The Messiah Arrives: Mark 11:7-11
As followers of Christ, we must be vigilant. Things are not always as they appear. Paul’s advice in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 is true. Test everything; hold fast to what is good.
The triumphal entry is a passage that reads like a celebration but becomes one of the saddest stories in the Gospels. At first glance, it feels like the crowd finally knows Jesus is God’s Messiah. It feels like Jesus finally receives the support of the masses. It feels like a genuine climax of the story!
The climax is coming, but not how the crowds expect. The crowd celebrates the coming of their Messiah, not God’s Messiah. Jesus has their support until they realize this important difference. Jesus came to do God’s work, not theirs.
Some history behind these events gives light to this dynamic. Roughly two hundred years prior to Jesus, the Seleucid Empire – a subdivision of what used to be the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great – was in domination of Jewish land. A leader arose from the people named Judas Maccabeus and led what has become known as the Maccabean Revolt. The Hebrew people overthrew the Greeks and the Hebrew people gained their independence. The celebration of Hannukah commemorates the restoration of temple worship once Judas Maccabeus secured Jerusalem.
As Judas Maccabeus rode into Jerusalem having freed the city, people littered the road with cloaks and palm branches and praised their conquering hero. This would have been well known among the people. Thus, as Jesus marches into Jerusalem and the people celebrate the coming of their Messiah, they anticipate Jesus will do what Judas Maccabeus did before him. They anticipate the coming of their freedom – freedom from Rome.
Jesus is interested in freedom, but not worldly freedom. Jesus has come to conquer sin. We have freedom over sin and the promise of victory over death because of Jesus. Rome still dominated Jerusalem after Jesus came and went. In the same way, the followers of Christ still have worldly structures imposing rules and regulations over us. Our freedom is not of this world but a spiritual freedom.
The crowd doesn’t get it. They celebrate a Messiah, the wrong Messiah. All along the crowd has been after Jesus for the wrong reasons. The triumphal entry is the climax of that arc in this story. Here the crowd gets it irrevocably wrong, although they use all the right words to make it sound like they got it right.
This is often the way with the world. Sometimes the world gets it obviously wrong. The more dangerous times are when the world gets it wrong but in the disguise of getting it right. It is easy to read this story and think the wrong thing is happening. This is not a celebration; this is a story of people making a fatal error because of faulty expectations. What the triumphal entry teaches is that as followers of Christ, we must be vigilant.
