone needed. Jesus will not bow to misguided expectations, for He is the humble king. King Jesus is great enough to demand total submission, but He's also humble enough to submit Himself to our shameful judgment.

This is the kind of king He is. He came to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday knowing full well that Good Friday was coming, a day where it would take everything He had to obey the Father's will and achieve something far greater than our smaller Australian dreams. Jesus won't bow down to us, but if we will bow down to Him, He promises us something far better than whatever dream we're chasing after. Let's pray together. Father, we thank You that You know best.

We thank You that You see beyond what we see and that You enacted Your eternal plan in Christ to save us from our true enemies, Satan, sin, and death. Thank You, Jesus, that You did not submit to the will of the crowds, but that You submitted to the will of the Father. Thank You, Jesus, for going into Jerusalem that two thousand years ago and showing us that You were the humble king who would even humble Yourself to the point of dying on a Roman cross for our sake, for our sins, for our salvation. We just praise You in this place, Lord Jesus. We glorify You, and we ask that You would give us the eyes, the spiritual eyes to see Your worth, Your glory, Your supremacy, Your beauty, and help us to follow You wherever You will lead us, knowing that You will be with us.

It's in Your name we pray, Jesus. Amen.